In her Williamsburg apartment, Zoe Burmester is sculpting her latest creation. What she’s building isn’t just something you can admire. It’s art you can devour.
“To all intents and purposes, it works similarly to clay,” she said about the modeling chocolate she used to sculpt in her kitchen.
What You Need To Know
- A cake artist who lives in Brooklyn is competing in a baking show centered on Harry Potter
- She recently moved from England to Williamsburg, calling it a dream to live in New York City
- She has made it to the finals of the baking show, which airs Thursday night
This wasn’t the career she started in. She started by working on TV sets in England, but baking was always a passion.
“I always loved that concept of telling a story and creating something out of nothing,” she said.
Burmester is self-taught. She posted her early creations on social media. Then people started asking: could she bake for them?
Her love turned into her job, and Sugar Street Studios was born.
She made 40 pairs of sneakers for a client, two emperor penguins for a wedding and a whole scene of monkeys causing chaos in a kitchen. All of these were cakes.
“They are always a labor of love,” she said.
But doing this work is not always a piece of cake.
“These cakes don’t hold themselves up,” she said while sculpting. “We’re engineers and architects and bakers and artists. For this sort of work, you are a master of all trades, really.”
She has had to become a master of something else, too: change. In the last year, her family moved from England to Brooklyn for her husband’s work. She had to leave her studio behind.
“We teach our children to take the adventures that life throws at you,” she said.
Moving to New York was one adventure. The next was much more unexpected.
This fall, on the Food Network, bakers from around the United States, including Burmester, traveled for “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking,” taking place on the film sets in England.
“To be a part of it in this way? To go back to London to go back to the sets? It was a bit of a dream come true to be honest with you,” she said.
The winners will be featured in the next Harry Potter cookbook.
She and her partner in the competition, Jordan Pilarski, had six hours to make gigantic pieces that could usually take weeks.
“You come up with all these crazy ideas, all these things if you had all the time in the world you would do, but you didn’t,” she said.
What started as nine teams is now down to two. Burmester and Pilarski have made it to the finale, airing on Thursday.
She wouldn’t give any spoilers, but did say, “I just feel really lucky to be part of such a fun experience.”
She isn’t sure what will be next. She has brought Sugar Street Studios to Brooklyn but hopes to get into a kitchen outside her apartment to bake for clients soon.
She said it was always a dream to live in New York City.
So as she has left Hogwarts and is back in the city, she knows her new chapter already has a sweet start.