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When Linda Shonk won the home economics award for baking in eighth grade, her family barely batted an eye. After all, she came from a long line of bakers: Her grandmother wowed family and friends with her European-style desserts, and her mother boasted a reputation for making elaborate birthday cakes. It seemed only natural that Shonk would inherit the same sweet tooth. "When I came home with the award, I laughed and said, ëGrandma, if I can bake a pie like you and a cake like my mom, Iíll be wealthy one day,í" she recalls.

Little did she realize how prophetic her words would prove to be. Now almost 35 years later, Shonk not only owns a hugely successful baking business, but she also holds the rights to a secret icing recipe she invented in her own kitchen. Her creation, a smooth fondant icing called Choco-Pan, revolutionized the baking world with its combination of a rich chocolate flavor and an easy-to-handle consistency. Her baking company and brainchild, Sweet Art, ships the fondant to all 50 states and recently stepped up production to enter international markets.

To the casual observer, it seems that Shonkís success was, literally, a piece of cake. She effortlessly twirls the fondant into perfect rosebuds, whipping up breathtaking wedding cakes as she personally greets customers in her small southeastside bakery. While she takes phone orders, she spins delicate sprigs of violets and stephanotis from pure sugar, placing them in such lifelike nosegays across the satiny fondant that it seems almost sacrilege to bite into her creations.

In reality, however, those sweet dreams took more than a good dose of sugar; they were spun from ingenuity and hard work ñ the same ingredients that fuel Shonk today. She bakes most of Sweet Artís cakes herself, putting in 50 to 80 hours in the kitchen each week. An average cake requires about six hours of work and runs $800 to $1,000, sometimes more depending on the detail. Last month, Shonk spent a record 20 hours to create a multitiered mosaic wedding cake, with tiny fondant tiles covering each layer. She offers everything from traditional chocolate cake to more exotic flavors, including hazelnut, lemon poppyseed and apple spice. "My philosophy has always been that the cake should taste as good as the decorations are beautiful," she says. "When people still talk about a cake years after the wedding, thatís what makes me proud."

Despite her skill in the kitchen, Shonk didnít initially consider baking as a career ñ in fact, her course load at Emmerich Manual High School didnít include a single home economics class. Instead, she enrolled at IUPUI after graduation to pursue a degree in elementary education. To earn extra money, she got a job as a sales clerk with William H. Block department stores and worked her way through their apprentice program to become an assistant housewares buyer. The work didnít thrill her, but she quickly picked up on management skills as she learned to survey inventory, project sales and plan for the future. "Looking back, that job gave me the training I needed to go out and start my own business," she says. "I learned how to assess my own inventory, how to buy bulk ingredients and how to estimate the number of cakes for a given period."

Still, entrepreneurialism seemed an acquired taste. Content with her retail roots, she left IUPUI one year short of her degree to marry childhood friend Gary Shonk before the Vietnam War hit. Though they never dated, the two lived on the same block and walked to school together. They kept in touch after high school, holding long phone conversations when Gary moved away to enroll in architectural school at Purdue. Then in 1969 Garyís birthday was the first number picked in the draft. One night in September, he called to say he had been ordered to Vietnam. "That was such dreadful news, going to war so far away," Linda says. "I was so numb that all I could say was, ëOh Gary, Iím so sorry.í And then he said, ëWill you marry me?í I was so stunned that I made him call me back for an answer." They were married in December 1969, less than a month before Gary left for Vietnam.

With her husband overseas for the next year and a half, Shonk took on a full-time position with Blockís to save money. At that point, completing her degree seemed as far away as her new husband, and she gave up all thoughts of the future to concentrate on simply making it through each work day. "All my dreams seemed to be on hold ñ I wasnít living the family life I wanted because my husband was at war, and I couldnít pursue the education I wanted because war meant saving money."

Things improved only slightly when Gary returned in 1971. The couple moved to upper Michigan, where he was stationed, and Shonk found herself still miles away from a fulfilling career. That year, she began experimenting with cakes in an attempt to stay occupied. "It was so cold up there that I tried to find things that I could do at home to stay warm," she says. "The nearest grocery store was 12 miles away, and the nearest shopping mall was a half hour away, so it wasnít like I was going out for fun. My kitchen was my play area."

When Garyís term ended nine months later, they returned to Indianapolis so he could finish his architectural degree. Shonk went back to Blockís, intending to complete her own degree after Gary graduated. Instead, she found herself pregnant with son Joseph, who was born in March 1973. "There was never a question in my mind that I would stay home with my baby ñ my mother was home with me, and I felt that I owed my child the same attention," she says. "I suppose I should have been frustrated because as a stay-at-home mom I would be giving up my degree, but I didnít see it as a set-back. I was thrilled to be starting a family ñ as far as I was concerned, this was the start of a wonderful life."

Not even Shonk herself could have guessed that her motherly devotion would launch a baking empire. She continued to bake cakes in her spare time, gradually improving her decorating skills. Then when Joseph was a year old, Garyís sister Nancy asked her to make a telephone cake for an Indiana Bell retirement party. Her design was so popular that the company commissioned similar cakes for other occasions.

Shortly afterward, one of Shonkís cousins asked her to make his wedding cake. "My skills really werenít very advanced, so I tried to back out of it, but he said, ëI donít care if itís just a sheet cake ñ I want you to do it.í" That simple design somehow evolved into an elaborate layered one with a bridge, so Shonk hit the books and went through several practice cakes before the big day. When she finally dropped the cake off at Valle Vista Country Club for the reception, the general manager was so impressed that he asked her to join his pastry staff. "I fell into my career quite accidentally, and it was like I had been hit by a lightning bolt when I realized I could do this for a living," she says. "Suddenly I had found my dream, to stay home with my son and still have a career."

She started working part-time as a pastry chef in 1974, making restaurant desserts and coordinating Sunday brunches. She took the early shift so she could stay with Joseph in the afternoon, and over the next two years she learned the secrets behind rich pastry filling and frosted rosebuds. As her skill grew, however, so did her desire for advancement. She moved from Valle Vista to Adamís Mark Hotel, and eventually to the Hyatt Regency in search of higher pay. "Women pastry chefs just didnít command the salaries that male pastry chefs did, and I finally got tired of coming in second all the time," she says.

Until that point, having a career that also suited her home life seemed reward enough ñ launching her own business and a trademark fondant was, well, the icing on the cake. Working out of her kitchen, she began supplying custom cakes to local hotels and a limited store of customers. She also experimented as Joseph stirred cake batter on a small stool. "I had to constantly come up with new and different products because I was competing with caterers that had whole lines of frozen pastries," she says.

That drive for originality produced Choco-Pan, a smooth fondant icing that is rolled into thin sheets and draped over cakes. Popular in Europe for its satiny appearance, fondant previously appealed to few Americans because of its bitter aftertaste, heavy texture and tendency to melt in the refrigerator. Making fondants from scratch can be tricky, too, because the ingredients must first be cooked and then stabilized with gelatin or glycerin. With Choco-Pan, Shonk essentially reinvented the fondant, producing a ready-made frosting with the taste of chocolate and the consistency of marzipan. "I developed Choco-Pan for myself because I wanted something that tasted as good as it looked," she says. "I never dreamed it would be so popular with my customers."

Orders began to stream in as word spread locally, and in 1986 she made her move. She and Gary (now a drafting designer for Kysor USA) took out two loans and a second mortgage to raise the $25,000 needed for baking equipment and bought a small house on the southeastside, the birthplace of Sweet Art. The move proved good for business: Within two years, Shonk found that she could no longer keep up with the orders herself, so she set up shop in a nearby office building. "I felt like I was signing over my life," she says. "Suddenly we were hiring employees, we had a much higher rent, we needed more equipment, we needed inspections and we were facing a situation that was foreign to me. It was a dream come true, but it was also an overwhelming one."

That was only the beginning. Sweet Art continued to attract local customers, partly because of Choco-Panís popularity. On a whim, Shonk decided to go public and took her invention to an industry convention in Columbus, Ohio, in 1994. "One of my friends kept trying to buy batches of Choco-Pan from me and said one day, ëYou really ought to show people this. Itís good stuff.í My reaction was, ëI guess it wonít hurt.í" She set up a small booth with 4-pound buckets of fondant ñ by the third day of the five-day show, other fondant distributors closed their booths and Shonk sold out.

After that, orders began pouring in from outside the state. Shonk has made wedding cakes for Pacer Rik Smits and ex-Pacer Ron Anderson, a birthday cake for racing dragster Kenny Bernstein ("He loves carrot cake, by the way," she says) and a scale model cake of Purdue Universityís Elliott Hall of Music for its 75th anniversary. She also numbers several former governors, Colts players and international soccer athletes among her customers. In 1987 she catered the Pan Am Games and attracted considerable attention for her specialty pastries ñ industry magazines and national publications (including The Wall Street Journal) quickly snapped up her designs just as quickly as the public did. She now ships about 250 pounds of fondant every day by UPS.

Ironically, Shonkís son Joseph ñ her very reason for entering the baking business ñ now plays an integral part in his motherís company. As production manager for Sweet Art, Joseph oversees shipping and handles the companyís sales and inventory records. He also helps Shonk lift the 80-quart stainless steel bowls (filled with 60 to 70 quarts of ingredients) in which the two of them manufacture Choco-Pan. "Itís very gratifying to have him as a part of the business because heís what got me started," she says. "Iíve always had my familyís support in the company, and Iím very fortunate to be living my dream."

She doesnít sugar-coat the companyís early struggles, though, when Sweet Artís growing pains nearly put her out of business. Shortly after the companyís move, Shonk launched a new bread line in an effort to diversify her products. She also acquired several large restaurant and hotel clients and found herself faced with more orders for pastries, bread, rolls and cakes than her staff of four could handle. "Everything was coming so quickly that we needed more equipment and more employees to meet the demand. We started to expand a little too fast at that point, and it was tough to bear financially as well as physically," she says. "We were basically a tree that had too many twigs ñ our main branch wasnít doing very well because we were trying to support all those twigs."

To compound the problem, Shonk felt her only option was to initiate bankruptcy proceedings in 1991, when she took on the expense of larger quarters only to fund she couldnít cover her lease. Fortunately, her landlord rented the building to another company before the bankruptcy claim cleared, so Shonk gathered her wits and her equipment and set up shop across the street in her current southeastside location. She tightened her belt after that, eliminating her bread line, cutting back on staff and taking on only those projects she could comfortably handle.

Sweet Art thrived that next year as customers eagerly devoured her cakes and pastries, but the close call left Shonk with a bitter taste in her mouth. "I had a lot of shaky nights, wondering if Iíd still have my business and all Iíd worked for the next morning," she says. "Even when my life returned to normal, I felt a cloud hanging over my head because I was haunted by the word ëbankruptcy.í That cloud is just now starting to lift after seven years."

The gray skies of the past certainly show no signs of returning: Sweet Artís future seems as smooth as one of its trademark sheets of Choco-Pan. Last yearís annual sales included 14,000 pounds of Choco-Pan. Even more impressive, Shonk shipped her first order to Brazil in January, plans to begin shipments to England before the end of the year and hopes to tackle other European markets by 1999. Even conservative estimates double the companyís projected annual sales in two years. "Weíre looking at truckloads now, not just single shipments," she says.

This spring Sweet Art will take up a new 4,000-square-foot residence in the same southeastside complex. Fellow pastry chef Lionel Pichereau, who acquired the pastry side of the business when Choco-Pan started to grow, will take over the current space to manufacture pastries and wholesale cakes as The French Confection. Shonk plans to hire more employees to handle Choco-Panís international shipments and will invest in more baking equipment. This time, though, the growth is more controlled. "When you go through the lean times, you learn your lesson," she says. "You gauge your success carefully from then on, but at the same time you canít be afraid to take risks. Running a small business is just like living life: Youíll never move forward if you canít get over the past."

She applies a similar philosophy to her personal life, maintaining a careful mix between her business success and her private goals. Though she doesnít see an education degree in her future, she plans to return to her teaching dreams by starting a sugar school in the next five years. "Cake decorating is such a relaxing, satisfying art for many people, whether theyíre homemakers or aspiring pastry chefs," she says. "I want to teach people how to make that special birthday cake for someone, or how to spend some time with their children making a gingerbread house at Christmas."

Sheíll also continue to spin her own sweet dreams, which she says she wonít know until they choose to reveal themselves. "Life is funny. It always has something in store for you, whether itís a lesson you have to learn or a goal you can finally achieve," she says. "The fun part is in seeing the new places that life draws you to, sometimes when you least expect it. Thereís nothing more satisfying or rewarding than traveling that journey step by step."