PHOTOS BY RACHEL HOFFMAN The cactus cake's dense chocolate interior is revealed. Below: Dann pipes royal icing spines to be placed into the buttercream on the cake. LONG BRANCH — It's practically a secret. Hidden in a residential neighborhood behind an inconspicuous, white wooden door with a sign that reads All You Need is Cake, two women are busy at work. The fragrance of rich buttercream, melting chocolate and baking cake assault you as you walk down the sidewalk nearby and finally you realize — it's a bakery. But not just any bakery.

"It's one of those things; I'm not getting any younger and I really just don't like the nine-to-five, being tied down to a desk and a routine … and so I thought, it's time to make a leap, and just do it," said Linda Dann, co-owner and cofounder of All You Need is Cake, a specialty cake bakery on 199 Norwood Ave. in Long Branch,

All You Need is Cake blossomed out of Dann's and her friend Judy Celeste's initial business, Desserts by Design. When they began Desserts by Design a year and a half ago, they primarily baked and sold cakes, pastries and macaroons to local restaurants, caterers, cafes and gourmet food shops, decorating specialty cakes on the side to get their creative fix.

Linda Dann But business eventually declined as the lucrative summer season ended and buyers cut back when the economy weakened. Dann and Celeste had a difficult choice to make. They chose boldly, starting a new branch of their bakery, All You Need is Cake, this past March.

"We had to kind of reinvent our focus," said Dann, a resident of Belmar.

Today, they are still wholesaling other desserts for buyers, but focus the majority of their time, attention and funds toward cake orders. "You have to be creative in an economy like this. You have to see where you can cut, and barter and whatever you can do to make it," she added.

The baking pair's favorite projects had always been specialty cakes, with their colorful fondant drapery, intricate, iced details and sometimes cartoonish flair. "And so we decided, we were both pushing 50 and it was do or die. Basically we had nothing when we started ... but we took what we had and we started!" added Celeste, Brick Township.

Judy Celeste What they had is currently packed into a cozy, roughly 200-square-foot converted retail space for the homemade pasta shop next door. Shimmering metal bowls, pans and pastry bag tips of varying sizes and shapes are haphazardly stacked and hung amidst wire racks and rubber spatulas. A striking portrait of John Lennon by Celeste's daughter accompanies the buttercream coated dishes in the kitchen. A neat row of delicate, color-dusted gum paste roses dry by the front windowsill. And then there are the only two employees, Dann and Celeste.

"And that's one of the hardest things for the two of us, is to be the jack of all trades, to be the marketing expert and … the one that's handling the baking and the one that's talking to the client. It's just the two of us. And so you wind up switching hats a lot," Celeste said.

One of the hardest tasks for All You Need is Cake is advertising with limited funds. Celeste explained.

"Basically it's word of mouth and whatever we can get out there and push and pedal. But I believe in our product, and that's what you have to do."

The most successful methods for attracting customers to date have been through their website and along the community grapevine, they said.

However, Dann and Celeste find the small nature of their independent business to be positive in integral ways. Being self-employed, they have more creative license than if it was a larger operation, they said.

"Every cake is different … That's where the fun is, that's where the creativity is, in the decorating," said Dann.

Guided only by their client's desired themes and ingredients, the bakers get to use their sugar art skills to create some whimsical, elaborate cakes.

Celeste agreed, "I enjoy having that 'wow' factor. I enjoy being able to have a creative outlet."

Some of the partners' favorites include a robin's egg blue, Super Mario Brothers theme cake topped by a pudgy fondant, black-mustachedMario figure.

Aesthetics aside, the quality of their cakes is of utmost importance to Dann and Celeste, they said. The two insist on making a cake the day before it is due to ensure freshness and make everything from scratch with natural ingredients, from shortbread crumbly crusts to chocolate icing.

"Our main philosophy is: your cake should taste as good as it looks. We want people to come back," Dann said.

Ultimately, "You can taste it. You can taste the difference," Celeste said.

Quite literally. Dann and Celeste test the quality of their cake creations by asking friends and family to do tastings of new cake flavors and decorations, judging whether or not their cake experiments will have mass appeal.

"Nothing goes out unless we know for sure that it's 100 percent exactly as it should be," she added.

In addition to being in touch with the community's taste preferences, All You Need is Cake is fiscally conscious as well. In response to the economic climate, they offer budget wedding cakes at $2.75 per slice, as compared with their usual $3.50.

"In this economy, that's the thing. We've had people say, 'We really can't afford it [wedding cakes],' " said Dann, adding "We want to make it reasonable for them."

The cakes are made with the same ingredients; they "are elegant but very simple," Celeste said. They are covered with buttercream and can be embellished with a drape of fondant, or sugar dough, or decorated with petite lines, dots or flowers in gum paste.

"Despite the economy… people still want to make a fuss for somebody," she said.

In fact, Celeste began baking specialty cakes solely to "make a fuss," becoming the go-to baker for co-worker's birthdays while working at an insurance company. Having grown up in the kitchen, learning to cook and bake from her mother, Celeste eventually channeled her passion into teaching at the Young Chef's Academy in Morganville four years ago. It was there that she met Dann, who was the director of the program at the time.

"It's funny because we have the same sense of humor, twisted and sick — it's fun to find someone that really gets it" Dann said with a peal of laughter.

Dann was the director of the New School's Culinary Arts program in New York for nine years and taught basic and mater level cooking, baking, and cake decorating classes for 17 years.

Both Dann and Celeste had yearned to be in business for themselves, they said. Though it's their similarities that drew them together, it was their differences that make running All You Need is Cake such an enjoyable job.

"But we kind of balance each other, because she's very exact and precise ... and I'm more like, let's just close our eyes and jump and see where we land and between the two of us, we end up coming out in the middle, which is kind of nice," said Celeste, a Red Bank native.

For now, both their friendship and business are going strong. They draw in customers for all types of occasions from birthdays and weddings to anniversaries, holidays and special events. After hours of work kneading fondant, piping flowers, mixing butter cream and greasing pans, they couldn't be happier with their biggest job risk to date.

"We've been very lucky. Our families have been very supportive. My kids have basically learned how to do without everything except cake. They have lots of cake. But they understand that this is important to us, that this is our dream and this is something we really will sacrifice for and in the end it'll pay off," Celeste said. For more information, visit www.allyouneediscake. biz.