Married couple Alexandra and Austin Bruner have found a unique way to combine all their passions: Together, the two ExxonMobil geoscientists create geology-themed cakes.
“It was in grad school that we decided to make our first geology cake,” Alexandra said. “For the last day of the short course (on deepwater depositional systems), we decided to make this cake that looked like one of the figures that we had been looking at … from there, we just decided it was really fun.”
The couple started baking together in 2019 during their undergraduate studies at Clemson University. At the time, Austin was studying engineering, and he put his love of structural elements to work within his new girlfriend’s side hustle: baking. “We complement each other really well in how we make (cakes),” he said. “I really like the 30D-style cakes, and the structural ones, and making arches, and Alex really loves the beautiful piping work and frosting work,” Austin said. He switched his major to geology later in his collegiate career after meeting Alexandra and other friends who loved it.
In 2021, Austin made Alexandra a sculpture cake of her favorite formation for her birthday.
“Alex told me she knew she wanted to be a geologist when she went on a field trip in high school to the Delicate Arch,” Austin explained. “Underneath the stars, under Delicate Arch, she was like ‘I know I’m going to be a geologist. This is what I want to do.’”
In the year after making the cake, Austin proposed under Delicate Arch.
After they baked their first geology cake together in 2022, the couple made a cake featuring a normal fault, knickpoint, and some jointing for the Graduate Student Organization at Kansas University.
“That’s where we learned we have to put the name of the bakery in all our photos, because it went so viral on LinkedIn,” Austin recounted. The post showcasing the cake received about 9,000 likes and 140 comments. Bruner Bakery had gone viral.
The duo baked a cake showcasing a salt canopy among sandstone and shale layers as seen in the Gulf of Mexico to commemorate the end of a year-long internship Austin had with TotalEnergies. Some of the layers are made with rice crispies.
“It was our first break into using a material other than cake,” Austin said.
More recently, the couple baked a fault bend fold cake for a colleague’s retirement. It received almost 1,500 likes and 65 comments on LinkedIn.
Next up? One goal is to make a replica of Spindletop, with blackberry jam spewing out of food-grade tubing.
“We have got a couple other ideas coming down the pipeline,” Austin said.
The couple said Bruner Bakery, which they run entirely out of their home kitchen, will likely always be a side gig, but they would love for it to grow.
“I’d love for it to get to a point where we could buy an industrial oven,” Austin said, adding that he’d also love to see it turn into a way to interest kids in the sciences and feed the geoscience career pipeline.
“We bake the geology cakes because we are geologists, and we love geology, so I think it would be hard to ever step away from being a full-time geologist,” Alexandra said.
She added that the two jobs are more similar than they might seem.
“Geologists are kind of artists at heart. It’s such an artistic kind of science, so it’s been really fun to put that together in a way that people wouldn’t expect. At the end of the day, we are storytellers and artists in the work that we do.”