Wedding dress was piece of cake for chef

UZHHOROD, Ukraine — Valentyn Shtefano's pastries were known for attracting stares and giggles as well as lip-smacking murmurs. But even his fiancée was surprised when Shtefano told her he was making her wedding dress — out of flour, eggs, sugar and caramel.

The dress — made of 1,500 cream puffs and weighing 20 pounds — took the baker two months to make, and by the end of the wedding reception, bride Viktoriya said she didn't want to take it off. Shtefano, 28, is a rising star in the field of baking as visual art, earning him a following in Uzhhorod, near the border with Slovakia. His creations have generated a buzz in a place where cake is often layers of heavy cream, wafers and nuts or poppy seeds, more something to eat than to view.

"At first glance, it's really a surprise. I didn't even believe it was a cake," said Olha Nemyataya, who sampled some of Shtefano's new desserts. "Nowhere in Uzhhorod have I seen things like this."

Shtefano, whose fingernails are stained with food coloring, is eager to introduce new sweets to the city of 125,000, which has a center full of new businesses and cafes but is otherwise dominated by gray Soviet-era apartment buildings.

He got his first job as a baker six years ago. Last year, he took a three-month baking course in Paris and entered an international baking competition with his sister. They made a 2-foot-long 1920s-era Cadillac from cream puffs and caramel, and took third place.

Some of Shtefano's cakes are strictly for mature audiences, like a pair of breasts on display at a pizzeria where his goods are sold. But he also created an elaborate Easter cake that drew hundreds to a cathedral. It was a black-and-gold globe hatching from an Easter egg, with pieces of eggshell on top of the globe and falling off to the side.

His biggest challenge was the wedding-dress cake. At first, he sewed empty cream puffs together, but the dress collapsed. Then, he carefully attached the puffs to a wedding-dress frame, and Viktoriya spent a couple hours each night before the wedding modeling the dress as Shtefano added more puffs. Her crown, bouquet and necklace were made from caramelized sugar.

"At first, it was even a little embarrassing," Viktoriya Shtefano said of the dress she wore to the couple's reception in August at Uzhhorod's 1,200-year-old castle. "Cameras, interviews, but after a couple of hours, I didn't even want to take it off."

The baker hopes to someday open a business with his sister, believing there's more room for skillful bakers here than in Paris. "Here you can buy jobs," he said. "You want to be president, governor, [parliament] deputy, OK.

"But my job you can't buy; you have to do it."