Kwento cakes – tastefully artistic

Kwento cakes – tastefully artistic

SHANNON NOCOS

By Althea Manasan
The Philippine Reporter

When Shannon Nocos started her online cake business in 2020, her goal was to eventually sell one cake per day.

Now less than two years later, her business, Kwento, is flourishing and garnering attention from the likes of Blog TO, the Toronto Star, NOW Magazine and the Marilyn Dennis Show. Last November, she even opened her first retail shop in downtown Toronto.

“I don’t think the gravity of what I’ve done in the last couple of years has really sunk in,” said Nocos, who is now 29 and lives in Mississauga.

“Sometimes I have the idea that this is a disposable thing, [that] no one takes this seriously, no one really believes in what I’m doing … [but] once I started getting a little bit more attention, I was like, ‘Ok maybe this is something that I can actually do and take on.’”

It’s not hard to understand what draws people to her creations. Nocos’s cakes are visually distinctive, featuring bold, vibrant colours, striking textures and highly detailed patterns made out of buttercream. For her fringe cakes, she uses frosting to replicate strings of yarn. Her pointillism cakes look like abstract impressionist paintings come to life. And her patchwork cakes are reminiscent of cozy knitted quilts.

Each cake she makes is unique, explains Nocos, who says she pipes them “freestyle.”

“I don’t like them looking uniform. Even if it’s a fringe cake, I want every fringe cake looking different. I want every piping cake to look different,” she said.

Just a couple of years ago, Nocos’s career path looked very different. She had spent the last decade working in operations and retail management in Toronto, but decided she needed to make a change.

She enrolled in a five-month French culinary arts program at Enderun Colleges in Manila, and in January 2020 flew halfway around the world to begin her education.

But just a couple of months into the program, the arrival of COVID-19 sent the world — including Manila — into lockdown. Her program was put on hold, and eventually the threat of looming border restrictions forced her to return home to Canada until her classes could resume.

“It turned into four months of just waiting around. So I was like, ‘I need to find work,’ but I was still expected to go back to school,” Nocos said. “So I didn’t want to find a job and commit to a job and have to leave them a month or two in.”

Instead she decided to go the entrepreneurial route, launching her own business and transforming the basement of her family home in Mississauga into a functioning kitchen. She began marketing herself online.

Kwento started out as a meal kit delivery service. For Nocos, this would not only help to keep her culinary skills fresh, but would also be a way to play around with flavours and ingredients inspired by her time in the Philippines. One of her dishes was a bagnet cobb salad, with crispy pork belly taking the place of the usual bacon.

“Coming back from the Philippines, coming back from culinary school, I had this feeling of pride, that I need to represent Filipino food and Filipino culture in my line of work going forward,” she said.

But Nocos soon found that she couldn’t sustain a meal kit service. “I just didn’t have the space for it. I think I probably only had room in my fridge for only two or three orders max,” she said.

So Nocos did what she seems to do best: pivot. She turned her focus to baked goods, like tarts and cookies, which were easier to store. Then when she realized even those were too costly —  “I [was] delivering $6 cookies to Ajax…it just didn’t make sense” —  she eventually shifted to cakes.

“It’s a bigger canvas, and there’s a lot more you can do creatively,” Nocos said. “And I come from an arts background, so it was a little more exciting for me in that sense.”

Her early cakes had floral designs, featuring edible flowers picked from her own garden. “Coming from culinary school…edible flowers were always something that I was interested in as a garnish,” she said.

Nocos’s signature fringe and pointillism cakes were born after she saw similar designs on social media, tried to recreate them, and then put her own spin on them.

“That first fringe cake took me hours to figure out, but I’ve done so many that it’s muscle memory at this point,” she said. “That first patchwork cake that I did took me like a whole day, and now from starting the patchwork to finishing it, I can do it in like an hour and a half.”

Helped by her background in graphic design, Noco has quickly grown her business online, with many clients discovering her eye-catching cakes on social media.

She also expanded her customer base by working with other local young Filipino-Canadian entrepreneurs on collaborations. Her first one was in 2020 with Kim Francisco, owner of floral studio Paraluman. For Halloween, Nocos and Francisco offered a collection of all-black cakes along with floral arrangements.

Soon others, like Sasha Ortega, formerly of Tala, and Keanu Francisco of Kusinera, were also reaching out to her, asking her to create desserts to go along with their meal delivery menus.

“I think it’s such a strength in our community that we’re not afraid to just ask,” said Nocos, who was born and raised in Mississauga to her parents, Daisy and Orlando, who immigrated to Canada separately in the 80s.

Nocos says that when she meets other Filipino-Canadians like her, she feels “an automatic shared bonding experience of some sort…You just gravitate to one another as soon as you know that fact about each other.”

She expresses her heritage in the flavours she uses in her baking. In her collaboration with Kusinera, she developed a yema tart. Her early cakes featured ube, and on her site, you can order a calamansi olive oil cake with whipped mascarpone.

She’s even tried adding adobo sauce to a chocolate cake, an idea that she admits is “still a work in progress.”

The new Kwento retail store, located near Dufferin St.and College St., is still in its soft launch phase as Nocos works to execute her vision for the space. She currently sells about 20 cakes a week and now has a production assistant helping her with all the orders.

In addition to selling her cakes and pastries, Nocos wants Kwento to offer a one-stop gift shopping experience, featuring  things like flowers, candles, ceramics, greeting cards and wrapping paper, all made by local vendors.

Nocos also hopes to eventually turn Kwento into a community hub, hosting dinners, workshops, and featuring a rotation of artists in an exhibit space. “I’m really interested in keeping those sorts of values as the business grows,” she said.

“I’m not doing this to get rich, I’m doing this to be able to have a job that I like and is fun for me,” Nocos said. “I left [retail] to make sure that whatever I do going forward is enjoyable and something that I genuinely want to do…so we’ll see.”