Kyiv pastry chef Aleksandr Kasian has baked since childhood and now supervises outlets in several Ukrainian cities. His specialty is festive cakes, the latest of them 1.25 meters high.
I’m 29, and I’ve been a cook since 2000, though it would be more accurate to say since childhood. When I was a child, our family somehow came into two sacks of flour. My mother doesn’t bake, so the flour sat untouched for a long time.
I was curious and started experimenting with it: I kneaded dough and tried to bake something. At first it didn’t work out well, but each time it got better and better. Then I started trading recipes with my mother’s friends.
At school, I “bought” my exam grades with cakes. I didn’t want to study; even then I knew it wasn’t for me. So I would bake a cake, bring it to the teacher and get a good mark.
I’ve been a baker since I was 12. After ninth grade I went to a technical school, and then I was recommended to Denis Komarenko at the restaurant “Surprise”, which was very prestigious at the time.
I ended up in the pastry shop by chance. My mentors there were Lebanese. It was very interesting and important practice, and I learned a lot there.
Nowadays I’m a “free artist”. I supervise several outlets in a number of Ukrainian cities, and I set up pastry production kitchens that are practical to work in.
There are very few pastry chefs on the market today. Everyone prefers to learn to work with meat and main courses, and baking cakes is considered less prestigious. But in fact it’s very interesting, and tasty, of course.
I like spicy Eastern cuisine, as well as French and Italian. I cook what I like and don’t stick to any particular cuisine. I like to experiment and use my imagination with different dishes and ingredients. My specialty is big dishes, festive cakes and complex constructions.
My latest cake was 1.25 meters high. I was afraid it wouldn’t survive our roads, but everything was fine, and the customers called to thank me.
My work is my hobby. At work I feel like a child: I have material from which I can build and create something. Perhaps, if I hadn’t become a pastry chef, I would have become a builder. I like construction work, working with cement and bricks.
I’m married, and I have a wonderful daughter who is now in second grade. She’s just like me: she doesn’t like to study.
This dish was interesting for me because I wondered how it would look in a photograph. I had been thinking about making it for a while but never had the chance.
