Maria Tulchevska
Maria Tulchevska
Maria Tulchevska is the founder of ART DESSERT LLC — a company that offers a variety of superior European desserts and pastries as well as professional pastry classes all over the United States.
She has directly coached hundreds of students, and is now seeing the impressive results and professional development of her pastry trainees.
Maria Tulchevska is the founder of ART DESSERT LLC — a company that offers a variety of superior European desserts and pastries as well as professional pastry classes all over the United States.
She has directly coached hundreds of students, and is now seeing the impressive results and professional development of her pastry trainees.
She has directly coached hundreds of students, and is now seeing the impressive results and professional development of her pastry trainees.
Maria has been dedicated to her career as a chef and instructor since 2019. But to get there, she had to start somewhere like everyone else. And, as it turns out,
a lot of formal education, long hours of study
and dedication
laid the groundwork for her
successful career.
Here's her story, in her own words:
Before my husband and I moved to California in 2014, we lived in Ukraine, where I was working at an important but boring desk job at one of the Big Four accounting firms. I was not able to express my creativity and felt suffocated.
The move to a new country presented new opportunities. I’ve always been attracted to pastry, but the long-wished-for maternity leave has kept me extremely busy with my twins. So, it didn’t look like the time was right for me to start trying myself in a new industry. But despite my hesitations, life had other plans for the undying passion burning inside of me.
My total obsession with pastry emerged one blessed day when I stumbled upon a photo of a cake the likes of which I’ve never seen before. This creation was totally minimalist, perfectly smooth and shiny, and formed in a startling but pleasing geometrical shape. It looked so elegant that it completely captivated me!
I could not resist the urge to dig deeper into how this cake was created, so I immediately started scouring the web for recipes and tools to try and make this unusual cake. I couldn’t find anything useful on the popular websites. But I persisted, and eventually my curiosity led me straight to the doors of the trendsetters of contemporary European pastry «fashion» – Amaury Guichon, Cédric Grolet, Pierre Hermé, Christophe Michalak, Ramon Morató, and Jordi Bordas.
Little by little, crumb by crumb, I started building up the knowledge and techniques that would eventually make it possible for me to create something even remotely similar to my «dream pastry.» At the time, I thought my first mousse cake was sheer perfection, but now I look back and see all the errors of a rookie baker.
Instead, they kept me running in search of more knowledge, more skills.
Over the next couple of years, I took endless online classes, gathering information and relying on my instructors’ experience to try and see «the big picture.» But things didn’t always add up, and after many courses, I was left with more questions than answers.
Why did this recipe not work for me? Why did this happen? What is the chemistry behind the processes?
While drifting in the sea of recipes and instructors and sinking oodles of time and money into classes and ingredients, I still failed to grasp the entire process.
But I also had the opportunity to study for 400 hours under Amaury Guichon and Michel Ernots. Like a sponge, I soaked in everything I saw, heard, and tasted. Finally, I had the answers I’d been chasing for years. I learned and practiced until I couldn’t stand up anymore, but this experience started shaping me as a professional.
With my thirst for knowledge still not quite quenched, I signed up for another year of studies, now under Chef Jordi Bordas (the World Pastry Champion in 2011). He focuses on researching and investigating complex technological aspects of pastry, and that’s what I felt I needed to finally grasp the «behind the scenes» science, so I was really blessed to finally get this valuable knowledge.
And then, one glorious summer day in 2019, everything changed!
I saw an ad for the first-ever enrollment in the Pastry Academy that Amaury Guichon, one of the world’s best pastry chefs and a man whose creations inspired me every day, was just opening — and I wanted it. No, I WANTED it with all my heart!
It seemed absolutely impossible that I’d ever go there. With twin toddlers, no relatives around to help, and the tuition + accommodation running up to nearly $30k, it was out of the question. But when you crave something so much, miracles happen. And that’s how, on October 14th of that same year, the brand-new doors of Amaury Guichon Pastry Academy opened to me and eight other lucky students from all over the globe. We were all eager to learn from the great chef.
My family made a lot of sacrifices to get me there: my husband worked grueling overtime hours and also took care of our girls, my mother closed her business, and my father-in-law quit his job in Ukraine to come to the US and help with the kids. I flew back and forth between Sacramento and Las Vegas 18 times to spend those precious couple of days a week with my family.
Still feeling like my personal knowledge quest was not yet finished, in 2021, I went to train under the world’s best chocolatier, Ramon Morato, to learn everything there is to know about chocolate work and recipe formulation.
And then, one glorious summer day in 2019, everything changed!
I saw an ad for the first-ever enrollment in the Pastry Academy that Amaury Guichon, one of the world’s best pastry chefs and a man whose creations inspired me every day, was just opening — and I wanted it. No, I WANTED it with all my heart!
It seemed absolutely impossible that I’d ever go there. With twin toddlers, no relatives around to help, and the tuition + accommodation running up to nearly $30k, it was out of the question. But when you crave something so much, miracles happen. And that’s how, on October 14th of that same year, the brand-new doors of Amaury Guichon Pastry Academy opened to me and eight other lucky students from all over the globe. We were all eager to learn from the great chef.
My family made a lot of sacrifices to get me there: my husband worked grueling overtime hours and also took care of our girls, my mother closed her business, and my father-in-law quit his job in Ukraine to come to the US and help with the kids. I flew back and forth between Sacramento and Las Vegas 18 times to spend those precious couple of days a week with my family.
But I also had the opportunity to study for 400 hours under Amaury Guichon and Michel Ernots. Like a sponge, I soaked in everything I saw, heard, and tasted. Finally, I had the answers I’d been chasing for years. I learned and practiced until I couldn’t stand up anymore, but this experience started shaping me as a professional.
With my thirst for knowledge still not quite quenched, I signed up for another year of studies, now under Chef Jordi Bordas (the World Pastry Champion in 2011). He focuses on researching and investigating complex technological aspects of pastry, and that’s what I felt I needed to finally grasp the «behind the scenes» science, so I was really blessed to finally get this valuable knowledge.
Still feeling like my personal knowledge quest was not yet finished, in 2021, I went to train under the world’s best chocolatier, Ramon Morato, to learn everything there is to know about chocolate work and recipe formulation.
