Along with his son Adam, Mr. Greenberg is survived by one other son, Seth, and 4 grandchildren. Carol Greenberg died in 2017.
The bakeries had been a household enterprise. Carol labored in gross sales and high quality management, and the boys started working earlier than their tenth birthdays, folding cake, pie and cookie bins after faculty and on weekends at 5 bins for a penny. Their output was spectacular: The boys might every whip up as many as 1,000 bins in a day.
Adam left the corporate after highschool however Seth stayed on, working in gross sales and finally adorning muffins, although by his personal admission he lacked his father’s aptitude. “I’m only a technician,” he mentioned. “He was the artist.”
In 1992, Seth purchased the enterprise outright, although his mom and father continued to work there full time. For many years the elder Mr. Greenberg had been working six days every week — usually until midnight on Fridays — and he continued to take action. Seth Greenberg bought the corporate in 1995, and the household stayed on for an additional two years till the connection with the brand new house owners soured.
However earlier than the household bowed out for good, they acquired a name to make a cake for President Invoice Clinton’s fiftieth birthday, in August 1996. They conceived an American flag, constituted of layers of yellow poundcake. It was a colossus, requiring 432 eggs, 96 kilos of butter, 98 kilos of sugar and 100 kilos of flour, layered with 15 kilos of raspberry preserves and topped with 15 kilos of darkish fudge glaze, and it will take two full days to arrange it. (The birthday occasion was a fund-raiser, and the Greenbergs donated their creation, which might have value $4,000 at retail.)
The bottom of the cake was so large, it didn’t match by means of the door, requiring some last-minute maneuvering, however there was an even bigger downside: The day earlier than the social gathering, Seth, who was learning for his M.B.A. at Columbia Enterprise College, had an examination, a scheduling battle that became a neighborhood information occasion.
“I requested if the White Home would ship a observe,” Seth advised The New York Occasions for an article headlined “A Presidential Cake Is Not a Piece of Cake.” (The paper additionally printed the recipe.) “They type of glossed over that.” He mentioned the Democratic Nationwide Committee volunteered to assist.
