WES KINSEY COOKS UP CAREER; THE NEW OWNER OF MY DADDY'S CHEESECAKE HAS DESIGNED AND MADE THOUSANDS OF WEDDING CAKES.

Wes Kinsey poured batter in pans for wedding cake layers.

Kinsey put the personal touch on a party cake with freshly made flowers of icing.

Wes Kinsey's cooking career has been icing on the cake. Lots of it.

The 39-year-old Cape Girardeau man has been designing and making wedding cakes since graduating from high school two decades ago.

Since buying the My Daddy's Cheesecake store at 111 N. Main on Aug. 26, Kinsey has spent time baking muffins and cheesecakes.

Kinsey grew up on an East Cape Girardeau, Ill., farm, the fourth of six children. "Mom was always a big cooker at home," he said.

Kinsey has catered to cooking since his high school days. At rural Shawnee High School in Wolf Lake, Ill., he took a two-year, two-hour-a-day cooking class his junior and senior years. It was a new program in 1973, and Kinsey was the only boy in the class.

The cooking was done in a large classroom that had four kitchen areas.

In the first year of the program, students learned to run a restaurant. Kinsey and the other students did everything from buying and cooking the food to waiting on tables and washing the dishes.

"You had to come up with a balanced meal for $2 a person," he recalled. Once a week they served a meal to students and faculty, who paid a small charge to dine there.

In the second year students learned to run a bakery. "That is where I got into cake decorating," he said.

Kinsey learned about teaspoons and cups; how to make gravy and how to saute. And he got his first taste of cake decorating.

He loved it. "It just appealed to me, the creative side of it -- to take it in a rough form and decorate it down to a work of art."

After graduating from high school in 1975, Kinsey took cake decorating classes at the Cape Girardeau Vocational-Technical School. One of his sisters, Barb Kinsey, took classes with him.

"We took beginning classes over and over," he said. He and his sister often sat at home making cake roses for hours on end. They made the flowers and then threw them back in a bowl and did it all over again.

He made his first wedding cake in the mid-1970s while still living at home on the family farm. He loaded bricks for a living and made wedding cakes on the side, often going home over the lunch hour to bake cakes and make icing.

"It was like working two full-time jobs almost," he said.

He soon moved on to a new job: teaching cake decorating classes at the JCPenney store at West Park Mall. "We had the second-largest Wilton cake decorating classes in the nation."

In 1982, he took a two-week cake decorating class at the prestigious Wilton School of Confectionery Arts in Chicago. He then returned to his job at JCPenney.

A month later the Wilton company hired him and he moved to Chicago to decorate cakes to be photographed for the company catalogs. "I decorated cakes for six publications," he said.

Kinsey's cakes had to be flawless. "It was a real learning experience because the camera is much more critical than the eye is," he said.

The Wilton company's equipment has made cake decorating much easier. Prior to World War II, pastry chefs had to cut paper cones to make their own tips for dispensing icing. The development of metal tips eliminated that practice.

He worked for Wilton for five years, from 1983 to 1988. He helped develop a new technique for making gum paste flowers. "They almost look like china. It dries hard. Every petal is handmade and assembled. It takes hours."

He demonstrated the new technique at the International Cake Exposition in Salt Lake City in 1985.

While working for Wilton, he continued to learn. He studied under Wesley Wilton, son of the company founder, and learned to make satin-ribbon candy. "It is like hard candy. It is paper thin and you wrap it around the cake."

Kinsey moved around a lot: He spent time in San Antonio, Atlanta and St. Louis, training cake-decorating teachers in the Wilton methods.

In 1988, he left Wilton and returned to Cape Girardeau, where he and co-owner Lois Unfer opened the Crown Cake & Party store on Broadway. "We specialized in wedding cakes and sold decorating supplies."

In 1992, Unfer bowed out of the business. Kinsey couldn't afford to buy her out, so the business closed.

Kinsey went to work for The Sweet Shop bakery in Cape Girardeau as a wedding cake decorator. He actually was his own boss and worked as a subcontractor to The Sweet Shop.

Later, he helped manage the business while continuing to make wedding cakes.

Today, he is back to being a business owner with the purchase of My Daddy's Cheesecake. He operates the business with the help of six part-time employees.

Over the years he has designed and made thousands of wedding cakes. He averages about 200 a year.

No two cakes are exactly alike. Kinsey said he spends hours mixing colors to get just the right icing to match the wedding colors.

His weekends are busy delivering wedding cakes. At the height of the wedding season, Kinsey has handled as many as 10 wedding cakes on a weekend.

For Kinsey it is a labor of love. "I do all the baking, the icing, the decorating and delivery," he said.

He uses about 150 pounds of butter-cream icing a week on wedding and groom cakes.

The largest cake he ever made was one for the bicentennial of Grace United Methodist Church in 1987.

"I think it served 800," he said. The cake had about five layers. It sat on thick plywood. Kinsey made a cathedral spire for it. The entire cake was about 5 feet tall. "It really made a massive centerpiece."

Kinsey is seeing a whole new generation of customers. "I am now doing wedding cakes for the children of people who we did weddings for."

He also is making more cheesecake wedding cakes for a business layered with success.