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Pinoy Abroad

Pinay cake artists hitting sweet spots in London


When best friends Valeri Valeriano and Christina Ong flew to London in 2008 to work as a nurse and a caregiver respectively, the idea of going into cake design, let alone starting a cake business, never crossed their minds. As Christina put it, they fell into it “by accident.” On Mother’s Day in 2011, they wanted to give a special surprise to two of their friends, whom they consider their surrogate moms in London. “Valerie stumbled on this Youtube video of a sunflower cupcake tutorial using buttercream and with no other tool except a zip lock bag. So she tried it at first. They loved it and one of them suggested, ‘hey, why not turn this into a business?’ So we did,” Christina recalled. They decided to focus on buttercream, despite the fact that it was the hardest to make. “Here in the Philippines, we grew up loving buttercream right? And also everyone else is doing fondants, so we thought it’s something we love and love to taste and we thought if we worked on it, explore it more, then we’d come up with something different,” Valeri explained. They both knew that working with buttercream would make them stand out, and hopefully help them break into the already massive cake industry in London. Like mothers, with their cake artistry as their baby, they experienced birthing pains. “It was really hard because when we were starting we literally had to send hundreds of e-mails to different schools, magazines and newspapers just to give us a chance to pitch in different fairs. Sadly, nobody replied to any of our emails,” Christina said. They got their break when a participant in a local school fair cancelled at a short notice – three days before the event. Christina and Valeri, who were starting their fledgling business called Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes that time, did not hesitate to take their place and in two days, they pulled off 200 cupcakes and 180 cake pops. Since then, the cake duo has joined one fair after another and soon enough, found themselves joining competitions. They have since won awards in the Cake International Show: a bronze medal in April last year as well as a bronze and silver medal in November last year. In January this year, they won two gold medals, one bronze medal and a certificate of merit in the world-class culinary competition Salon Culinaire, besting other cake artists from across the globe. Giving back The self-taught cake artists are now determined to give back by teaching other people about buttercream. They went back to the Philippines last January 25 to create couture cakes for Filipino clients, as well as conduct cake artistry master classes.  They held their classes last February 4 to 7 in Manila. “The turn-out was great. We had, like, 30 students per day,” Valeri said, clearly elated at the full house class. Asked why they named their cake business Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes, Valeri has this to answer: “Basically, dealing with butter cream is kind of frustrating at first. It’s very delicate, very soft, so you will definitely need a lot of patience. And if you don’t have passion, you will quit, you will throw it away. So it’s passion and love, so it’s like we are the queens of passion and love.” Due to go back to London next week, these buttercream queens are set to give their all to the cake business, which, for them, is definitely more fun than their previous professions. “It’s different eh. We get to be creative. We really are having so much fun. It must be fate talaga,” Valerie said. They are putting up their own cake studio this coming May in London and are set to travel in Europe and Asia to conduct classes. - VVP, GMA News

Tags: london, baking
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