New York bakery masters in sexy snacks

The next evening you're all alone in your dorm room, log on to a Web site with enough tits and ass to rev up your evening. No, it isn't another porn site. It's the site for Masturbakers, a small bakery in Manhattan's East Village, which offers, as its name suggests, a selection of erotic cakes that will titillate more than your taste buds. But these aren't just lookers - they taste damn good, too.

Having visited their Web site, I expected the bakery to resemble a Greenwich Village sex shop or I-90's Erotic Empire, but this was not the case. Masturbakers shares space with the restaurant Old Devil Moon, which, as the decor - strands of Christmas lights hanging above vintage booths and mismatched chairs - might suggest, draws a bohemian crowd. And Tami Latham, co-owner of both Masturbakers and the restaurant, herself clad in Levi's and cowboy boots, looked more like a displaced hippie than a dominatrix.

Following the lead of a friend who had opened similar bakeries in Philadelphia and San Francisco, Latham placed an ad in the Village Voice to gauge the New York market. And to her pleasure, the phones started ringing - everyone, it seemed, had a desire, even a need, for an erotic cake. Nearly five years later, Latham's team - herself and a couple assistants - is still hard at work, baking between 30 and 60 cakes each week.

The cakes - chocolate, vanilla, or marble - come in a variety of shapes and sizes with your choice of pineapple, raspberry, or - the house special - Bavarian cream filling. The breasts, ranging in size from a modest C to an outrageous EE, and the male torso complete with an optional stand-up candy penis, are among the most popular. But things really heat up in the hands of the decorators, who complete the cakes with bulging nipples, squiggles of hair, or, for an additional $5, a black lace bra. Witty one liners - "a hard man is good to find" or "the best is yet to cum" - provoke an added giggle or groan.

Latham finds that her customers - mostly cops, postal workers, and young women who want cakes for office or bachelorette parties - have a good sense of humor. And while she has satisfied some pretty raunchy customer orders - one cake depicted a girl performing oral sex on a gorilla - she knows where to draw the line. Recently denied requests include a severed girl and a girl riding a man like a horse. One customer (think Jason Biggs' unforgettable scene in "American Pie") asked whether the cakes came with a hole. They don't.

"We told him he could fuck his cake, we just wouldn't be responsible for the damage," Latham said.

Though Latham seems happy with her title of Masturbaker, she is protective of her school-age children. She tries to have all the cakes boxed up by the time they arrive home from school and suggests that when classmates, or better yet, teachers and other parents ask what their mom does, they simply say she creates custom cakes.

Because the cakes actually tantalize the taste buds, Latham finds that many of her clients return with requests for wedding cakes or other more conventional items. Surprisingly, Latham hopes to expand her business in this direction, for although she has the market on erotic cakes pretty much cornered, even tits and ass "get boring after awhile."

But as Latham realizes, Masturbakers' reputation is built on being both tasty and tasteless. And that, of course, is why we love it.

To view or order cakes, go to www.masturbakers.com. Whole cakes cost $40-$125.