Odesa natives Victoria Gladchenko and Anna Bakhonko turned a shared love of food and design into Make my Cake Patisserie, starting with no experience, cooking at night and selling by day.
Victoria: I was born in May 1987 in my beloved Odesa. Food has meant a lot to me since childhood. My dad was an excellent cook, and my mother always liked to “invent” something delicious and surprise us.
I never had the usual childhood problems with “fried onions,” “fish,” “greens” and so on. I ate everything that was cooked deliciously. In our family, a meal always had meaning, and the food was varied and beautiful.
Anna: I was born in winter, on January 1, 1986, here in Odesa. I spent my childhood in a beautiful house with a large shady garden. My grandmother's goal was always “to feed Anna all the best and healthiest things,” and I carefully hid the meatballs from my soup, hoping not to be found out.
I loved my mom's cooking adventures much more: rose-shaped cookies topped with rose jam, a three-layer ice cream cake decorated with mulberries we had picked together on the way back from the beach, crunchy mini-toasts with colored herring butter. My mother always had an unusual, playful approach to cooking and eating.
Victoria: How did I come to my patisserie? It's all about the desire to give people a celebration, which has stayed with me since childhood. A celebration is a house full of guests and a beautifully set table with dishes that your friends and relatives always admire.
Then I began to learn and develop my taste. I realized that to be loved by Food, you don't need special training: you need to love food, understand it and feel it. Food and I had a love affair, although I realized it only later, after I had earned two degrees in completely different fields and worked for several years in a completely uninteresting industry.
While I was working, I started my own food blog and my cooking adventures, and the Internet and books became my teachers. Around the same time I met Anna, who had a passion for design and decor and who became my soulmate. Together we decided to run an event and catering business, and my husband helped us a lot.
Anna: My journey to the “kitchen” began in my school years. Once we had a drawing contest at school, and my mom suggested making a picture out of dough. We rolled out a sheet of pastry and made a whole story out of colored figures: a lake and reeds, a cloudy sky, ducks and a rosebush. Then we baked it all.
Of course, our picture was the most interesting one, and even though we told all my classmates that the dough was salty and not very tasty, a large part of the picture disappeared very quickly. That's how I got my passion for crafts and decor.
Some time later, I realized that food should be delicious as well as beautiful. When Victoria came into my life, I found a friend, a companion and a culinary teacher, and we realized we could have a great time working together as well as walking together. We complement each other perfectly in this: Victoria cooked gourmet, stunning appetizers, and I thought about the presentation, how to decorate them and how to complete every detail together.
Victoria: A few years later we decided to give up everything we had been doing before and try to open a patisserie that we would like to visit ourselves, as often as possible. We were afraid, because we had no experience, just a strong desire and aspiration. We cooked there at night and sold our sweets during the day.
Anna: We have been helping, teaching and inspiring each other toward more and more new cooking adventures for four years now.
Victoria: We do everything we do because we madly love it. When the final result strikes a chord in our guests' hearts, that is real success. That's how we live.
Anna: I love walks on rainy days, working on something new and inspiring shopping at the local market. My husband laughs at the way I choose and buy products by how photogenic they are: everything goes to Instagram first, and only then to the table. And, of course, as a decorator, I love flea markets. Finding something strange and old and using it in my work (and in life) is my passion!
Victoria: Work, friends, my husband Oleg and our French bulldog Auguste are my life and my hobbies at the same time. It's great when you don't have to wait for the end of the working day to do what you love. I love long walks, reading and writing my personal Instagram blog.
As for my food preferences, I love Mediterranean cuisine. In my opinion, it brings together the cuisines of many countries, all varied, all the best, fresh and seasonal. At work I make sweets, and at home I prefer meat or fish with lots of greens. I like to combine several textures and as many flavors as possible in one dish, and I really like a sweet note in savory dishes.
Anna: Mediterranean Cuisine was my first cookbook, and it was with its help that I started to cook. It may have laid the foundation for my taste preferences. Still, it's always hard for me to pick just one thing: I love light, healthy salads, juicy burgers and my grandmother's Odesa fritters of tyulka, the tiny Black Sea sprat.
Anna: What would I like to wish readers? Learn to enjoy simple things and pay attention to details, because everything is made of them. And let yourself be a kid again sometimes.
Victoria: It's very simple: love what you do, listen to the voice of your soul and don't waste time on empty things, whether it's uninteresting work, bright covers with no meaning or, above all, public opinion. Love, because life is so short!
