In today’s world, personalisation and customisation is the name of the game.
It can be through vehicles, bags, shoes, accessories and clothing. For Katrina Depeiza-Hall her affair with personalisation takes the form of making unforgettable occasions like birthdays even more special through her love for baking.
The St Lucy resident has had a fondness for baking from the first time she recalled as a child watching her mother slave over heat in their kitchen to bake a cake for her birthday. However, it has only been within the past four to five years that this affection began to flourish and this was fromalised with the establishment of Phenomenal Cakes and Pastries earlier this year.
Though customised cakes are nothing new, over the past several years Depeiza-Hall has been actively baking and crafting cakes to take cake designs to another level in Barbados.
Since registering her business in the past year, business has been booming, thanks to the rampant Internet Exposure. She designs anything from feet-high Hulk cakes to cars from the Disney movie of the same name. Her cakes are three dimensional and are often described as edible pieces of art so awesome you don’t want to eat them.
“I’ve designed cakes for people and they told me they just want to put it on a shelf and store it. I once baked a cake and designed it like a football with a pair of football boots. The guy actually ate the ball and kept the shoes in the fridge for weeks. So when I hear things like that, I know I am doing something good because I want to give them a different feeling about a cake,” Depeiza-Hall said, laughing as she recounted the event during a recent interview EASY.
When Depeiza-Hall graduated from the Coleridge & Parry School she decided she would work in the hotel industry. She joked that mainly because of its uniform, she enrolled at the Barbados Community College’s hospitality programme at the PomMarine Hotel.
“I realised that I liked the tourism sector and I wanted to get into it. I didn’t care which part of it so then when I got into the school I wanted to do a course that would touch every part of the sector. But when I got into the kitchen I liked the baking so much I decided to focus most on that.”
Obtaining an associate degree in hospitality studies she continued to further her studies by taking baking technology level 2 as well as an icing course.
Depeiza-Hall, who is employed full-time as a chef de partee, explained that while home one day surfing the Internet searching for new trends a light bulb went off in her mind to start her own business.
She knew she had the talent but it was just a matter of the wherewithal to get the idea off the ground.
The 29-year-old said that little by little she started to purchase tools, ingredients and whatever she would need for the business. But with no customers calling her telephone Depeiza-Hall remained resolute that she would see her goal to fruition.
“When I first started out I wasn’t doing any orders for anybody so I began to practise my craft by baking cakes for myself. I would design them, make sculptures, take pictures and post them on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. The pictures helped a lot but I still had to push the idea of [three- dimensional] cakes so people could understand that they can do so much more with cakes than making it flat and placing a picture on it,” she said.
Depeiza-Hall said the majority of her growing clientele are mostly made of persons who prefer 3-D cakes, though she stressed that she was also good at making traditional cakes.
Her inspiration comes from persons like Buddy Valastro from Cake Boss and other TV baking shows.
“People like uniqueness. They would send me a picture of what they want and I would add my own little twist to it and put a little of me into everything I do. It makes me feel really really good when people enjoy my cakes.
“To have a big adult feeling like they did when they were children and getting a cake for the first time is a huge accomplishment for me. Nowadays people are under all types of stress with work, family, money and so I love to see when they receive it and their faces appear so fussy. I think that is the most enjoyable part of my job,” she maintained.
Depeiza-Hall doesn’t have any children yet but her aim is to make the business a household name and leave a legacy for them when they do come. So her immediate goal is to expand her kitchen into a larger chef’s kitchen and complete a small business course which she started a couple years ago with the Youth Entrepreneurship Scheme but had to pause because of increase in business.
“I would like to one day resign from my job to work on my business full-time. kitchen. There aren’t a lot of bakeries in St Lucy, mainly bread shops so I want St Lucy for myself to grow and develop.
“I want to open a pickup spot possibly in a central location for persons from other parishes because some people may find it difficult to come down here.
“I love what I am doing and I truly hope there is a bright future for me. There were many times I iced cakes all night and had to go to work and be productive in an eight- hour shift. Many nights I had to do that and you does feel tired but in the end you have to want it to keep up and carry on. You can feel the fatigued in your feet and back but once you are really passionate about what you do, those things are for but a fleeting moment.”
