Artistry on a plate is a piece of cake

She says she enjoyed the instant feedback from customers and the satisfaction of pulling off a new design. "Sometimes, when customers had specific ideas and requests that I hadn't tried before, I got excited and was motivated to bring their vision to life," Wang adds.

As her experience grew, Wang discovered that baking was her true calling and quit her job in 2018. "I felt that I was just a cog in a big machine, and didn't play a big enough role in the outcome of a project," she explains.

Wang followed professional pastry chefs to learn the basics of shaping, piping, coloring, and fondant work before opening her dessert studio in Hangzhou.

Not content with traditional buttercream cakes, she began to make sculptural cakes that were shaped like cheongsam (traditional Chinese dress), clouds, wine barrels and skewers.

She was inspired to create micro-landscape cakes in 2022 when a former colleague sent her a photo of an island and asked if she could fashion it out of cake. After some trial and error, Wang succeeded and then posted photos on the social media platform Xiaohongshu, earning herself more than 100,000 followers overnight. "I was so excited that I couldn't fall asleep," she says, adding that she then decided to make more cakes that looked like real-life destinations.

Wang began to pick up different skill sets. She had to explore everything on her own, as she failed to find anyone who was making micro-landscape cakes in China, she says.