Even Martha Stewart loves Provo Craft's latest: Cricut Cake

SOUTH JORDAN — If your company has helped throngs of crafters graduate from paste and Popsicle sticks to producing intricate troves of family treasures at a touch, what do you do next?

Let them make cake.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have responded to Provo Craft's latest venture with one word: Sweet!

Consumers ranging from harried homemakers to famous cake decorators to celebrities are using the Cricut Cake machine to turn layer cakes into works of art, worthy of any wedding reception or the glossy pages of national magazines. And, perhaps the glossiest arbiter of taste of them all, Martha Stewart, is to appear on the Home Shopping Network Sunday to unveil her signature-embossed version of the printer-sized, tedium-saving device that she will endorse as the latest tool no kitchen is complete without.

Making what amounts to a cake decoration cutter out of the technology behind a programmable ink-on-paper printer is the brainchild of Provo Craft CEO Jim Thornton, a big-shouldered kid from Chicago and the incandescently positive quarterback of about 180 "I'm so excited to be here I can hardly stand it" employees who inhabit gleaming building No. 10876 on the River Park commercial campus. The company headquarters moved north from Spanish Fork just over a month ago.

South Jordan is becoming a commercial beehive of the state and the hub of what Brock Blake, investor/start-up business guru who runs FundingUniverse LLC just down the street believes is on the verge of ushering in an unparalleled era of innovation and entrepreneurship in Utah.

"We're not Silicon Valley exactly, but something pretty close to it," Blake told the Deseret News earlier this month.

Following a personal motto that good enough isn't ever good enough and that the best things come to those who innovate, Thornton assembled a team of high-tech young turks from around the country, and since 2005, increased earnings by 500 to 600 percent annually, numbers that soon had Bank of America and Merrill Lynch knocking down the door along with companies wanting to join the venture. In recent months, both the company's passel of products and their availability — from Walmart stores to Staples — has been proliferating. (The products are described in detail at www.provocraft.com.)