Nadia Parekh talks about applying both science and emotions to her baked creations
There is a science to baking cakes, and Nadia Parekh is trained for it. She graduated a decade ago from Le Cordon Bleu in London, with a Grand Diplôme in both cuisine and pastry, and while she enjoyed the former, she excelled in the latter. Having previously studied clinical psychology, she could easily adapt to the requirement for technical exactitude. “The grammage has to be correct, the formulas have to be x, y, z,” says Nadia.
But there is also an art at play in the process, and that gets closer to the essence of her work. “I’ve been baking since I was little, and it’s always been the way I expressed myself creatively.” It was this particular artistic impulse that inspired her to build a cake-making business in Dubai (where she was born and raised to Pakistani parents), and it is this heartfelt element that her customers respond to. This past Valentine’s Day, for example, Nadia designed a cake to be set on fire, which was not merely a striking concept for social media, but also a means of being constructive with her own emotional troubles.
“I feel the best ideas come from heartbreak,” she says. “When you’re in the worst places, mentally, and you can channel them into something productive, that’s where the magic happens. So I’m lighting my cake on fire, and that’s fun, but then people tell me they relate to that feeling, to the emotion that comes through even from an Instagram reel, from the colours and graphics, the storytelling…”
Most customers who actually try her cakes tend to come back for more. “That’s where the craving comes in. But the original connection comes from emotion.” Then there is the actual business end of baking, which Nadia has had to contend with to an ever-greater degree as her customer base keeps growing. When she started Melange some six years ago, it was mainly a catering operation, but she has also identified a gap in the market for American-style stacked and decorated cakes made with intricate French techniques and components – a particular niche that was not necessarily part of her training.
“I kind of married the two together, using the French ways of making sponges, fillings, mousses and buttercreams but assembling them in ways that aren’t very French at all, but more familiar to this market.” Working on commission, she’s as close as anyone to the cutting edge of the cake slice in terms of decorative fashions in baking.
Present trends include ribbons, bows and Japanese-influenced ikebana floral arrangements on cakes, as well as something called the Lambeth style, “a very old-fashioned British design that can look like a dainty Victorian cake, but you could also choose neon colours to pipe with and make it super-funky.” Seasonal fruits have also swung back into common usage, “stewed peach and things like that as cake fillings, which are not fun to work with because they’re not so stable and a pain to stack.”
Nadia is “self-taught” when it comes to design, her own tastes and preferences tending away from over-elaboration (“You won’t see figurines on my cakes,” she says), and towards a more abstract expression of a given theme. “I prefer using colours, patterns, textures to convey feelings. And I don’t use fondant so I rely a lot on sugar and chocolate, which I learned to work with at Le Cordon Bleu and over years in kitchens.” That’s where she’s happiest, too, but the success of her business means spending less and less time there.
“The entrepreneur thing is not something I love,” admits Nadia, “but if I want to grow the company, no one else is going to do it. So I try to make sure I have hours in the kitchen just for my sanity. Bespoke cake designs are something I should be doing myself anyway, and customers expect it, and if you took it away from me I would be very sad.”
If Nadia has proven anything through her art, it’s that there’s scope for sadness, too, as demonstrated by a watermelon cake she recently designed to raise money for charity in Gaza – the colours corresponding to the Palestinian flag. “That’s been a heartbreak over the last six months, it’s a cause I care about deeply. You feel helpless, so you think ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Well, I can make a cake. It’s something, I guess. The least I could do.”
At the other end of the scale, there is the joy that comes of helping others tell their stories though cake designs, “and being a part of happy occasions”. “Weddings, birthdays, baby showers, all those happy times in life. I love that, and that love is what keeps me doing it. I just want to go and do my work, and I believe the rest will follow.”
