The Great British Bake Off is back, and while we're expecting some proper showstoppers from this year's contestants, no one in the country is making cakes quite like Kia Utzon-Frank.
The Danish-born, London-residing cook burst on to the baking scene in 2015 with her cosmic-looking marbled creations, spherical ‘concrete’ cakes and most recently, she's been making Brutalist biscuits – and now she wants to introduce the UK to the joy of the Danish Flødeboller.
First up: how to pronounce it. ‘It's flooh-de-buhl,’ she laughs, ‘but I'm thinking of changing the name of my ones, though.
Flødeboller literally means ‘cream buns’ but they're most similar in form to Tunnock's Teacakes. Over in Denmark, these tiny round meringue- and chocolate-topped wafers or biscuits are eaten practically non-stop – in fact, Kia tells me, the average Danish person eats fifty-two of these each year. This is a nation obsessed.
Before her experiments in making luxury versions of these flødeboller began, she first turned her hand to mastering the art of creating cakes with a highly unconventional decoration. Aged fifteen, she jumped into the deep end when she offered to make her cousin's wedding cake, that had to serve 150 people. ‘It was a crazy thing to do,’ she remembers. ‘I had never done it before and I didn't know any of the tricks, I was just making it up and figuring it out as I went along. But I do that all the time.’ It was a success, and she received her next wedding cake commission straight away.