Siljanovic, Pisanelli, Day, Tania: sweet life for pastry chefs
Here are four inspiring pastry chefs to watch out for across the country.
Start naming some of Australia’s well-known pastry chefs and you’ll quickly end up with a list taller than an Adriano Zumbo croquembouche.
So in the interests of brevity, and because four is a great number, here are four pastry chefs to watch out for across the country.
In Sydney, Nina Siljanovic, aka the Nutty Baker, can be found in her shop in Vaucluse, or online.
She’s nutty because she gave up a successful career in investment banking by day and baking by night for fun, to take up baking as a full-time job. Siljanovic also uses a lot of nuts, despite people warning her when she started that everyone had a nut allergy. “Now nuts are a superfood,” she says.
Siljanovic opened her physical shop last November; the fresh baking smells wafting out the door are advertisement enough.
“I think because I’m in there all the time I’m immune to the smell, but I see people walk past and then double back,” she says.
Her range covers cakes, tarts, brownies and amaretti. “What’s been interesting is none of my stuff is vegan or sugar-free. I’m just doing good old-fashioned baking,” she says.
Jonny Pisanelli set up shop last year at Abbots and Kinney in Adelaide’s CBD, selling French and Italian pastries. The Italian range is inspired by his heritage, the French by his education. One of his favourites is a simple butter croissant; The Australian’s restaurant critic John Lethlean rates them as some of the best croissants he has had.
Pisanelli says he enjoys baking just a few metres from the customers. “We get to see the reaction on people’s faces as they experience something that’s fresh and hot out of the oven,” he says.
Other bestsellers are sfogliatelle, sugar daddy (Pisanelli’s version of a kouign-amann, a French pastry from Brittany) and a doughy, a cross between a bombolone and a doughnut.
Melanie Day learned to bake with her mother, a member of the Queensland Country Women’s Association. Now, as pastry chef at the Pullman hotel in Cairns, she still makes some of her childhood favourites such as rocky road, but with a grown-up twist.
Her latest high-tea menu is called Childhood Sugar Rush and contains versions of a licorice allsorts and redskin pannacotta. She makes jams for the high-tea scones from scratch, too, usually from local and seasonal fruits.
Day says she was always creative with desserts.
“I feel like that’s the easy part for me; it’s easy to create these weird and wacky things, but actually executing them is the tricky part,” she says.
As a student in France of some of the best in the business, including Alain Ducasse, Christy Tania learned to master choux pastry, ice cream, macarons and mousse. In that order: until she had mastered choux pastry, she didn’t progress to ice cream.
Now, as executive pastry chef at The Langham, Melbourne, Tania says she’s still learning from her experience, including stints at the Ritz in Paris and Guy Savoy in Singapore — and not forgetting her time on MasterChef judging the contestants’ re-creation of her impossibly complicated Mistique dessert.
“You have to try everything, you have to try new textures, new flavours, new ingredients,” she says. “And when you are (doing that) things just come and then you combine that with your story, your personal background. If you enjoy your job, it’s never difficult.”