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The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Self-taught baker makes extravagant cakes for Sugar & Spice

Along with the cakes sold, Karlie Story is in charge of decorating all of the cakes on display in the windows of Sugar & Spice in the IMU.

Karlie Story spends hours a day covered in sugar, but comes home smelling like metal.

“I’m assuming it’s the mixers and the tables and everything,” she said. “I’m like, ‘What’s this smell?’ I should smell like vanilla.”

As the cake decorator at Sugar & Spice in the Indiana Memorial Union, Story spends her days rolling fondant and creating and icing cakes for birthdays, graduations, weddings and more.

And she learned it all from scratch.

Story, who began working at the bakery about a year ago, is self-taught. Aside from taking a few online classes, she learned all of her techniques in her own kitchen.

About five years ago, she was browsing the Internet and came across a cake that caught her attention. She wasn’t looking for a project, but something about the idea of trying to make a cake like that excited her, she said.

“From my very first cake, I was hooked,” she said. “It was really hard, and it’s not my proudest cake, by any means ... but there was just something about it that was just so fun.”

Ashley Baughman began working as Sugar & Spice’s pastry chef about four months ago and said she immediately noticed the caliber of Story’s work.

“I was so thrilled that she was here and could make these fabulous cakes,” she said. “And then I heard she was self-taught, and I was blown away.”

Baughman, who received her bachelor’s degree in baking and pastry at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, said Story’s skills are impressive, but how she earned them is more so.

“That’s almost unheard of in the industry,” she said. “Most people learn through hands-on work. She learned through hands-on work in her own kitchen, making cakes.”

Story interrupted Baughman’s 
accolades.

“And lots and lots of trial and error,” she said. “Emphasis on error.”

***

The cake Story made for her brother-in-law’s wedding began to lean. Then it began to fall.

She left the wedding in tears, but she came away from it with a clearer idea of how to structure her cakes.

In the small bakery behind the Sugar & Spice storefront, Story uses lessons like this to create works of art for clients.

Last Friday, among 25 other cake orders, she made a cake for a customer’s 18th birthday.

Story dusted the metal bench table with powdered sugar and rolled a ball of white fondant into a circular sheet. Carefully, she draped the sheet over an 8-inch, round chocolate cake, iced with a thin layer of buttercream.

She smoothed the sides, ensuring no bubbles formed under the layer of fondant. 
She worked fondant up around the top edge of the cylindrical cake, saying that’s the style customers look for.

“Nowadays, everyone wants those nice, sharp corners,” she said. “You know, if you cover it, it’s like Play-Doh, it just wants to curve.”

She continued decorating, crisscrossing the cake with a quilting tool to add the effect of stitching to the fondant’s smoothed surface. She talked about her daughters, ages 6, 8 and 10.

“They’re my little ducks,” she said.

She said she sometimes feels bad her daughters can’t help with some of the projects she works on at home, but she makes time to decorate with them.

“I bake them all a little cake, and we get all the stuff out and we decorate our own little cakes,” she said. “We really like that.”

She added silver beads to the 
intersection of each of the quilting stitches with clear piping gel.

Next, she said, she would repeat the process on the six-inch vanilla top tier. Then she would add ribbons at the base of each tier and an edible 
image on top.

“We give the customers what they like,” she said.

***

The bakery behind Sugar & Spice churns out French macaroons, cookies, cakes, candies and more for the IMU’s event catering service.

There are six traditional cookie recipes that have not been touched since Sugar & Spice opened more than 50 years ago, Baughman said. 

But it goes far beyond the details of a recipe — it’s about the work put into it.

“Pastry is an art and a science,” Baughman said. “It is so different from cooking. People ask me all the time: ‘Do you cook?’ No, I bake. I am an artist, and I am a chemist. I’m a mathematician. I don’t cook.”

Part of her goal for the bakery when she came in was to change everything to grams, Baughman said. Measuring in grams instead of cups or teaspoons raises the stakes, making every batch of every item as precise as possible.

Baughman, who grew up in Bloomington, said she never realized a bakery like this existed in the IMU.

Now, she works to ensure the product stands out.

“From scratch, fresh, local,” she said. “It’s a little hidden gem back here.”

One of the obstacles, however, is customers’ shock when it comes to the price of the fondant cakes.

“People, especially with fondant cakes, see things on TV, they see things in magazines and books and on YouTube or in pictures on Pinterest, and they want to replicate those cakes,” Baughman said. “And they expect these great cakes, but they expect them to be $20 or they expect them to be even $50 ... but Karlie’s labor on cakes is not cheap.”

For instance, the display cake Story made that day, a basketball-themed, two-tier fondant cake, would cost about $150.

Still, the bakery creates cakes weekly, filling wedding cake orders almost once per weekend — lately, due to wedding season, it’s been two or three wedding cakes per weekend — and the orders don’t stop coming.

What makes Sugar & Spice special, Story said, is the staff’s ability to create these products for its customers.

“We can really do anything anybody has dreamed of,” Story said. “And if we haven’t done it before, we’re going to perfect it by the time the event comes around.”

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