The way I would approach this is to subclass UICollectionViewCell
and add the UI components you need to it as iVars. When you need to update the UI with new data you would grab the cell object like you are now in the pseudo code and then call a method you declare, could be updateCellWithModel:
and pass it the model that is held in the datasource. In this method you would do some simple checks for if the UI elements are created or not and create them if needed, its always a good idea to have sanity checks in these types of methods but the elements should be created in the init method and will always be there.
EDIT: I believe I answered your question but it still confuses me, please add more info so I can edit my answer if needed.