Over the past year, Vanillana Pastry Studio founder Svitlana Kostiuk has been able to experiment with new dessert creations—and cut pickup times for her customers.
Launching Vanillana Pastry Studio in Luxembourg around four years ago, Svitlana Kostiuk was inspired to bring Cédric Grolet-inspired pastries to the local market. While Grolet’s dessert creations at Le Meurice in Paris cost around €18 per piece, Kostiuk charges €10 for each (with a minimum of four per order)—only slightly more than the price of the ingredients she uses.
While she has had to increase her prices slightly over the past two years—given the steep increases of ingredients like chocolate and cocoa butter—Kostiuk says she’s not doing it for the money but for the love of the craft. Although she has a career in finance, during her recent parental leave she was able to find the time to experiment with new flavours. Orders can also be placed in advance, but Kostiuk now allows for same-day, curbside pickup near the Cloche d’Or shopping centre.
Most popular creations
Having taken pastry classes through one of Grolet’s students, she learned the art of stabilising ganache, creating chocolate shells, producing gel interiors and playing with colours and textures via a range of techniques so that each piece resembles the fruit or nut whose essence the piece is meant to encapsulate. “For each dessert, it takes me around 50 minutes in total to go from zero to the final result,” Kostiuk explains. “It’s very time consuming; there are a lot of steps.”
And that’s not even factoring in the amount of time for freezing or setting. For each fruit dessert, there’s the “liquid, running heart”, then ganache cream and a chocolate shell. To produce the runny gel, Kostiuk uses fresh fruit—with a preference for seasonal and local ones whenever possible—and needs to freeze it as part of her process, which can take around six hours. The cream ganache, meanwhile, stabilises after 12 hours. Then both of those need to be combined and, once again, frozen. It’s only then that she can dive into the chocolate, which she then covers, using a pistol to paint the pieces to give them their special effects.
Her mango and passion fruit desserts have been the most popular amongst her clients. To make the mango, for instance, she first uses a yellow coating but then gives it a bit of red and green and then a glaze to create that shiny effect. For Kostiuk, it’s important the desserts not just taste great but that they’re also as aesthetically close as possible to the foods upon which they’re based. In the case of the passion fruit, she adds, “It doesn’t need to be perfectly round—it has some sort of ‘damage’—and it can even look a bit ‘dirty’.”
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Making impressions
Kostiuk has found more time over the past year to experiment. “I’m still following certain chefs. I see what they’re doing, taking some basic inspiration, but once you get the basics, you can play with them. That’s why I’m creating my own recipes,” she says.
As part of this journey, she recently ordered customised pecan nut and lychee moulds. She may have to fork up around €1,000 per mould, but the added value is in the amount of time saved, as she’ll no longer have to work these shapes manually. Kostiuk says that since selling the pecan nut dessert, some clients have told her it may have surpassed her pistacho dessert. “It has been a huge success,” she adds. “People were really impressed—it looks really realistic.”
Although she previously had desserts such as a persimmon with rum and an orange with Aperol Spritz, Kostiuk has shifted away from desserts with alcohol. She’s also proud to note that the desserts are free of refined sugar, gluten-free and mainly lactose-free.
While some of her clients are quite regular and eager to discover her new concoctions, others might order them to make an impression on dinner party guests. One of her most unique experiences was fulfilling an order from a couple in Canada: “They really surprised me because they checked out my page and really wanted to try my desserts. They were touring European countries and put Luxembourg on the list just to come and try my desserts. I was really flattered.”
Launching classes
In September, Kostiuk plans on launching a series of online classes so others can learn the art of making similar desserts. The courses, available in both English and French, will be accessible via a link on the Vanillana Pastry Studio Instagram page and cost around €100 per class.
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