Haute Couture Wedding Cakes
Revital Melech takes pride in the fact she can turn almost any item into an edible masterpiece. Whether it’s an culinary Canon SLR for a photography buff or a tasty Tiffany’s gift box, bespoke cakes are her specialty, and couples around Shanghai are turning to her to personalize their wedding displays.
Unlike many proprietors of the culinary cottage industries around town, Melech has formal training in her field – a Bachelor’s degree in Culinary Arts from the Culinary Institute of America and a decade of experience working as a pastry chef in New York restaurants, including the two Michelin star Picholine. “It’s not my hobby, it’s my profession,” she says.
Melech came to Shanghai with her husband and took some time off to study Chinese at a local university, but she wasn’t happy with the tai tai way of life and decided to get back into the cake-making business. After working 60 hour weeks in the Big Apple, she opted out of rejoining the restaurant world in Shanghai and decided to open a studio for custom-made cakes, a niche product that remains quite unique in Shanghai.
She asks that customers submit their order at least two weeks in advance so she can work with them to come up with a concept, discuss the design and do tastings before she starts baking.
“Technically making the cake is actually the fastest part. It’s the decorations that take the longest. Flowers need time to dry, then you need to dye them and handbrush them with colours to make them look as close to the real thing as possible.”
Her most time intensive cake so far took about a week and a half, as she had to hand make 400 flowers that cascaded down the multi-layered cake and spilled across the table.
While that particular design was for a Western wedding, most of her clients are Chinese, and often the cultural gaps prove to be interesting. To please the local palate, Melech can incorporate ingredients like green tea and red bean paste into her creations. Once, she even made a girly, pink cake topped with a mongoose, and this past Mid-Autumn Festival, she put her own spin on mooncakes.
“I am really a vessel to help my customers make their dreams come true. What I like is not necessarily what they like, so I just try to make something to please them. Some people are happy with chocolate and chocolate, and I respect that,” she says.
To make sure she gets the flavours just right, Melech tests all of her cakes on her husband’s employees. “They’re very honest about telling me if it’s too sweet or not sweet enough, or if they like the flavour,” she says. The experiment has proven successful, as many locals who initially doubt her ability to make a cake that caters to the Chinese palate are “happily surprised” when they come in to do a tasting.
Over the past two years, Melech has discovered that satisfying the customers’ desires isn’t the hardest part of her job; it’s the weather.
“It’s challenging to transport a cake in the summer humidity in Shanghai. The fondant on the outside of the cake is sugar,” she explains. “It’s hydroscopic so it absorbs humidity by its nature, and you don’t want the entire piece to melt before it arrives at its destination.”
To find a solution, Melech consulted with several chef friends from Mississippi and Philippines. Now, she keeps the cake indoors as much as possible in the air conditioning and then wraps the boxes so if it does “sweat”, it sweats on the box. She experimented with several trial runs before she delivered her first cake in Shanghai’s sweltering summer heat.
Melech has also discovered that making your way through Shanghai’s traffic is no easy feat either. “I trained a driver to not put on the brakes too fast and to drive gently, but explaining this to a cab driver...” she trails off, remembering the near debacles of the past. “Well, it is, after all, a cake. It’s fragile.”
Revital’s Studio Cake Boutique. Tel: 186 2103 4318. Web: www.revitalsstudio.com
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