Andrew Fuller stands out. Turn on an episode of Is It Cake? and you’ll find the baker rocking a bright green-and-blue mohawk that matches his equally vibrant bushy beard. Looking at his clothes and the spookily decorated glasses perched on his face, you’d assume the show was filmed on Halloween — or, at least, in October. But this is just Andrew. It’s Andrew every day of the year.
Throughout Season 1 of Is It Cake?, the Iowa native and owner of Sugar Freakshow proves that it isn’t just his whimsical appearance that stands out. Andrew’s trompe l’oeil bakes, with their innovative flavors, are as remarkable as his fearless personal style. (And if you haven’t gotten a chance to see him in action, check out the series — otherwise, major spoilers ahead.) With his conch-shell challah bread and weathered leather suitcase cakes, Andrew ultimately wins the baking competition show, along with the hearts of his fellow contestants, the show’s judges and likely more than a few viewers. It turns out that it’s Andrew’s unique point-of-view that led him to baking in the first place, and it’s what has helped him thrive at it, on- and off-screen.
To start off, how did you get into the world of hyperrealistic cakes? You can probably tell by looking at me that I’ve always just been a weirdly creative person — not just creative but weirdly creative. My house, my aesthetic, everything about me is just very odd. I’ve always gravitated towards things being made out of unconventional things, things that don’t make sense the way that they are. As an unorthodox cake artist, I just gravitate towards the weird and the most unlikely things to be cake. It’s just a thing that’s naturally exciting to me.
It kind of started with my love of horror. I love horror movies. I love spooky, not necessarily gory, but spooky, macabre, Tim Burton kind of stuff. So, it started with me doing organs and body parts. A placenta cake was the first hyperrealistic thing that I did. I made a placenta for a nurse in 2018 actually. I delivered it to the hospital and they were so freaked out when I delivered it that literally the front-desk person jumped up and yelled at me for bringing biohazardous material into the hospital. At that moment, I was like, “Maybe I should stick with realism.” I really get into the details. I’m a freak for details, and if you want to make something look super realistic, it’s all about those little details that other people overlook.
When did you decide to start baking professionally? I’ve always gravitated towards anything that’s art-related and just being a creator. My dad passed away when I was really young, and I was a weird kid, even back then. We moved in with my great-grandma for a while, and it was really big for her to ingrain in me how to cook, how to bake, how to do simple things, like making griddle cakes and things like that. That ended up becoming my happy thing so it always was on the backburner. As an artist, I realized you can create art and people can love and appreciate it, but they don’t really purchase it. But if you make that art edible, they justify it.
When I started the whole cake adventure, I actually started off with not anything spooky at all. My business was called Guy Needs Cake — so original, so original. I literally just started off by making a cake for my husband. I watched all those baking shows, and I was like, “ bet I could do that just for fun.” I tried it and friends and family went nuts over that. It’s this thing that I organically fell into.
How important is it for your cakes to taste as good as they look? Is that a difficult balance to maintain? I think it’s because of people’s hatred towards fondant, but so many people assume that if your cake looks incredible, it’s going to taste like cardboard or it’s just going to not be good. Part of my art and part of what I like to do is create something that blows people’s minds that they don’t understand that it’s cake until they finally do cut into it, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, not only does this thing look like a shoe, but it tastes better than any cake I’ve ever had.” At the end of the day, it’s a cake, so if it’s not good, what are you selling? I really, I really pride myself on flavor.
So does that mean you don’t use fondant? I don’t. There are three camps: fondant, buttercream or modeling chocolate. I’m 100% in the camp of modeling chocolate, not only because it functions like clay — you can actually blend it, sculpt it and shave it down — but also because it tastes good. It actually tastes like either chocolate or like a white Tootsie Roll. I think it also aids in sealing in the flavors of the cake, so you have a nice, dense, moist cake. People go to a wedding, and the first time they ever experience fondant is the kind that comes out of a box. Their cake is wrapped in fondant, and everybody just starts peeling it off. So I think people just expect this nasty, doughy sugar paper, and I get it, but I like to surprise people.
What’s your favorite cake to make, and what’s your favorite cake to eat? My favorite cake to make, hands-down, is [devil’s] food cake with a dark chocolate ganache. It’s a dense cake, and the ganache sets up so beautifully, like a sculpture, and it’s the easiest thing to work with. You can manipulate it really well. You can blend it together and make cake clay, like cake pop material, for adding softer details to things before you put your modeling chocolate on. So it’s just very versatile and people love the flavor of it, which is great.
I recently learned that Champagne cake originated in Iowa. I love the lightness and the effervescence of it and just how unique it is. It’s awful for a sculpted cake, because it’s light and airy and usually has a whipped type of frosting.
What’s one kitchen tool you can’t live without? I don’t know if I would call it a kitchen tool, but it’s definitely a cake tool. There are kits that you can buy for, like, $5 with little yellow tools, but there’s this one specific tool that’s in this set that you can’t get by itself. It’s meant for clay sculpting, but I find it really useful for getting the organic shapes that I need, for pushing out seams, for getting the curves that I want. It’s just so multi-useful. I actually had it tattooed on the side of my hand and nobody understands what it is. Unless you’re an artist, you don’t get it. They break so easily that I have dozens of them at my studio because I can’t finish a cake if I don’t have them on hand. So, it’s 100% my go-to tool, but it’s just a basic sculpting tool.
Was filming Is It Cake? as fun as it looked? Did you form a bond with the other contestants? Going into this whole thing was terrifying. It reminded me so much of my literal experience the only time I ever went to summer camp because I showed up, I bawled my face off for days calling my mom whenever they gave me the 10 minutes to call [her] and telling her how much I hated it and wanted to come home. Then, as we started gearing up and getting into things, I was so happy and didn’t want to come back home.
I feel like any creative person deals with imposter syndrome, and you compare yourself to other people. I’ve done shows before, and some of the people that I filmed with had not, so they felt like I had an advantage, but I felt the opposite because I didn’t really do well on the other shows. You get in your head so much, but it ended up being, hands-down, the best experience I’ve had on a show.
All of the castmates, we’re all super close now. Right now, with all that’s going on, we’re all checking in on each other, making sure everybody’s in a good spot, planning meet-ups, planning collaborations and things like that. I love every single person that I met. I mean, we’re the only people that experienced this.
Your doughnut cake was a huge success with the judges, and it sounded so delicious. How was it made? For every cake that I made on the show, I wanted the flavor to have something to do with what the cake was and what the theme was. I kept laughing about the fact that I chose to do bread, which really, when you break it down, is so similar to cake. So, how do I really mess with their minds? I’m making a cake that looks like bread and tastes like doughnuts.
There are different ways that you can do it that are really cool and really give that doughnut flavor. You can either blend up doughnuts and mix them into your milk to actually infuse the flavor of doughnuts into the cake, or you can reserve grease from fried doughnuts and actually put that into your batter, which gives the mouthfeel, texture and taste of fresh donuts. What’s really cool is if you don’t make doughnuts, you can go to any local doughnut shop and be like, “Can I get some of your doughnut grease?” They look at you like you’re a lunatic, but they’ll give it to you.
In addition to doughnut cake, you made tiramisu cake and baklava cake. How do you come up with such innovative recipes? Do you spend a lot of time recipe testing? I am so much a “do now, think later” type of person, and I think that is successful for me because I don’t get in my head. I get in my head later, and I’m like, “What was I doing? Why did I do that?” But I trust my instincts and I go with my gut with things. So, specifically, that finale cake, it was tiramisu on one side and then baklava on the other side. I had fully thrown all caution to the wind and was like, “Why not experiment on the finale of a show?” Because I wanted to do some worldly flavors, and I wanted it to seem like a travel-flavored cake. I had done versions of a pistachio cake, which was the base cake and made sense for baklava, but I had never done a baklava cake. And I had never done a tiramisu cake, but I had made tiramisu. So I’m all about experimenting now, seeing how it works out. That’s how you learn. That’s how you grow. If it’s not great, you throw it out and then you get back to the drawing board. Maybe that’s a crazy strategy for a finale, but it worked out for me.
How has your life changed since winning Is It Cake? I acquired the keys to my first-ever cake studio. Since filming, all I’ve done is put my heart and soul into making the weirdest, strangest, exactly-what-you-would-expect-from-me type of cake studio that’s going to be opening soon. It’s not something I would’ve been able to do if I didn’t have this experience and I didn’t get to do the show, and I still haven’t processed winning.
When I won, Karamo [Brown], who was one of the finale judges, pulled me aside and said, “As a Netflix star and as a person who really didn’t have as well-known of a career before Queer Eye, it changed my whole life. So I want to take a selfie with you because when the show comes out, I’m so proud to share your accomplishment with the world. Go home, give your husband a hug and tell him that your whole life is about to change because of what you just did.” It was so cool to get like a, “Hey, everything’s about to get crazy for you” pep talk from Karamo.
How did you develop such a unique personal style? I’m sitting here talking to you wearing a custom seven-inch Mars Attacks! platform boot, and I’m in my house, on the phone, so I love this question. Honestly, I grew up for a long time being a total wallflower. I was so scared of other people. I was so scared of other kids. I was bullied quite a bit in school, and I was terrified of the world. I was terrified to be seen. I was terrified of being a fat guy. I was terrified of being the gay guy, and not to be dramatic about that, but it wears you down and you get sick of having every move you make and every step you take feel like something that you have to choreograph and orchestrate in your mind before you do it so it comes out halfway normally. You get to a point, or at least I got to a point, where that’s not a way to live. It’s not conducive to happiness at all. I’ve always been a weirdo. I’ve always been a person who likes to express myself outwardly, and now that I’m working for myself, I can have a little bit more fun with that, which I’m very thankful for.
I’m just having fun with my life. I always tell people that my aesthetic is “I lost my wardrobe in a house fire or something tragic and a clown donated his wardrobe to me.” That’s me in a nutshell. Embrace who you are. It sounds cheesy, but I want to inspire other people to do that. None of us are getting out of here alive. Don’t take things so seriously.
This interview was edited and condensed for length and clarity.
