Let Vege Mamma eat cake

How she cut through a saturated field like this one is anyone’s guess. However, Fodor credits her entrepreneurial spirit as the instigating factor. “I love engaging with my community and taking them on unexpected journeys through my edible creations. Taking risks is at the heart of what I do.” She experiments with new flavours (her current favourite pairing is dark chocolate with sour berries), techniques and designs to craft a visual story. And of course, the cakes taste damn good too.

Currently, Fodor is also drawn to the contrast of sweet things with cheese. “ For the past few weeks, I haven’t missed a day without enjoying a slice of sourdough topped with homemade jam and Swiss cheese, a perfect balance of creamy, rich, and tart flavours.” The cake artist is always mulling on the flavour on her mind, and finding ways to integrate that into her avenue of work. It’s how she’s able to reinvent the wheel, time and time again. See: Cornbread paired with vanilla bean ice cream. Flourless chocolate cake served on a bed of torched tahini. Strawberry sundaes whipped by hand — a hangover from the hazy summer days of her childhood, ingeniously integrated as a collaboration with Giorgio Armani’s Si Passione Red Musk. Fodor’s ability to employ marketing whiz and artistry is how she has retained and grown her cult following.

Outside of the culinary, Fodor’s cakes are widely beloved by the fashion world. With freshly minted press (and cakes) in the likes of Vogue, Gourmet Traveller, Harper’s Bazaar and Broadsheet, testaments are flung wide and far. Her favourite mag collaboration to date was a selection of little cakes she created for Elle Magazine’s re-launch.

It’s not all flowers and ribbons, though. Fodor wields an impressive inner catalogue of cinema, literature and travel that she sieves inspiration from. She’s fond of French Cinema, including Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue. “Its blend of eroticism and psychological depth, paired with its beautiful pastel palette. resonates with me.” David Lynch’s filmography, and the creative works of Yayoi Kusama, Louis Bourgeois and Salvador Dalí also inspire Fodor’s process.

She also has to step away from her usual routine. Fodor embarks on a yearly, month-long solo vacation to immerse herself in a new environment. She visits local bakeries, samples seasonal produce, and trawls through old baking shows to see how others approach their craft. This year, she’s also committed to scaling it back in order to regroup and focus. After eras of taking on every project that came her way, Fodor wants Vege Mamma to be split more evenly across recipe development and creation.

Respecting the order of things at both ends has become a priority of Fodor’s. To ward off burnout, she relaxes at a bathhouse or exercises. Once a week, she takes herself to a swankier eatery, with delicious food and a couple martinis to swill. The downtime stabilises her to keep her creativity and motivation high. Then the cakes can keep baking in the oven. It’s how she’s managed to create cakes for particularly inspiring individuals, including the likes of Georgia Fowler, Francesca Hung, Victoria Barron and Bernadette Sukar. For the latter, she put together a 6 tier creation that stood around 1 meter tall. The design had an inherent Marie Antoinette feel, fusing Victorian-style piping with a subtle gothic twist. The tiers were, as expected, just slightly askew. “Nothing is ever flawless, and that’s what makes it imperfectly perfect,” says Fodor.

With the likeliness that baking can often go awry, Fodor has her routine fine-tuned to a science. Every morning, she writes a to-do list. When aspects of her day don’t go as planned, she takes a moment to get fresh air, gather herself, and then move forward.

Has Fodor ever made a baking faux pas? The cakemaker is coy, without bite. “There have been moments I have felt I wasn’t going in the right direction, so I would start all over again. So no real faux pas pour moi, merci, bisous.”