Acclaimed chef visits her home town

WHITE RIVER – “The most important thing about cooking, is to realise that you will never stop learning, and the best way to learn is from others.”

This was the message conveyed on Tuesday when locally bred pastry chef and award-winning wedding cake baker, Anmar Odendal, showed off her culinary skills with quirkiness at the brand-new Café Kilinda’s on Tuesday.

Guests were treated to a front row seat of a macaron and mini meringue master classes in true Masterchef style. Born in Pretoria, Odendal grew up in the Lowveld where she went to Laerskool Bergland and Hoërskool Nelspruit.

She graduated from the institute of culinary arts in Stellenbosch in 2003 after which she went to work as a pastry chef at the Cape Grace Hotel under Bruce Robertson.

“He was my hero, he taught me everything I needed to know in order to take chances and not stick with the ordinary,” she says. Roberston passed away in November last year after being diagnosed with leukaemia.

She then started to work at the award-winning By Word Of Mouth Catering in Johannesburg in 2005 after which she went abroad in 2007.

Here she worked for a British family on their yacht based in the Mediterranean, the Pacific and the Adriatic and cooked for guests like the Prince of Monaco, Uma Thurman, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson.

She moved to England and established Crumb, her bespoke wedding cake business. By 2013, Crumb won “Best wedding cake designer East of England”, and ended in the top seven in the country in the national wedding industry awards in London, and listed under the “Top 20 most amazing wedding cake bakers in the UK”. She has done lots of high-profile cakes that have been published on numerous international and local wedding blogs and magazines such as OK!

She mainly focuses on wedding cakes that are quirky and surprising – and not traditional.

“I find myself asking the question ‘why not?’ a lot,” she says.

She works as a pastry chef for a group of exclusive small hotels belonging to the TA hotel collection on the east coast of England focusing on wedding cakes and concept afternoon teas in Suffolk, as well as running Crumb.

She has appeared on numerous food shows in the UK where she does lots for stage cooking demonstrations and cook-offs, and also spends lots for her time teaching people to bake and decorate cakes in very informative master classes like the one on Tuesday. She’s currently also busy with her first book called Sweet Ink, where she is collaborating with 15 of the top woman tattoo artists in the world, where they are all designing their dream celebration cake, with no limits to design or size, and in this book she’s taking these designs and turning them into real cakes.

“Even though I am having a great time overseas, my heart still belongs to the Lowveld.

“To come back here and start a business is definitely not out of the question,” she concludes.

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