Hello! I'm Ceren Kömüryakan. I was born in Bursa in 1993. I am a senior student at Uludağ University's Logistics Department. I have been doing an internship in the Logistics and Foreign Trade Department at Aktaş Holding for 4 months. Actually, I am a professional pastry chef. I studied professional pastry and bakery in 2015 at MSA. So I learned the chemistry of the work in this way. I worked in the kitchen for 3 years as a pastry chef in the service sector. And I think pastry is really an art.

Pastry is not only a profession but also a passion for me; that's why I continue to be productive and make cakes, pies and cookies for my loved ones. Thanks to the professional training I have received and improvements I have made during my work in the kitchen, I still continue to receive orders even if I no longer work professionally in a kitchen. On special occasions such as birthdays and engagements, I make cakes that make people feel special.

People frequently ask how I decided to become a pastry chef, how my interest in the cuisine started and whether I received training on this subject. Frankly, my interest in pastry, generally speaking in culinary arts, started at a very young age. Since my mom and dad were working, I usually had to stay with my grandmother in summers. I loved watching and helping her while she was cooking and baking in the kitchen. My grandmother is very skilled in the kitchen. I inherited my culinary talent from her.

Thanks to my ability and love for culinary arts and support by my family, I received training at an academy which is the only culinary institution in Turkey certified by the England-based City & Guilds, one of the biggest accreditation institutions, Scottish SQA and Pearson / Ed Excel and deemed one of the best culinary institutions in the world. And this is a dream come true for me.

If you ask me "what is required to be a good pastry chef?", my answer is that one needs to be ambitious and have a love for cuisine and to be skillful, to receive a quality education and spare time and effort. These are the prerequisites for being a successful pastry chef.

On top of these, I can numerate many other qualities to be a good pastry chef: to be open to innovations, to research, to follow the latest trends, to try, to use the equipment well and to apply the recipe completely and correctly ...

Apart from all these, the quality of the ingredients you use is also very important. If you want to create a beautiful product, you must use quality cream, chocolate, fruit etc. For example, it is very important to use a fresh egg for a beautifully fluffy sponge cake and a quality chocolate for a chocolate cake.

I also think that no matter what job you do, if you want to be good and successful, you must definitely work hard and love what you do. Education, love, and talent alone may not make much sense, but when taken as a whole together with selfless effort and time, success is inevitable.

When people eat something unusual or different, they usually ask "Is this your own recipe?". Actually, the answer is neither exactly yes nor exactly no. When you prepare new and different recipes, you are sometimes inspired by a recipe written in a cookbook, sometimes by a picture seen while surfing the internet, sometimes by the smell of cakes and cookies that come to your nose while sitting in a restaurant or cafe.

Before I try new things, I read many local and foreign resources. I follow the well-known chefs and see what they are working on. I adapt the recipes to suit our taste or I add things that I like and think will suit our taste.

Speaking of the chefs I admire, the following names are the first that come to my mind:

Mehmet Gürs, born in Finland: He is the chef and partner of Mikla in Istanbul. At the same time, Mikla has been on the "The World's 50 Best Restaurants" list since 2015.

Osman Sezener from Izmir: He is the chef and owner of Od Urla, located on Izmir Urla Vineyard Road. His restaurant is referred to as a restaurant serving food 'from farm to table'. All products that can be harvested on the family grounds or in the gardens of the restaurant are cooked in the Od Urla kitchen. The menu of the restaurant, which also attaches importance to seasonal food, is updated with new ingredients almost every 45 minutes.

Clare Smyth from Northern Ireland: She started working in restaurants at a very young age. She received the "Young Chef of the Year" award and she is a female chef with 3 Michelin stars.

Cedric Grolet from France: He received the world's best pastry chef award in the "World's 50 Best Restaurants" category. He has his own patisserie.

Dinara Kasko from Ukraine: Although she is actually an interior architecture, she has become one of the world famous pastry chefs.

Jordi Roca from Spain: He has been selected as the "Best Pastry Chef". He has 3 Michelin stars. He adapts local flavors into modern presentations.

Janice Wong who is known as Asia's most famous pastry chef: He emphasizes that pastry is a lifestyle. And he brings colors on his cakes to the fore.

Speaking of my most loved recipe, the banana cake is definitely the first to come to mind. This cake with banana, peanut butter and lots of chocolate was loved so much that the name of my Instagram account where I share photos of the products is now "@bananacakebakery". Popular in the USA and Australia, banana bread is normally preferred for breakfast and is called "easy bread". In our country, it is generally consumed with tea and coffee and has so many varieties. My recipe is just like banana bread, but it is different in taste and content than the banana bread with its large amount of chocolate, peanut butter and spices.

Last but not least, I would like to tell those who are eager to do this job that culinary arts are a very labor-intensive branch. People may think that it is just fun. Those who wish to do this job must be open to very long and tiring working hours, hierarchy, discipline and even stress.

They must agree to work on weekends, on holidays and at Christmas. Only if they love this job passionately, can they do it with pleasure. Otherwise, this way of working may turn into kind of a torment after a while. I recommend them to be open to innovations and to follow famous chefs and especially to read foreign sources.

CEREN KÖMÜRYAKAN

Aktaş Holding Logistics / Foreign Trade Intern