Next month, Violet’s head chef Niko and I will celebrate three years of working together! The magic he creates with cakes, and particularly with flowers, is amazing. I wanted to let him tell you about them, and a bit more about himself as well - so here it is, my first guest post.
Claire x
With our cakes at Violet, there’s so much about them that’s about texture, and the flowers are a part of that. We have our buttercreams that we whip up, and then we have our fruit powders, and our crushed crystallised violets, and I’m just building up textures from there.
If you’re thinking about getting into decorating cakes with flowers like we do at the bakery I think you really have to start by taking a walk; see how flowers and bushes are doing it on their own and get inspired. It’s hard for me now to pass a gorgeous flower without wanting to put it on a cake, and it’s not just a flower, it could be a bloom or a blossom, it could be a tree branch with buds. Paying attention to all this helps you get in tune with the growing seasons, you see the crocuses and the bulbs coming through in February, followed by the blossoms that are talking to the fruit that’s about to come in. I love using those to steal that beauty a little bit earlier than the fruit gives it up.
Flowers have always been part of my story in one way or another. In my first job ever, when I was 15 at the Hourglass Brasserie in Bristol, Rhode Island, I remember we used nasturtiums in a savory salad. I loved gardening when I was younger, and so I’d grown nasturtiums myself and I’d seen them everywhere, but using these flowers in cooking was brand new to me. I thought it was the coolest thing.
That same summer I worked at the Hourglass, my friends and I got our drivers licenses, and we began a habit of cruising around with our secateurs pillaging gardens and bushes wherever we found them, filling the car with flowers and taking them home to use for photoshoots. I always tried to grow flowers myself but in my back garden at home it was super shady and often I had to resort to stealing. I still remember that summer with those early flowers, being off school and seeing the irises, the lillies, and the hydrangeas - all so New England. Years later, when I was stuck at home during the pandemic, I found myself wanting to be with nature and ended up working at a tulip farm near my hometown, where we have the same climate as the Netherlands.
In the years between the irises and the tulips I moved away from the kitchen and worked in fashion and fine art; first in New York, then LA, then London, but baking and cooking was always there. In between my fashion and art jobs I would be in a kitchen rolling dumplings or flipping burgers. It’s never felt like working to be a chef, I always knew I could go back to working with my hands, it always felt like a pasttime, or an extra curricular, something to do on my day off. That’s how I started at Violet, I was looking for work in fashion and talking to the tailor Ian Hundley when he mentioned his friend owned a bakery.
That was three years ago now, and that need to keep working with my hands has served me well since. At Violet, when I first got to do those early morning baking shifts I loved getting breakfast ready. In a funny way that’s sort of like decorating the shop, piling the trays with cinnamon buns and muffins and scones, it’s not perfect but it’s beautiful because of that. Now, as the head chef, a lot of my time is spent decorating cakes and working with flowers and fruit. When I was working at the tulip farm I had so many lying around that I used them to decorate cakes that I sold on facebook marketplace, I’d never done it before but it felt right. In a way everything’s come together now in what I do.
There's some loose rules we follow at the bakery - some flowers are a no-go, we always try to work with what’s seasonal, and all colours are natural. When I’m teaching new chefs how to decorate I talk about how certain buttercreams look better with muted colors – with the Amalfi Lemon & Elderflower I try to stay very neutral, pure white if I can, unless there’s something with more of a lemony vibe in yellows or orange. Chocolate cakes are so easy to decorate, you can use whites, or pinks and purples, or rich ruby maroons and oranges, but I’d never use orange on a Raspberry Buttercream cake. You have to understand the life of a flower as well, how it will sit on a cake and open and change as the cake is on display.
There are times when I kind of have to take a step back from myself and honor the ingredients, or the customers’ wishes. I remember my first shift decorating, there was a wedding cake with dahlias and chrysanthemums and I thought, fuck these are like supermarket flowers. But it’s a challenge, I was proud of myself that day. I posted it to Instagram with the caption, “making the case for an autumn wedding”.
Ultimately, you’re telling a story. With weddings, ideally I’d always start with a base of white roses; it’s romantic of me but it’s like the foundation of the marriage starting with pure and enduring love. There was a wedding cake I did and the bride had a 20 foot train and veil, hand embroidered with snapdragons, but the only snapdragons I’d got were bright red. They weren’t working with the cake, but I put one in, one secret, just for her. There’s something about the meaning of flowers, you’re always trying to keep a thread of meaning throughout.
If it’s a cake for a birthday or other celebration, that meaning is about enhancing the look of the cake. You’re speaking to its movement and its seasonality and its naturalness. If I’m decorating with fruit and flowers, which isn’t that popular a combination sadly, I always want the flowers to make the fruit really shine, to show off the beautiful flavors of the seasonal fruit.
I always have Claire in the back of my mind saying that it should look like these flowers have fallen from the bush, just like Alice had taught her at Chez Panisse. I think my predecessors have had that too, if I look at the cakes decorated by former head chefs Izaak and Elizabeth I can see that outline being worked to. It’s an aesthetic that I love and that I’ve always had in me, I love that haphazard randomness, where the petals have spilled out, I want to get into it, and make it raw, and make it messy more than I’m making it pretty.
You can use a more robust, hardy flower like a cornflower or a rose, and break it up knowing it will maintain its body, and use it as confetti. Then take the more ethereal, wispy heads, and pepper those through. If I had a bunch of cloudy peonies, I’d then be looking for a sweetpea with its tendrils to break it up, you want to keep it interesting; maybe the colours are the same, but I’d want the textures to be different and contrasting.
You have to make it look natural, but that’s really hard, you have to do more than just let things fall.
You’re never going to be able to replicate that perfect, natural, random beauty, but you can always be informed by it.
x Niko