CAKE LADY'S JUST DESSERTS : FOR THE ARTWORK IN FRANCES KUYPER'S MUSEUM, THE CANVAS IS PRETTY CRUMBY - AND HER PAINT IS THE ICING ON THE CAKE.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

As decorators go, Frances Kuyper takes the cake.

Well, actually, she frosts the cake. She sculpts it. She pipes it. She covers it with curlicues and flowers and leaves and maybe a bunny or two. And to top it all off, she airbrushes a portrait on it.

Then, if it's not on the way to some movie or TV star or to a birthday shindig, she and her husband, Frankie, have it for dessert.

``I'm the only person I know who can have my cake and eat it, too,'' Kuyper said with a laugh in the kitchen of her Pasadena bungalow-turned-museum, headquarters for cake decorating classes and home to more than 150 examples of what icing experts call ``cake crafting.''

Kuyper's Mini Cake Museum, in a quiet residential area just off the Foothill Freeway (210), isn't hard to find. Just drive up Lola Avenue and look for the mailbox shaped like a five-tiered wedding cake.

Inside, you're likely to find Kuyper rearranging her reference library of more than 1,000 volumes on cake decorating, spiffing up the video room where visitors can watch more than 90 cake decorating videos, finding just the perfect display spot for a new ``artificial cake'' (decorated plastic foam) , or trying out a new decorating technique in the open kitchen.

``People don't realize what can be done with cake and icing,'' said Kuyper, 78. ``It's an art. And I wanted to show it to them.''

A museum from scratch

The museum is a dream come true for Kuyper, but creating it was no piece of cake. In 1992, she began to think about creating a museum displaying the craft she perfected during a 45-year career in 14 bakeries and stints as a traveling teacher and demonstrator in 48 states and eight countries.

When she couldn't get backing for the idea from local women's groups, she put it on the back burner for two years - until a morning's prayer and meditation told her to get going again. Her widowed daughter had remarried and moved from the early-1900s, two-story bungalow on her parents' property (Kuyper and her husband, Frank, live in a smaller, more modern home on the rear of the lot).

The cake decorator envisioned the empty house as the museum she had long dreamed of. After nearly two years of work, the museum opened June 26, 1994, on Kuyper's 76th birthday.

Strolling past the glassed-in shelves, it's hard to believe that some of the creations on display are made of icing - albeit icing that age has turned hard as brick and inedible, even for ants. There's a miniature of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a flower garden, straw hats, Easter eggs, baskets filled with flowers, a sky-high wedding cake from the Philippines, a high-tech cake from England that looks like a space ship, cakes covered with English filigree, icing portraits of the rich and famous.

Only about a dozen of the cakes in the museum were decorated by Kuyper; most of those feature her unique airbrush portrait technique or giant 3-D cartoon figures. The others were created by bakers and decorators from all over the world, who often pass through Los Angeles on their way home from demonstrations and leave their best works with Kuyper for display. Sometimes, they even stop to teach a class or two.

Mostly retired from bakery chores, Kuyper leads visitors through her museum, writes (she's penned three books on cake decorating), demonstrates for how-to videos (her sixth will be out this spring), and teaches private cake-decorating lessons. (She boasts that she can turn anyone into a passable cake decorator in two hours - and into an expert in six hours.)

In the museum's kitchen, visitors who blink risk missing much of the decorating process. On a recent morning, she iced a cake in less than a minute and added ruffles, filigree and an Easter bunny in a few minutes more with deft touches of an air brush and pastry bags fitted with decorating tips.

Her record for decorating an 8-inch, round birthday cake, she said, is about two minutes. In a professional bakery once, she decorated 100 cakes in 12 hours, averaging about eight minutes a cake - but, she's quick to point out, they were bigger cakes.

``After that, I became known as a fast lady ... uh, a fast decorator,'' she joked.

Former vaudevillian 

Cake decorating was a second career for Kuyper who, in the 1930s and '40s, traveled throughout the United States with her sister Charlotte, singing and dancing as the Schultz Sisters on the vaudeville stage. But she found herself alone when her dance partner married and retired from show business in the late '40s.

Another sister, Helen, asked Kuyper to come and work in her bakery, decorating cakes, but she resisted. A few years later, she met and married Frank Kuyper, and when she began to look for ways she could supplement his too-small postman's salary, she remembered Helen's suggestion.

She mowed lawns to raise money for flour, butter and other ingredients, then experimented with cakes and frosting in her kitchen. The Kuypers were so poor that they couldn't afford to buy gifts for neighbor children's birthday parties, so she made a standing offer to other mothers: She'd bake and decorate a birthday cake as daughter Carol's ``gift.''

``There were 32 kids on the block, so I got a lot of practice,'' she said.

When the wife of a local banker saw one of her cakes and ordered one for $6 ($5 of that was profit in the early 1950s), Kuyper decided to market her creations to a wider audience. But setting up her own business was far from a cakewalk.

``I was baking all night and decorating all day,'' she recalled. ``It was hard work.''

An ailing baker gave her her first long-term job in a professional bakery.

Going to check on a job opening, she found the baker suffering from a bad case of the flu, trying to finish a backlog of birthday cakes.

``This fellow was so sick, I felt sorry for him,'' Kuyper said. ``I said, `If you give me an apron, I'll finish your cakes and you can go home to bed.' I stayed at that bakery 2-1/2 years.''

She learned much of her technique by watching a decorator at Farmers Market in Los Angeles. ``I used to stand in front of that window five hours at a time,'' Kuyper said. ``His hands were like magic.''

As bakeries closed and new ones opened, she worked at more than a baker's dozen.

``I could walk out of one job and into another because I was so creative,'' Kuyper said. ``Cake decorators didn't think about being creative in those days. So I was different.''

At many places she worked, she created her frosting decorations in the bakery window, where kids with their noses pressed up against the glass called her the Cake Lady, a moniker she later had registered.

In 1970, with a growing demand for more personalized cakes, she experimented with an air brush and discovered she could use food coloring to draw portraits on smooth rolled fondant cake tops. When nobody wanted to destroy the portrait by cutting the cake, she sandwiched a piece of waxed paper between the cake and the fondant portrait so the top could be lifted off, even framed.

Cakes for celebrities

Over the years, she's baked and decorated cakes for plenty of celebrities, among them Eddie Cantor, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore and John Wayne. A few weeks ago, she got a personal note and a videotape from actor Arsenio Hall after a staff member who visited Kuyper's museum gave Hall one of her cakes sporting his portrait.

But she's a celebrity in her own right - in the cake world anyway. In the 1970s, Kuyper worked for six years for Wilton Industries Inc., traveling from mall to mall across the United States to demonstrate the company's cake pans and other products, and for three years in the 1980s as a consultant for Baskin-Robbins, which makes ice cream cakes.

Kuyper - who's been named to both the International Cake Decorator's Hall of Fame and the London Guild of Sugarcrafts - also has taught decorating techniques in Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, England, Canada, Mexico and Singapore. She's appeared on a slew of Los Angeles-based talk shows, had her occupation guessed in 1972 on ``I've Got a Secret,'' and was a regular guest on Los Angeles' ``Dialing for Dollars'' show (1965-73).

Now, she's writing her autobiography, while hoping she'll some day be able to afford to move her museum to Springfield, Mo., just up the road a piece from country music mecca Branson.

``That's where everything's happening now,'' Kuyper said. ``It's where I want to be.''

That, she said, would truly be the icing on the cake.

Sweet deal

The Mini Cake Museum, 432 N. Lola Ave., Pasadena, is open for public tours by appointment. Admission is free, but there is a small charge for use of the reference and video libraries.

On Sundays, the museum is open for a free Sunday Social, featuring cake decorating demonstrations for up to 35 people. Private classes are given by request.

For information on museum tours or classes, call museum owner Frances Kuyper at [phone].

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos, Box

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Edible Art

In Frances Kuyper's museum, frosted facades take the cake

(2--Color) In 1970, Frances Kuyper experimented with an airbrush and discovered she could use food coloring to draw portraits on cake tops, such as this rendering of Oprah Winfrey.

(3--Color) In the museum's kitchen, Frances Kuyper iced a cake in less than a minute, adding ruffles, filigree and an Easter bunny in a few minutes more.

(4--Color) Frances Kuyper with one of her signature pieces, a patriotic portrait of an American Bald Eagle suitable for the Fourth of July or Veterans Day.

(5--Color) It isn't hard to find Frances Kuyper's Mini Cake Museum. Just drive up Lola Avenue and look for the mailbox shaped like a five-tiered wedding cake.

Myung J. Chun/Daily News

Box: Sweet deal (See Text)