Maya Dahlia
Krishma standing in a rustic kitchen holding a cup of tea, in a cream off the shoulder knitted jumper, with open shelves of jugs and mugs behind her
The person behind it

KrishmaCake designer, artist, mother of two

Krishma is the hands and heart behind every cake. From the first design ideas to baking, decorating and setting up on the day, she personally oversees every detail.

She also manages the enquiries, takes the calls and fits it all around family life and the school run. Every cake is made with genuine care and personal attention, because there is only one Krishma, and that is what makes each creation so personal.

Based
London
Home
Jas, Zadie
and Jiyah
Largest to date
Seven tiers
Trained at
Peggy Porschen
Academy
Krishma in a Maya Dahlia apron holding a finished cake dressed with sugar roses
The cakes

Sugar, and the patience it asks for

A seven tier cake is roughly six weeks of work, and most of that is not baking. It is drawing, then redrawing. Cutting two hundred butterflies by hand and accepting that a dozen of them will break. Piping an arch freehand and starting again when the pressure wavers.

Krishma takes a limited number of weddings a year, which is a commercial decision she keeps refusing to change. A cake she has not drawn, piped and carried in herself is not one she is willing to put her name on.

Krishma sketching a cake design in a notebook at her studio table
Before the cakes

An artist who found her medium in sugar

Creativity came first. Long before cakes became a business, Krishma loved to draw, paint and make things by hand. She has always enjoyed working with detail and taking the time to create something beautifully.

Cake design became another way to express that creativity. Sugar and icing offered a new medium to work with, one that could be shaped, sculpted and transformed into something completely unique.

That artistic background can still be seen in every cake today. From delicate details and textures to architectural shapes and intricate finishes, each design is approached as a piece of art, just one that happens to taste delicious too.

Krishma standing in front of a floral Maya Dahlia Cakes shopfront backdrop.
Where she learned it

Trained at the Peggy Porschen Academy

The technical grounding came from Belgravia. The Peggy Porschen Academy opened in 2011 as the first cookery school in London given over entirely to baking, cake decorating and sugar craft, sitting across the road from the parlour on Ebury Street. Classes are capped at eight, everyone works at their own station, and the house standard is exacting: traditionally elegant, deliberately understated, and unforgiving about craftsmanship.

That is where the discipline in this work comes from. Royal icing rather than shortcuts. Restraint rather than decoration for its own sake. The habit of choosing the harder method because the result will look right, and nobody will quite be able to say why.

From the sketchbook

Her working drawings

Not presentation pieces. These are the sheets the cakes are actually built from, with the tier sizes worked out in the margin and the details argued over in pencil.

Pencil drawing of a five tier wedding cake, annotated with hexagonal tier, pillars, arches and cherubs, sugar flower spray and wedding date numerals
Pillars, a hexagonal tier, arches and cherubs, and the wedding date set in Roman numerals along the base.
Krishma's annotated wedding cake sketch showing a sugar flower cascade, an oval cut-out and floral bands around the base.
A sugar flower cascade, an oval cut-out and floral bands around the base, with each detail noted by hand.
Nothing leaves this studio that I have not piped, dressed and set on the table myself.
Krishma
Krishma in a kitchen holding a mug, smiling towards the camera
At home

The kitchen does not stop at cake

Ask anyone who has been fed at her table. Cooking is the other half of the same habit: making something properly, then giving it away. Nobody leaves the house hungry, nobody is allowed to help with the washing up, and there is always more food than there are people.

Home is Jas and their two girls, Zadie and Jiyah. Jas is in the events world too, a partner in Kudos Music, which means the household understands weekends, late setups and the particular quiet of a Sunday after a Saturday wedding.

Krishma in the kitchen holding a mug, looking out of frame
Away from the bench

Travel, and where the flavours come from

She travels whenever the diary allows, and it is not really a holiday so much as research she refuses to call research. The Amalfi lemons on the flavours page are there because of a terrace above the sea. The Alphonso mangoes are there because of a ten week season worth planning a year around.

Rooms come home with her too. A ceiling in a church, tile work in a courtyard, the way light falls through a glasshouse at five o'clock. Half of them end up as a piped detail on a cake eighteen months later.

A few other things

Things that do not fit anywhere else

Follow along

From the studio

@maya_dahlia_cakes

Follow Krishma’s latest work on Instagram.

Yours next

Tell her about the day

Send the date, the venue and roughly how many guests. You will hear back within two working days.

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