Creating Cakes
Long before I made elaborate mousse cakes for customers, I was a 14 year old girl in a small Slovak village, baking a simple cake for my family every Sunday. At the time I thought Malatina, in the Orava region, was the end of the world and I couldn’t wait to leave. Yet looking back, I can see the village gave me more than I understood then: a love of baking, a respect for hard work and the quiet beginnings of a passion that would return to me decades later.
When I go back today I see the beauty of the landscape, the simplicity of village life and the environment that shaped me. I appreciate that little village much more now than I ever did as a child. Perhaps that’s what happens with age. We spend our younger years hoping to go somewhere else, convinced that happiness is waiting for us over the horizon, only to discover later that the things that shaped us most were right there all along.
Working for what you want
I am the oldest of a big family of five girls and my parents were farmers. We had cows, sheep and pigs in our fields and plenty of work to do, so helping my parents was simply part of family life. During the school holidays, while other children might go on holiday, we usually worked on the farm. I didn’t consider it anything special, it was simply our family way of life. Looking back, I realise it instilled something very valuable in me. It taught me to work for what I wanted and not to give up if life was difficult. We learnt to contribute, take responsibility and persevere. Those principles have remained with me throughout my life.
Some of my happiest childhood memories were created after the work was finished. In Malatina there were places where young people would meet. We’d gather together, talk, play volleyball or basketball and listen to popular Slovak music and American rock music on cassette players. We didn’t have the technology that young people have today but we had each other and those evenings were wonderful.
I began baking cakes when I was about 14. At that time I wasn’t intent on starting a business, that thought never occurred to me. I simply loved the process of baking. Every Sunday, I’d make a cake for my parents and sisters, which was quite a tall order. I’d bake a cake in the morning and by the evening it had usually disappeared which was a good sign.
My mother was a very good baker too. She made wonderful pastries, specialising in items baked with yeast like doughnuts and other traditional treats. All the women in my family were good cooks and bakers so perhaps I inherited my skills from them. I enjoyed the magic of taking ordinary ingredients and turning them into something beautiful and delicious. But I had no idea that this small Sunday ritual would eventually become one of the most important parts of my life.
After finishing at the village school, I went on to grammar school in the next town. When I was 19 I went to university in Nitra in Southern Slovakia where I studied agriculture. Considering my business venture now, it probably sounds a strange choice but with my farming background studying agriculture made perfect sense. Unfortunately I didn’t complete the course. Life took me in another direction. After university I got married and with my husband developed a large business in Slovakia and surrounding countries including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, which was a 24 hour self service VHS and DVD rental business. Unfortunately the rapid growth of the internet and online entertainment led to its decline and closure and thereafter we divorced. I wanted to move on and start another chapter in my life so I decided to move to England where I met my current partner Richard.
It was then that I started thinking about baking and making cakes again but it was COVID that really changed everything. During that strange period, when the world seemed to stop, I discovered beautiful French-style patisserie and mousse cakes online. I remember looking at these extraordinary creations and wondering how someone could make them. The shapes, colours, mirror glazes, tiny details and incredible precision fascinated me. They didn’t look like ordinary cakes, they looked like artistic sculptures. I wanted to understand how they were made but there was one problem: professional training courses were extremely expensive. There were courses in London costing thousands of pounds and I simply couldn’t afford that kind of money. So I searched elsewhere and discovered various online courses and one by one I learnt about mousse cakes, tarts, chocolate and sponge cakes.
That experience became part of the excitement of COVID for me. While there was so many frightening events happening everywhere, I had something completely different to concentrate on. I didn’t want to spend my time watching television and thinking about the effects of the pandemic, I wanted to learn to make these special kind of cakes.
I had no outlet for my first cakes, it was a cake-making hobby really. Richard supported me financially with the cost of the courses and the ingredients, which weren’t cheap. These were not ordinary sponge cakes. They required professional chocolate and specialist ingredients which were expensive and it wasn’t possible to substitute with whatever happened to be in the larder. I learnt the techniques and then started making the cakes.
There was just one minor issue: I had no customers. I was new to the Rudgwick area when we moved there in 2021 and I was a foreigner. Very few people knew me. I had some friends, but not enough to establish a business. Richard was my first customer, my first official taster and probably my most enthusiastic supporter. He loved my cakes. He would come home and ask, “Do we have something in the fridge?” He was excited because I was excited. He saw how much happiness the cakes were giving me and encouraged me to keep going. That support mattered enormously. When you start something from nothing, it’s very easy to wonder whether you’re wasting your time. Having someone who believes in what you are doing makes all the difference.
Learning to make the cakes was only half the challenge, I also had to learn how to find customers and sell myself. I’d barely used social media before. I had a Facebook account, but wasn’t particularly interested in using it. Suddenly I had to get to grips with Instagram, Facebook, photography, websites, branding and everything else that comes with running a small business.
Fortunately my youngest sister Zuzana lives in England and works as an interior designer. She had great ideas and was familiar with using social media and helped me set everything up. We created the name ‘Love My Cakes’ and eventually the business came together with that identity. I also developed a website with the help of my daughter Maria.
Right from the beginning I wanted to present myself to people as ‘the real me’. My sister took my first photographs and suggested I should style my hair or put makeup on but I refused. From the outset I wanted people to know me as I am. If someone saw my photograph online and then came to collect a cake, I wanted them to recognise me immediately.
One day in a local shop a woman exclaimed, “Maria!” I looked completely surprised because I didn’t know who she was. She went on, “You’re the cake maker!” She recognised me from Facebook and I loved that immediate response.
“The final appearance is where I really focus my art and is the part I love.”
The more I learned, the more I realised that this was not simply about baking, it was about creating. A cake starts as ingredients: chocolate, cream, fruit, eggs, sugar and other items that individually don’t look particularly extraordinary until I begin my work. I have recipes I’ve developed and perfected. Customers choose flavours from those recipes. But the decoration and the final appearance is where I really focus my art and is the part I love. When painting a picture, an artist can change a line or paint over something they’re not sure about. With my cakes, there’s only one chance to get it right, one touch, one movement. If there’s a mistake at the wrong moment, I may have to start again which can be incredibly annoying.
I remember one day a customer had ordered a cake for his daughter’s 30th birthday and arrived to collect it as I was finishing. I’d been experimenting with a new technique using wafer paper and was very pleased with the result. I was taking photographs from all different angles. The customer was ready to leave with the cake but I wasn’t ready to let it go. I stood around the cake, taking photographs and admiring it. He smiled at me and said “You can’t say goodbye to this cake, can you.” He could see how much I loved it and he was right. Eventually I let him take it away to his daughter who was absolutely delighted.
I’ve never made exactly the same cake twice which is an important factor to me. I may make the same flavour, but the design will change. A customer might give me an idea, a colour, an occasion or a theme and then offers me freedom to translate that. Sometimes the customer knows exactly what they want, often they don’t. I love those customers because that’s when I can really be creative!
My cakes can be quite abstract. They may not look as someone would imagine a birthday cake should look. But so far, nobody has been disappointed. Sometimes I think if I showed somebody a picture beforehand they might say no. But when they give me the freedom to be creative they’re always delighted. That’s the difference between simply making a cake and creating a bespoke cake. The customer is not only buying ingredients, they’re buying an original idea.
Of course, creativity isn’t always glamorous. There was one day when I was working with chocolate. Chocolate tempering requires precision. The temperature has to be right and if it goes wrong it can ruin the whole process.
“Creativity is a process.”
I normally try to keep everything clean but chocolate has a way of going everywhere. There was one occasion I was working on chocolate decorations while still learning the craft. I didn’t notice how far the chocolate and my handprints had spread around. Then the doorbell rang…! Friends had decided to call in unexpectedly. Thankfully, I’d finished the vital part of the process so I was able to answer the door. As they walked into the kitchen they saw the mess and were aghast. I was so embarrassed as this was early in the learning process for me. “This isn’t what I wanted you to see,” I told them and they laughed and understood. The beautiful photographs on social media show the finished product but not the chocolate on the worktop, the failed attempts, the hours of concentration or the moments when you wonder whether something is going to work. Creativity is a process.
Customers enquire about the cost of my cakes as price matters. I have a basic price for a ten-portion cake, around 18cm in diameter. From there, the price increases depending on the decoration and amount of work involved. I also make a wide selection of individual mousse cakes and tarts aside from the large celebration cakes.
Pricing creative work is difficult: ingredients have become more expensive, particularly chocolate. Costs have risen enormously and there’s a pressure to charge more. But in the rural area where I run my business people don’t always want to pay the price that bespoke patisserie deserves. In a big city there’s a larger market for this kind of cake and customers are willing to try something unusual and pay the price for it.
If someone wanted to start out in this business I would probably tell them not to! Not because I don’t enjoy it, as I most certainly do, but it is hard work and expensive. It requires patience, precision and constant learning. Handling customers, completing orders in a time frame and price. Sourcing ingredients, updating social media and other things that have nothing to do with actually creating a cake.
“I still get goosebumps, every single time.”
I never set out to build a cake business, I didn’t have a grand business plan. I didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a pastry chef. I was a girl from a small Slovak village who liked making a cake for her family on Sundays. But decades later, during one of the strangest periods in modern history, I saw photographs of extraordinary cakes online and thought, “I want to know how they do that.”
That drove me to do many things. I took up training courses, got to grips with social media and photography and how to sell products. I learned new techniques and most importantly that creativity doesn’t have an age limit. You can discover something aged 14, forget about it for years and one day experience it all over again!
Passion doesn’t always occur as a lightning bolt. Sometimes it grows quietly. I’m still in awe when I finish a cake. Every cake design is different: a chance to experiment and surprise someone. The hardest part is giving it away, but seeing a customer’s delight is what drives me.
If there is something you’ve always wanted to try, let curiosity spur you on. You don’t need all the answers or to know where it will lead. Sometimes it starts with a hobby which develops into the one thing that makes you feel most alive. For me, it’s creating cakes. After six years, I still get goosebumps, every single time!
Contact Maria Kovalikova at Love My Cakes on 07493 395714, by email at [email protected], or at lovemycakes.co.uk.
This article first appeared in the October 2026 issue of Cranleigh Magazine. Pick up your free copy around the village, or read more at cranleighmagazine.co.uk.
