2019 Cake Boss
IU Day. All IU. All Day. IU's Cake Boss. Through the window of a shop, a woman inside wears an apron and leans over a worktable decorating a cake with a tiny paintbrush. She rolls out red fondant.
[ Music ] >> I think I've just sort of been kind of a tinker by nature.
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Makenzie Kus, BA 2007. Owner of Something Blue Bakery in Lafayette, IN. She writes tiny lettering on a white fondant banner.
About 4 years ago, exactly 4 years ago, I opened the store.
When we took over this place, the walls were dark purple and everything had to be totally painted and we did it on our own.
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View of the interior of the shop. Blue and white walls with paintings of colorful cupcakes up high and photos in white frames lower on the walls.
Intricate cakes. One is multi-tiered white with a white feather flowing down the tiers. One is a realistic looking stack of books with a vine growing up and over them. All in edible fondant.
IU is definitely my family's line all the way.
My dad went there, my sister went there and several of my aunts and uncles went there.
So it was just sort of, you know, it was not a hard choice when you kind of see IU's campus especially you get a little spoiled.
Obviously you can see from some of the things on the cake that I got very attached to and kind of decided to end up going.
She is building a four tiered IU themed cake.
I'm a big IU basketball fan.
So that would probably be the start of where that began.
That was the first thing that I thought of.
Using a rotating cake stand, she turns the circular cake as she adds red and white stripes to the side of one layer.
So the candy stripper pants are so iconic to the team and just as IU in general and that I kind of had to get those on there and then just wanted to kind of have the significance of the basketball court and that logo I feel like that's a very kind of classic shot the overhead of the court and just Assembly Hall in general there's so many events held there, graduations and concerts and you sort of see it in a lot of photographs.
On another layer she paints a light yellowish tint to the sides of the cake that looks like a rock wall.
The limestone that's everywhere at IU.
The thin white banner attached to the side of the limestone layer says Indiana, Our Indiana. INDIANA. We're all for you!
Just visually it needs its own tier and we'll add a banner with the fight song on it and then down here you can see that I've started the painting for Kirkwood and framing the sides we'll add the sample [phonetic] gates again just because of that imagery everybody has to pass through those, take pictures with those, people get engaged in front of those.
Looking at a photo of Sample Gates, she paints a tiny image of the path and gardens leading to Kirkwood Avenue on the bottom layer of the cake. She adds fondant gate towers.
They're very important and then we have the Showalter Foundation, the Venus from the Showalter Foundation, which a lot of students when they graduate like to get in the foundation, take a picture.
On the side of the top layer of the cake is a bronze colored relief image of a nude woman lying on her side with her arms above her head.
A big challenge honestly though was picking what pieces I wanted to do.
A black and white sketch of the cake with notes of colors and ideas.
My original idea had just so many different things.
I thought, all right, you're going to need about 3 cakes to get all this on there.
So, I had to narrow it down.
So narrowing it down was probably the first process that was a little bit tricky and then just the time of everything.
As far as cake decorating goes, just make what you like in the beginning and sometimes you're doing it because you're making it for a friend's party and they'll tell you what you want, but just be patient.
Each, it's just like anything else, you know, a new thing it's going to take a little while so don't start it when you have to, you know, have it done very quickly or start it late at night when you're already tired because some things will go wrong.
So just kind of take your time playing around and learning the staff.
Everything is going to have its challenges.
The first time you use [inaudible], the first time that you ice a cake and try to get it early it's going to get hard.
So, just patience.
Patience.
A final view of the finished cake. The bottom layer is the Sample Gates. The second layer is the basketball candy stripes. The third layer is the limestone wall with the song lyric. The top layer is the venus statue.
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