Vince loves beach volleyball and won’t leave the house without pomade. He’s a volunteer firefighter, and he loves his dog too much.
And … Vince is a cake.
He’s a lovely abstract round cake with a dark blue frosting base and “wavy colors, yellow macaron sunshine, a white chocolate wave and a gold shark fin, duh!” says Mandy Krause, who delivers each cake order complete with a name and personality.
Krause is a 27-year-old pastry chef who loves gold, glitter and tons of sprinkles. She launched her business, Love & Macarons, in April. She makes and sells cakes, cupcakes, macarons, macaron towers and a mix of pastries for custom orders, weddings, events, special occasions and wholesale customers. You can find her macarons for sale at The Mason Jar Café in Benton Harbor, MI, and Nosh Village, a food truck most often found at Watermark Brewing Company in Stevensville, MI.
She makes a mix of macaron flavors including vanilla bean, salted caramel, Fruity Pebbles, cookies and cream, pumpkin and maple vanilla. She also uses real fruit and sometimes uses local produce in season, like raspberries.
Macarons are not easy to make. The temperature and airflow in the oven have to be perfect. Every ingredient has to be proportioned just right.
“If you don’t scale your egg whites perfectly, then there’s too much moisture in your shells,” says Krause. “Five extra grams of flour in a cookie doesn’t do anything; five extra grams of egg white in a macaron can ruin your life. They are just more precise and needy. Needy cookies.”
She does her baking early mornings in the kitchen at North Shore Inn in Benton Harbor, but she’s hoping to open a storefront in South Bend, IN, by spring.
Her customer base is from all over Michiana.
“I’d say 85% to 95% of my orders come from Instagram,” says Krause. “I have just over 1,000 followers, but they are very active and buy stuff all the time. I can’t believe social media is literally paying my bills!”
If you look at her business Instagram account, @loveandmacs, and her personal account, @mandykrause, you will understand why. Her cakes are works of art, and her posts are fun to read because she names and describes the personality of each cake.
Vince is not alone. There’s adventurous Evelyn, the golf-loving Henry, ukulele-playing Ally and more. “I don’t usually define the personality until I have the name,” says Krause. “The name that pops into my head is the name I choose.”
Some people have started to order by describing the person the cake is for, sort of reverse engineering Krause’s creative process. “They’ll say, ‘This is for my daughter. She really loves slime and rainbows and cowgirl boots and plays this and does that,’” says Krause. “Then I say to myself, ‘If I was a little girl who liked all this stuff, how would I want my cake to look?’ And then I do that.”
She also likes to have customers give her a budget, say $30, and she’ll put together a surprise box of treats with “pop tarts,” macarons, cupcakes and, sometimes, little candy bars.
She also teaches cake decorating classes at various locations around Michiana. “I tell my cake classes—this sounds really artsy hippie—but I let the cake tell me what it wants.”
Love & Macarons
Benton Harbor, MI
269.697.3526
loveandmacarons.com
Copyright ©2024 Edible Michiana. All rights reserved
