Wedding cake artist Maggie (Austin) LaBaugh still sweats every perfect detail

For 23 of her first 26 years, Maggie LaBaugh’s life had a singular purpose: mastering her technique as a ballerina. Awards and accolades came easily as she ascended the world of professional dance, but to her they seemed superfluous. What drove LaBaugh into the studio every day was the opportunity to have a shot at perfection. Each hour, each fragment of choreography, was a chance to create something beautiful and pristine. She labored relentlessly on tiny details, repeating a movement over and over for days until it was exactly right.

Then, while dancing one day in 2006, she felt a twinge in the ball of her foot. And what had started small in the rehearsal room grew into a lump the size of a golf ball as she walked down the corridor of the prestigious Joffrey Ballet Company in Chicago.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

She didn’t know it then, but that was the end. And the beginning.

In the years that followed, LaBaugh’s compulsion toward splendor would manifest itself in another, surprising medium: sugar flowers. And the young woman whose remarkable talent had been in dance, not baking or visual art, emerged as one of the country’s most promising cake makers, garnering international attention for edible sculptures that could double as museum pieces.

LaBaugh’s body faltered, but her spirit — fueled by the same quest for excellence — adapted and flourished.

For a while, though, she was lost.

The months that followed her injury were filled with daily physical therapy sessions and a revolving door of surgeons and podiatrists. She’d damaged a sesamoid, a tiny bone wrapped within a tendon that connects the foot to the big toe. For the average person, such an injury would be a nuisance at worst. For a professional dancer, it’s a tragedy.

After consulting with every expert she could find, and after a year and a half of intensive, but fruitless, rehabilitation, LaBaugh conceded that there was no hope. Her years of work — starting with ballet classes as a toddler in Massachusetts and leading to the coveted spot with Joffrey — culminated in a senseless anticlimax.

“It was awful,” recalls LaBaugh, sitting in an Alexandria cafe around the corner from the cake shop she’s preparing to open. Like her sugar flowers, she is delicate and refined, with lips painted ruby and eyes exaggerated by mascara. “But it’s like a professional athlete: You just never know when your time is going to come.”

LaBaugh tried to envision a life without dance, but she had no experience in anything else and no college degree to fall back on. She considered teaching ballet but couldn’t bear the thought of being in the studio without dancing.

Her husband encouraged her to find something new. LaBaugh was interested in wine and began thinking she might like to be a sommelier. She’d heard that Charlie Trotter, a chef she admired, hired interns with no experience in the food industry. Too nervous to make the cold call, she enrolled at the French Pastry School in Chicago. She’d always liked baking and, more than that, knew that the school regularly channeled interns to his restaurant, Charlie Trotter’s.