Moments before anouncing the name of the new Pastry Queen, it seemed that everything was already decided for the award ceremony. The Japanese, Tomomi Futakami had demonstrated a great consistency and had walked away with the special awards for her pastry in a cup, her chocolate cake and for organisation. Only Laetitia Moreau from France had overshadowed her with awards for best artistic sugar piece and for her dessert plate. But against the odds, the North American, Cher Harris, trained by Susan Notter, who had not won any of the categories, surprised everyone by clinching victory in the overall competition. Susan Notter, who had competed in the previous year’s competition had clearly taken away many learnings from that event. And so second place went to the Japanese and third place to the French woman.

It was not a brilliant competition because of the excellence of the creations, not even in the most popular category, the artistic piece, in which the contestants chose to follow a classic aesthetic style and demonstrate their technical virtuosity with floral motifs. Rather, it was more about a movement away from a strict interpretation of the theme of the second year of the competition, the Evolution of Cinema, an observation which we shared with members of the jury, such as Sonia Balacchi (winner of the first year’s competition).