Meet the cake boss who makes a Wichita Dillons bakery one of the creepiest stops in town
A typical trip to a Dillons in Wichita does not usually include sightings of in-progress intestinal surgeries or of human hearts, slick with blood, placed tidily inside a gift box and put on display.
But if you’re in the Dillons at Central and Rock (aka “Gucci Dillons”) anytime near Halloween and wander over to the bakery department, you’ll encounter all sorts of ready-to-eat horrors.
It’s all because of Randy Stratton, an artistic Wichitan who for seven years has worked as the pastry chef for that store. His sole job is to fill the bakery department’s display case with eye-catching, intricately decorated cakes, and at Halloween each year, his creepy creativity is on full display.
Some people have become such fans of his work — which has even started to earn national recognition — that they look forward to the days when he changes out the display cases.
“Over the last couple of years, my cake cases have turned more into a showpiece,” he said. “We will draw crowds just to check out what’s in it.”
And if you think Halloween was something, just wait until Christmas, when Stratton does his best work, he said.
“I’m obsessed with Christmas.”
A different kind of decorating
Stratton, 31, attended Maize High School and graduated in 2009.
He’s always been artistic, he said, and he was going to college to study fashion design when he got a job in the Dillon’s bakery.
He soon realized that his drawing skill translated to cake decorating, and early in his Dillons tenure, he won a cake decorating contest that included entries from Kroger stores all over the country. Within a year, he was promoted to pastry chef.
It didn’t take him long to realize that he’d rather decorate cakes than design clothes.
“I really liked doing this,” he said. “It just made me happy, and I liked the freedom I had with it.”
Stratton, who is self-taught, kept getting more elaborate with his designs, and his local fan base grew. His only job at Dillons is to dream up and create his elaborate cakes to fill the cases and to fulfill customers’ special orders.
His biggest holidays are Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and each year, he tries to come up with something that will top the previous year. He gets inspiration from customer requests and from cake decorating shows he sees on television, he said.
This year’s Halloween case, for example, also included what Stratton calls the “Skin Cake,” which was inspired by something he saw on television. It was a round layer cake with smooth frosting the color of pig skin. Only it appeared that the skin had been sliced open then sewn back up with stitches. A disembodied pig snout rested on top of the cake.
There was also a pumpkin-shaped cake with the word “Redrum” (“murder” spelled backwards from the Stephen King novel “The Shining”) written across it in bloody frosting scrawl. Last year, he made a sheet cake featuring a hand that had recently been severed by the saw blade in the middle of the cake.
His creations are edgy, but his supervisors don’t mind, Stratton said. He gets free rein to follow his artistic impulses.
And at Christmastime, his impulses are much warmer and fuzzier. He’s known to create 3-D Christmas trees and cakes that look like stacked presents. He also does lots of “character work,” which this year will include cakes in the shape of The Grinch or the Abominable Snowman.
He posts his creations on Instagram, and that’s led to national attention. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a producer from Food Network’s “Halloween Baking Championship” contacted Stratton and asked him to appear on the show. It was all set, but then COVID canceled his trip, he said, and he hasn’t reapplied. (If he does, he said, he’d rather be on a Christmas baking show.)
Two years ago, he traveled to the International Dairy Deli Bakery Association’s cake competition, and his design was given third place out of about 7,000 entries.
And recently, he was contacted by Satin Ice fondant, a frosting company that also has a cake magazine. It wanted to publish photos of some Stratton’s cakes.
No generic cakes
Stratton’s cakes are over-the-top works of edible art, and they aren’t inexpensive. The creepy surgical cake, for example, is priced at $150. But prices vary based on the cake’s size and difficulty level, he said.
He’s always coming up with new designs and never likes his display case to get stale, he said. Over the summer, when no big holidays were happening, he launched a series of “food cakes,” making one that looked like a pizza, one that looked like a chicken fried steak smothered in gravy (complete with sides) and one that looked like a foil-wrapped burrito topped with guacamole.
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He’s also made cakes that look like designer handbags and athletic shoes. Last Thanksgiving, he made a realistic looking turkey with stuffing spilling out of the cavity. Starbucks cups also frequently appear in his designs, and he’s even made adorable cake dogs.
Once the idea is confirmed and the cake is baked, Stratton said, it can take him anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours to complete the frosting work. Everything on his cakes is 100 percent edible, so he often has to get extra creative with fondant.
Customers can pre-order cakes, and the ones he puts on display in the cabinets are also for sale to walk-in customers.
Christmas orders have already started rolling in, Stratton said.
“My biggest goal is that I don’t want to be the type of person that sells someone a generic cake,” he said. “I want to make sure that every holiday season, I put out new work. And I always want to make sure to have something for everybody, something special that they’re not going to be able to find anywhere else.”
This story was originally published October 28, 2021 at 9:49 AM.
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