Cream started during lockdown last year. Momofuku Seiobo closed, and my partner and I had originally planned to go away for a few weeks, but obviously that got cancelled. I didn’t do anything for two or three weeks and I was like, ‘Ok, I’m kind of done being on holidays, I need something to do’.
I put up a post on Instagram saying, ‘I’ve been baking a lot at home if anybody would like a box of stuff to eat, you’re more than welcome to donate whatever you think it’s worth’. I had another friend who was also bored during lockdown, and she asked, ‘What’s the name of your bakery? We should make stickers’.
We came up with the name Cream and she created the stickers. It kind of exploded from there. People started messaging me and I just kept going.
Twenty per cent of my clientele are my friends and people who know me from Momofuku Seiobo or Sokyo. But a large majority of them are random people who
have found me through some degree of separation on Instagram or through media.
It’s become a cool creative outlet for me because people have allowed me to design
the exterior of their cake however I want. My style is a little bit abstract; I’m mostly
inspired by art and fashion. I went to see the [Henri] Matisse exhibition when it first
opened, and three days later I made a cake that was heavily inspired by the exhibition.
The flavours I’m working with are stable; we have vanilla, raspberry, lemon curd, lemon myrtle and Davidson plum curd (that one’s really good). At the beginning, I had a large selection, but what I’ve found is that it’s easier to choose from a very small list. There are 10 different types of cakes and 10 fillings.
In terms of making people’s celebration cakes, inconsistency is something that can be really disappointing. If someone takes a cake to somebody’s house and that person wants to order a cake and it isn’t as good, it’s disappointing. When your customer has an expectation, you really want to meet that and make their whole experience good.
The thing I’ve taken away from working in fine dining is the importance of consistency. It’s really easy to do something once, but it’s challenging to do it a hundred times and be exactly the same.
