Sep 22, 2016 | By Nick
A newly qualified architect turned her back on the construction industry to spend her days building ornate cakes with the help of a 3D printer.
Dinara Kasko was determined to be an architect and design landmark buildings, so she attended Kharkov University Architecture School in her home country. But, as soon as she started working in the industry, she just knew it wasn’t for her. So the 27-year-old Ukrainian looked for a way to apply her skills to another arena.
She worked as a designer, a photographer and then a 3D visualizer. She started baking in the background, as a hobby, before realizing that it was the thread that tied all of her ambitions and skills together.
"I liked what I was doing as an architect well enough, but I'm just much more interested in patisserie," she explained to So Good Magazine. "It just feels more like me." And just like in architecture, pastry making allows Kasko to explore a wide range of influences. "I get to use ideas from modern architecture, art, nature, and more.
“I’m trying to connect architecture, design, and patisserie. A beautiful cake as well as a beautiful building, needs preliminary design. Patisserie is not a job, it’s just my hobby. Many of my creations are concepts; their implementation takes a lot of time and numerous attempts. I have many unrealized ideas and a great desire to experiment. I don’t want to imitate others; I want to create something new.”
She firmly believes that the design of a cake has a major influence on the taste and the experience. So when it comes to a new creation, she doesn’t start with the ingredients. She starts with Autodesk 3DSMax.
Kasko often starts with a complex mathematical theory, like the Voronoi diagram, a particular component of a landmark building or even cues from the natural world like biomimicry. She then goes to work on the computer and plays with the shape until it’s a visually stunning work of art.
From there it’s a relatively simply case of 3D printing it in food-safe silicon to form the mold. When she has the concept in her hands and can visualize her cake, then she gets to work on the ingredients and colors that do justice to that first flash of inspiration.
So far, Kasko’s biggest clients are her friends and she also has 180,000 Instagram followers that love her clean cut designs and unusual shapes. It's a spectacular account and showcases Kasko's impressive food photography skills, as well as her unique baking skills. She hasn’t turned professional just yet, but she is taking classes with the world’s elite chefs and the next step is to open her own shop. Kasko says she might eventually like to open a pastry school, teaching some of her patisserie techniques.
Her distinctive shapes have also attracted the attention of the mass market and Silikomart is putting the Bubbles mold into production. The Bubbles mold will be available for sale in September. This could be a lucrative sideline for Kasko, but she is determined to focus on driving forward, innovation and pushing the limits of cake design.
She wants to use far more architectural influences in her work and she’s set her sights on building a cake that looks like the Sunwell Muse, a new building in Tokyo.
There are limits to what she can do with the visual side of a cake, of course, and Kasko is the first to admit that she cannot sacrifice the taste and structure in the name of pure aesthetics. In that sense, the world of patisserie is lagging behind the rest of the world.
“Today, with the help of 3D modeling, you can create any shape, the imagination is endless,” she said. “New building materials and technologies make it possible to create almost any idea in a building process. But in patisserie, first of all, we are limited by material properties. Moreover, the main factor is that the product must be edible and tasty.”
Without the 3D printer, Kasko’s approach to cake design simply wouldn’t be possible. Making each mold traditionally would make each cake so expensive that it just could not happen.
We can argue that these aren’t just cakes, they are grand designs that should be celebrated by her massive Instagram following and the world at large. But without the scientific brilliance of Autodesk 3DSMax and the 3D printer, they would never have happened at all.
All images credit: Dinara Kasko
Posted in 3D Printing Application
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This is stupid. Just make normal cakes.
John Dee wrote at 9/23/2016 2:08:26 AM:
Amazing
I.AM.Magic wrote at 9/22/2016 10:46:13 AM:
drooling...so hungry now
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