Section 01
Step 01 · EmpathizeOrigins in Competitive Pastry Arts
In the beginning, there was the training. Sullivan College’s Baking & Pastry Arts program incorporated Wilton Method instruction, and pastillage was the proving ground.
Pastillage is a sugar paste that dries completely rigid. It can be rolled, cut, and shaped into architectural forms: columns, panels, lattice, draped fabric. But once it sets, it cannot be corrected. A crack is a crack. A lean is a lean. The material enforces precision in a way that no instructor can. You either planned carefully enough, or you started over.
Planning carefully enough meant cardboard first. Every component was designed on paper, cut from cardboard, and test-fitted before a single piece of pastillage was rolled out. Piping templates were drawn, refined, and practiced repeatedly until the muscle memory was there. The sugar was the final draft, not the first one.
The green centerpiece was the timed test: ninety minutes to produce a finished structural showpiece from scratch. Every decision had to be made before the clock started. The pink centerpiece was built as additional practice under the same Wilton guidelines, pushing the same technical demands with more room to explore.
Both pieces predate the 1992 competition. They are the reason it was possible.
In 1992, I competed as a solo apprentice-class competitor at the ACF-sanctioned National Restaurant Association Salon at McCormick Place in Chicago, representing Sullivan College in Louisville, Kentucky.
My entry was titled “Silhouette”: a Russian-themed pastry arts display featuring a pastillage centerpiece modeled after Saint Basil’s Cathedral, accompanied by Charlotte Russe, plated petit desserts, and handcrafted decorative elements arranged on an oval mirror presentation. I earned a Silver Medal.
What I didn’t know at the time was that everything required to conceive, build, and present that entry was indistinguishable from what would later be called design thinking.
The competition imposed strict technical constraints and a published judging rubric. Success demanded that every element work together, not just individually. Thematic cohesion wasn’t a principle I’d read about. It was the difference between silver and bronze. Every decorative element had to belong to the same visual world. Nothing arbitrary. Nothing extraneous. That constraint taught me compositional balance before I had a word for it.
A lack of precision craftsmanship meant structural failure. A centerpiece that leaned, a glaze that cracked, wasn’t recoverable at presentation. You iterated before the deadline, not during it. The competition was an exercise in iterative execution evaluated on criteria that rewarded precision, coherence, and originality in equal measure.
Designing under strict constraints for a panel of expert judges who would assess your work against a rubric? That’s every UX deliverable I’ve produced since.
I didn’t know the board existed until recently. We were at Sullivan University for my daughter Georgia’s college visit when we found the Competition Awards wall. My name was there, 1992, Silver Medal, exactly where it had always been. I hadn’t known. Janette photographed it. There’s something fitting about that. The work was real enough to be permanently recorded without me ever needing to keep track of it.
