For Steffi Keusch Hart, baking is a piece of cake (or more like a piece of torta)

Update: After winning four episodes, Steffi took the Silver in Bake Off Italia today.

Update: Steffi won Star Baker and moved onto the final episode Friday. She and the remaining two contestants will face off in the finale next Friday, Nov. 21.

To win this episode, Steffi stuffed a profiterole (or cream puff) with cheesecake and then drew upon her German background to bake a Black Forest cake. “Yeah, I stuffed a cake in a cake again,” Steffi said.[hr]

Original story:

Steffi (Keusch) Hart’s daughter Olivia is five years old.

And, that’s about how long Steffi’s been baking. Truly baking; not Betty Crocker box mix baking.

“The first cake I ever made from scratch was for Olivia’s first birthday,” Steffi says. “I wanted to make her a big cake and wanted to have a big party so I got a recipe and made the most gigantic, behemoth, ugly cake that you can imagine. But it was made from scratch and it had a fresh chocolate mousse in it. It was the ugliest thing I have ever done and it fed about 40 people.”

But she continued baking and got better; conquering new recipes and different pastries. Her persistence and passion even took her to Paris — a 40 minute flight from where she lives in Italy — to learn how to make macarons — an especially problematic pastry for Steffi that until she attended pastry school in Paris, was unconquerable. “I couldn’t ever get them to turn out, they failed every single time,” she explains. “After the class, they turned out perfectly. That is when I kinda thought I could have a knack for this.”

Macarons are what eventually landed her on Bake Off Italia, a nationally televised baking contest modeled after a wildly popular British baking contest, The Great British Bake Off.

Yes, a 1997 graduate of Jasper High School is on a nationally televised baking contest in Italy. Plus, she is in the semifinals with only two shows left in the season.

Hard to believe, but by dint of her talent, a Jasper, Indiana native could win a national baking contest in Italy next Friday.

Actually, Steffi and the 15 other contestants completed filming over the summer and she knows the results. But, she’s not talking.

“It’s been really, really difficult to keep it a secret,” Steffi explains. “Every single mother, father, teacher, butcher, people in the supermarket is like ‘so, you can just tell me’ and I am like, ‘no, actually I just can’t tell you.’ But, we’re almost there!”

The 12 episode season finale is Friday, November 21.

Each episode pits the contestants against each other in two baking challenges; one creative and the other technical.

For the creative challenge, the judges give the contestants an item — like a bagel — to make. They are then judged on how creative the final production turns out.

The second half of each episode is spent on the technical challenge. Contestants are given a recipe that’s missing a few things and they must create the baked goody the recipe calls for. “Sometimes you don’t know what the cake looks like,” Steffi says. “You may not have any idea what you are making.”

Judging of the technical challenge is blind to prevent any bias by the two judges. They try the item and then score it. The contestants are then eliminated by their performance on the creative challenge and the score assigned on the technical challenge.

For the former Miss USA contestant — she represented Indiana in 2004 — the competition was acute. “It was probably one of the most intense things I have ever done. Miss USA was so much easier, I would rather have had a swimsuit and heels on,” Steffi says about her time on the show. “You work so hard. It was disheartening at times to come down to the final 35 seconds and seeing your creation that may be a disaster at this point. You want to cry but then you realize you’re crying about cake.”

La finale è a un morso dai concorrenti! Chi riuscirà ad accedervi? #BakeOffItalia, domani sera alle 21:10, canale 31! pic.twitter.com/d5gwlOKyPT

— Real Time (@realtimetvit) November 13, 2014

She also credits her success so far on her years in Dubois County 4-H. “I did 10 years of 4-H, as you do in Dubois County,” Steffi remarks. “I loved absolutely every one of the 10 years I was in 4-H.”

Besides 4-H, Steffi explained that her mother, Brenda Keusch, and her grandmother, Martha Neukam, are also great cooks who imparted some knowledge of the basics of cooking. Her grandmother began her introduction to baking. “Third or fourth year in 4-H you have to bake yeast breads, so every single one of us got sent to grandma’s for the day to do yeast breads,” she recalls.

That experience has shown up in some of the creative recipes on the show. In fact, Dinky’s local fame may have been spread internationally due to Steffi. “We had to make a torta saint honoré, a classic French cake with chiboust cream and cream puffs. I reinvented it by sticking an angel food cake into it,” Steffi said. “They [judges] were like ‘well, you’ve just stuffed an angel food cake into the middle of it’ and I was like ‘well, yeah I am an American and that’s what we do. We take a cake and stuff another cake inside of it.’”

Each episode has an overall winner and the winner is designated the Star Baker for that episode. Steffi has won the designation three times, — a record for the show — and the first time she won it was because she stuffed a Dinky’s style angel food cake into a torta saint honoré.

But the contest hasn’t been easy. Steffi’s biggest disaster and one of the most entertaining episodes actually involved an American recipe. “It was a rainbow cake. An American cake,” she exclaims about the six-layered multicolored monstrosity. “But, with 13 people baking six cakes each in only two hours, it was like the impossible episode. Everyone messed up.”

The bottom layer of Steffi’s rainbow cake collapsed as she was applying the icing. “I was like, ‘pbbtttttt, well there you go,’” she says.

There are two judges, Ernst Knam and Clelia D’Onofrio. Knam owns a famous chocolate shop in Milan and has a show called The King of Chocolate. According to Steffi, he was the Simon Cowell — the infamously abrasive American Idol judge — of the competition with his brutally honest opinions of the recipes. “It can be very heartbreaking,” she reports. “It’s like he’s judging your child. They’ll just say ‘I don’t like it.’ I am like, ‘but my husband likes it.’”

O’nofria is a well-known food writer and editor whose judging is concentrated on the overall presentation of the different creations.

Watching the finished episodes has been enlightening for Steffi. She was in the front row during filming and had no idea about some of the things that were going on behind her. It was easy for her to zone it all out though since Italian is not her first language. So, as she has been watching the broadcast episodes, she is surprised of the antics that occurred. “There was an episode where someone accidentally stole someone’s cream,” she says. “And, it was this big thing. I had no idea.”

Italy’s reaction to an American in the top four has been mixed to say the least. Nationally, the regions seem to support their own contestants but Steffi and Henry live in Veneto with their two children, the aforementioned Olivia and two-year-old Isabelle. Her continued progress through the season has garnered her some support from the community.

After winning the Star Baker designation for the November 7 episode for her version of bruti ma buoni (translated as ugly but good), a traditional Italian cookie, Steffi advanced to the semifinals and gained a lot of fans. “All of a sudden people began writing messages asking for recipes for brownies,” she explained. “They are interested in American things. They want to give it a go but don’t know how.”

She moved to Italy with Henry, who she met by chance in Indianapolis while she was bartending: “The classic story that I was bartending at Broad Ripple and he walked into the bar,” she explains.

He had a home in Italy and after the pair were married she moved there with him about eight years ago. He is English and Steffi’s drawn out Midwestern syllables have been somewhat replaced with his clipped British accent.

The small town in which they live is about an hour northwest of the Adriatic Sea where the mountains meet the plains leading to Venice. There, Steffi bakes a lot and handles the rigors of life in Italy, where nothing is easy and surprises happen daily. She has a degree in language-speech pathology from Indiana State and she provides private English lessons several evenings a week.

They come home to Jasper about once a year. Besides her family, Steffi misses the American and distinctly Jasper cultures. “I really miss the Strassenfest,” she shares. “I really miss the community coming together at sporting events. Because, that’s what we do. Rallying around the high school doesn’t happen here. That sense of community is a really American thing.”

Through the contest though, Steffi, the once quiet American who stayed in the apartment for two months when she first arrived in Veleto, has begun to experience the warmth that Italy has to offer. As she has progressed, townspeople have really reached out to her and she feels much closer to the residents in her small town.

Steffi has even become a bit of a celebrity or baking expert. She is regularly stopped at her daughter’s school and in the supermarket. “I am just now really experiencing the warmth the community has,” she explains. “I am now the VIP in the supermarket. I had a lady come up to me the other day asking how to make chocolate curls. So, I am standing in the supermarket with my kids explaining how to make chocolate curls.”

In about a week, a Jasper-native could be the next winner of an Italian baking contest. The grand prize is a publishing contract for a book of Steffi’s recipes.

Well, that and the fact a Hoosier (and a Sycamore) won a national baking contest in Italy.

“I guess some people would be content joining a coffee club” Steffi said. “I’m not. I like cakes and I like competing.”

We will update this story after we hear how Steffi does later today.