Sweet Business

Everything started two years ago with a cake which I baked for one of my groupmates' birthdays. I made that cake in a multicooker. The cake had a really strange shape and looked like melted jelly, but everyone who tasted it liked it! After that, my friends started asking me to bake something for their friends and family.

I've always loved cooking various baked goods for my family and for myself. However, I never used to think I would produce them in such big batches, I would have so many orders and I would make money making cakes! And I got hooked and one day I realized I was dreaming about creating desserts as famous pastry chefs do! I wanted to make not only delicious food, but also beautiful. They should bring people both gourmet pleasure and aesthetic delight. Desserts should excite and tickle people. The very way a dessert looks should fill the person with a feeling of anticipation and make them unable to cope with the temptation to try.

Luckily, we live in a surprising age when any information is available, so it wasn’t a problem to find materials on different recipes and techniques. There are lots of them on the Internet. I think I’ve watched thousands of professional videos and read about the same number of articles written by amazing pastry chefs. So I can admit I’m self-taught. Step by step, or it’s better to say cake by cake, I’m becoming more professional and my skills are becoming more advanced. Every cake is like an experiment for me.

Studying at the Faculty of Food Biotechnology at ITMO University helps me a lot in my small business as my major is the technology of bread and confectionery. Studies help me better understand what I am doing in terms of all the chemical and physical processes. In addition, we have lots of practical classes and sometimes these classes are conducted not only by university teachers, but also by specialists working for various food producing companies, for instance Puratos or Russian Bakels. They have great experience and I'm glad they share their knowledge and skills with us! At one such workshop we learned how to work with chocolate, temper it and make chocolate Bon bons. These workshops are extremely interesting and useful because I can talk to the masters of the art of making sweets and ask those questions answers to which I couldn't find on the internet.

I love trying new flavours and decoration techniques, and I am really happy when my friends ask me to create something unusual! They play along with my crazy experiments, though they just have no choice.

Sometimes, orders look like: "Please,could you make something WOW? I don't know what, but it must be something WOW and taste like a kinder surprise".

Or like:" In the age of the Soviet Union there was a cake…I need a taste from my childhood."

Oh, my God! I was born 10 years after the USSR's breakup! But as I've mentioned before you can find much on the Internet and luckily during the Soviet period State All-Union Standard also existed for manufactured food products, so there is a database with Soviet recipes. With my present experience I can say that only you are the person who is responsible for your dreams to come true!

You can find even more funny stories and cakes on my instagram account, or if you want something sweet and unusual, please write to me!