Officer has recipe for success

North Carolina Department of Public Safety

March 2001

Officer Has Recipe For Success
By Pamela Walker

OAK RIDGE- When he’s not transporting inmates, you might find Correctional Officer Lorenzo Shaw wearing a chef’s hat and practicing his culinary skills at a wedding or corporate event. Shaw has turned a hobby of decorating cakes and cooking into a successful business with the help of his wife Sonya.

"We got started by catering parties for family and friends and it has grown from there," said Shaw.

The 18-year veteran transportation officer works first shift at Guilford Correctional Center. He started his career in corrections as an officer at Southern Correctional Institution where he worked for two years before transferring to Guilford.

Shaw says his wife taught him how to decorate cakes. "I can do any kind of picture cake you want," said Shaw. He has done Valentine’s Day bears, the Rugrats, all kinds of animals and sports team mascots, but one favorite order has been a Tar Heel cake that features a ram’s head.

Cakes aren’t all Shaw cooks up. He also does catering for parties in which the guest list could include as many as 3,000 people. "We once helped cater a party for 2,800 people that was going on when Hurricane Floyd hit," said Shaw. "We stood outside cooking with the wind and the rain blowing and somehow we pulled it off, everyone was happy."

Probably the best perk of Shaw’s second job is that he gets to work around a lot of happy brides and their families. His living room is packed with displays of wedding cakes his wife has decorated. Shaw says he leaves the real fancy cakes to his wife, "the expert." The couple says they recently catered a very interesting wedding where the wedding party and all the guests were dressed in medieval costumes.

Between the two jobs you might think Shaw wouldn’t have time for anything else, but he also has three boys ages 12, 10 and 9 to keep up with. He says they are very active in sports and Shaw coaches one of his son’s basketball teams.

Shaw says someday he hopes to work part-time for the state and cater full-time, but he says it would be difficult to give up all the time he’s accumulated with the state. He says he likes both jobs, but he really enjoys the creative side of catering.

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