Former trucker has her cakes and bakes 'em, too

Associated Press Photo — This is just one of the many beautiful cakes former truck driver Michele Ludewig has produced.

The Associated Press

5/15/2008

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Former truck driver Michele Ludewig quipped that she has gone from “Freightliners to frosting.”

After leaving the job she loved so much, Ludewig forged a new business after doctors discovered a benign tumor on her spinal cord that made her job behind the wheel impossible.

"I went from Freightliners to frosting," Ludewig says with a laugh, as she stands in her professional kitchen on the east side of Sioux Falls.

Ludewig's cakes come from her own imagination and can take weeks to make. She's been designing cakes for two and a half years and was featured for her violin cake in the Ices magazine, a cake industry publication.

It was well done, says Blake Dede, owner of Ideal Wedding Center. "The violin looked like you could pick it up and play it."

She accomplished that after only three classes.

Ludewig, 60, had no idea she was creative. "I borrowed the violin from my grandson and made a template out of parchment. I fooled around with it until I got it right," she says.

Ideal Wedding Center features one of Ludewig's cakes in the store's cake top display.

"It's all done in fondant, and it has a luster dust appearance that looks like an opal. It looks like a wedding dress made out of cake with two tiers of ruffles with pearls," says Dede. "She is extremely talented and can come up with unbelievable things that I couldn't even imagine could be made out of fondant."

Ludewig's first career ended when she collapsed on the floor visiting her uncle in the hospital. Tests showed she had a three-inch tumor growing into the membrane of her spinal column.

"They estimated it had been growing for 15 to 20 years," Ludewig says.

Her occasional falls seemed insignificant. "I thought I was just clumsy."

Surgery in 2004 took away her career and left a foot-long scar on her upper back.

"I was angry I couldn't go back to truck driving," she says. "I went from a good income to no income."

When a friend casually asked her to make a cake for her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, Ludewig decided to give it a try. "Her mom had never had a wedding cake. She cried when she saw it," Ludewig says.

"That was the beginning. She gave me a new set of road maps — just in a different direction."

Ludewig took a few classes before opening her own business, Sweet Things.

Now she keeps busy with referrals through friends.