Kriti Mehrotra
Host Mikey Day perfectly described all-star Liz Janean Marek on Netflix’s ‘Is It Cake? Holiday’ season 2, when he referred to her as “cake mother.” After all, she is not only a former ‘Is It Cake?’ season 2 (2022) contestant but also a long-time professional baking educator and cake decorator with a specialization in sculpted pieces. Thus, it comes as no surprise that her confections on this special iteration of the original series won her a lifetime of bragging rights as well as a total cash prize of $55,000.
Liz Marek Has Been a Baking Entrepreneur For Over a Decade
Since Liz Janean Marek was born on October 26, 1980, in Lebanon, Oregon, into a reportedly loving and supportive household, she was always given the freedom to follow her dreams. She took some time off after graduating from high school in 1999 before eventually enrolling at Linn-Benton Community College in 2004 to pursue an Associate’s degree in Graphic Design. She earned the same in 2007, around the time she began baking as a therapeutic hobby while also launching her career as an intern at Brass Media Magazine.
According to records, Liz served at the magazine from March 2007 to June 2007, following which she made the upward move to OMAC Advertising as a full-time Graphic Designer. She truly liked her job, yet as she learned more about baking, decorating, and the industry in general over time, she became increasingly enamored of what was supposed to be just a hobby. She hence taught herself everything she needed to know through trial and error before realizing that this avenue of desert-making was the one she wanted to pursue for the rest of her life. Therefore, she quit her full-time job and established two different customizable cake businesses: Savor Cakes Food Cart and Artisan Cake Company in October 2010.
These endeavors gradually became so successful that Liz could barely keep up with the orders, prompting her to start participating in various competitions in 2014 to maintain the momentum. The truth is, her cake businesses had shut down by this point; yet, her demand was such that she ended up launching her own online baking school called Sugar Geek Show in August 2013. The idea behind this brand was for her to have a single platform through which she could share all her ideas, recipes, and tutorials, only for it to evolve into an international community. In fact, to this day, she is proudly at the helm of this one-stop shop, making her a professional blogger, cake decorator, entrepreneur, and educator from Portland, Oregon.
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Liz Marek Continues to Juggle Her Personal and Professional Experiences
When Liz ultimately chose to close her bakeries to focus more on teaching others about not only baking techniques but also the reasons behind each process, it was a family decision. That’s because the rising competitor/professional was happily married to Dan Marek at the time, and they had just welcomed their adorable firstborn daughter, Avalon, into the world in 2014. So, even though the idea of Sugar Geek Show had emerged in the summer of 2013, it wasn’t until around 2015 that it became a full-fledged online school, where baking and creativity know no bounds. It was then that Dan was also able to quit his job, allowing him to join the enterprise while they expanded their family by welcoming a son named Ezra.
In the years to follow, Liz had her work featured in various editions of American Cake Decorators, Cake Masters, and Cake Central, among several other related publications. As if that’s not enough, she made her debut on Netflix with ‘Is It Cake?’ season 2, where she was able to showcase her skills to such an extent that it further propelled her business to new heights. The 2010 graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute has since competed in various cake-making shows across the US and at an international level to further prove her mettle. These include Food Network’s ‘Duff Till Dawn’ (2015), Food Network’s ‘Super Mega Cake’ (2025) as well as ‘Tastemaker Talk.’ Things changed for Liz in late 2024, as she and Dan announced that they were separating for good, stating it was “really is what’s best for everyone” because it had been a long time coming.
Since then, Liz’s divorce has been finalized (September 2025), and Sugar Geek Show has become hers entirely. She has also found love again with a man named Gage Smiley. She and Dan continue to co-parent their two children amicably, yet their professional standing is now very different from what it used to be, as Gage is now her partner in life as well as in the kitchen. In fact, even the Sugar Geek Show has evolved in terms of the kind of cooking it celebrates – it isn’t just about desserts or sugar anymore; instead, it has also embraced the savory world. The Portland, Oregon, resident still spends hours perfecting every recipe before publishing them, all the while filming tutorials and teaching techniques; it’s just that the nature of them has changed over time. We should also mention that her work has enabled her to travel to various countries across the globe over the years, and most recently, in the fall of 2025, she visited Indonesia and the Philippines for a few weeks.
