UPFRONT SWEET SUCCESS

As one wise cook says, you can’t bake a cake with an angry heart. These three diverse bakers create their confections with huge dollops of love for their craft, a sprinkling of ideas gathered on their travels, served with the desire to share

Life’s a piece of cake for these passionate bakers

Cake is the ultimate comfort food. A food we don’t eat except for pleasure or celebration. Cakes are about love – the love your grandma put into her sponge, the love your aunty put into your Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book cakes, the love your friend puts into one she makes when something in your life isn’t turning out the way you wish.

A treat that’s eaten rarely enough that when you tuck into one that’s dry, or tasteless, it’s a genuine disappointment.

Yet in the past few years, this iconic eat has been taking a back seat to some of its more fashionable and fancy friends in the cabinets of bakeries and cafes all over Australia. You’ll see doughnuts, pistachio macarons, hazelnut tartlettes and raspberry friands. Where are the multi-layered butter cakes with fresh cream and strawberries? The chocolate cake that leaves you feeling like you can’t eat for a week?

Beyond the ivy-league of Tasmania’s cake shops and patisseries, TasWeekend discovers some passionate cake makers in unlikely spots.

AMANDA CHEW, HOWRAH

“I’m completely self-taught, I don’t have any qualifications,” says Amanda Chew, who after a busy day at Kopitiam Singapore Cafe in central Hobart, takes over the kitchen to produce cakes that make for great Instagram pictures and even better eating. While she doesn’t have her own shopfront yet, those in the know order her treats through the cafe.

By day, the busy kitchen is feeding Tasmania’s hospital, office and retail crowd with delicious Singaporean food. By night, the family hands the kitchen over to Chew so she can make cakes inspired by her travels around Asia.

Chew was born in Singapore and moved to Hobart with her family when she was 15. By then she was already a keen baker. She’d loved being in the kitchen from a young age, learning from her mother how to make traditional egg tarts.

It was the absence of the cakes she loved in Hobart that fired up her passion to make them.

“Most of the cake shops and bakeries here have the classic flavours, but the texture is different to what we get in Asia. If you’re Asian you miss that taste and flavour. They’re less sweet and a lot softer and lighter,” Chew says.

Whenever Chew can, she travels to Asia, and in particular Utsunomiya in Japan for cakespiration.

She’s soon to open an Asian bread business, but for now is happy creating durian shortcakes, matcha swiss rolls and yuzo mousses with the most incredible edible decorations.

instagram.com/chewsbakehobart

TONI BURNETT-RANDS, KINGSTON

“You cannot bake good cake with an angry heart.”

When Toni Burnett-Rands moved to Australia from Las Vegas, after falling in love and marrying a Tasmanian, she couldn’t find the food that tasted like home to her.

She’d grown up in a family where generations of women took their cooking seriously.

She started baking cakes early, and was going solo in her cake making by the time she was eight.

“I am a GG (Gramma’s Girl) and both women, and my great grandmother were prolific hostesses, and I was the next in line to learn the skills, flavours and textures,” Burnett-Rands says.

She gained a following when she set up her mobile catering company Honey Child’s Creole Corner and started cooking the food of her culture, including pies, doughnuts and cakes from her home in Kingston.

“I think the secret to cake baking is respect. Respect the measurements, respect the ingredients, and respect the truth of your feelings. You cannot bake a good cake with an angry heart. You have to submit to joy and embrace the concept. Cake baking is for expressing love.”

Her turtle cake is a special gift to her new country. It’s an incredible rich, moist chocolate cake with surprises all the way through it – ganache, toasted pecans and burned sugar to thrill the tastebuds with every bite. “It was created out of my love for my birth country and all that I wanted Australia to understand about me and my food,” she says.

Burnett-Rands now takes her cakes right around the state, as she travels with her catering company to markets, festivals and pop-ups to share the food of the American South.

facebook.com/honeychildontheGO

WAYNE HAWKINS, CLAREMONT

“It’s all well and good to have a cake that looks fantastic. At the end of the day it has to please in the eating!” says Wayne Hawkins, who travelled around the world to bring his passion back to Claremont.

Cake-making has long been a job for Hawkins, who undertook a pastry apprenticeship in Hobart 25 years ago. He worked in bakeries and patisseries in Western Australia and across Europe, settling for a time in Austria and Romania.

When he and wife Laura returned to Australia, they began looking for a space for their European-style cakes and goodies. Claremont didn’t seem the obvious choice, but after seven years there, they’ve built up a dedicated clientele at Crisp n’ Sweet in Claremont Plaza.

“A pastry chef is all formula. So on the cake side, [with] the actual baking and making of the product you’re following formulas to the gram. I always say to a new apprentice: it can become mundane, because you learn how to make it once then you make it a thousand times. So you have to have the in-built passion to create,” Hawkins says.

“I get bored with things – so our cabinet is constantly in rotation of new things. That keeps me and our customers interested.”

Hawkins’s passion is for making something spectacular out of the everyday.

“One of the cakes I’m really proud of is the chocolate caramel bar. I love Mars Bars and was thinking, ‘Where can I go from here?’ So I came up with this gluten-free chocolate cake – it reminds me of a tripped-out version of a Mars Bar,” he says.

“When you bite into it you get that same feeling of the first time you eat one because it’s so lush. It’s only new, as it takes a lot of experimenting with flavours and textures to get it just right.”

facebook.com/CrispNSweet

The cakes: From top left, Amanda Chew’s sweet creations: matcha cake with taro swiss roll in the background; Kaya buns and strawberry and raspberry shortcake; and her Mr and Mrs wedding cake.