BOTARI’s Modern Makers series meets Rose Studio, a creative practice bringing together cake, art and design through playful colour, sculptural forms and an instinctive approach to making.
How did Rose Studio begin?
For Rose Studio’s founder, cakes had always held a particular fascination. Bakery displays, arrangements of treats and even supermarket sheet cakes caught her eye while she studied and worked in art and design.
What began as a weekend hobby gradually became another way to explore ideas. Around the time she left her role at a global fashion brand, she was spending most of her spare hours making cakes for friends and family.
“I felt a natural urge to find my own artistic voice through cake.”
Rose Studio grew from that feeling: a space to experiment and create something personal for people looking beyond the everyday bakery cake.
Finding inspiration beyond cake
“Our signature designs are inspired by anything but cake.”
A background in fashion design shapes the studio’s approach to volume, surface and structure. There is a fascination with how separate elements come together, and how something soft or seemingly fragile can hold weight and take shape.
Paintings and printing techniques offer ideas for smaller details, from surface finishes to texture. Something seen elsewhere becomes a starting point for experimenting with what cake can do.
The story behind Alma
One of Rose Studio’s most beloved designs began with the playful toy designs of Alma Siedhoff-Buscher.
The idea was a cubical cake with a different colour on each surface. During its making, the founder became absorbed in achieving perfectly clean edges between the colours. Curtis, her husband and partner at Rose Studio, suggested letting those boundaries stay rough.
That suggestion prompted a deeper response. Learning about the restrictions Siedhoff-Buscher faced as a woman at the Bauhaus, including being denied access to essential woodworking tools, had stayed with her.
She decided to channel that feeling into the cake, allowing the edges to run free and choosing colours that felt natural.
“That was the moment I felt the cake was finished.”
The character of making by hand
Without formal pastry training, Rose Studio’s founder has developed her own adaptations of traditional techniques. Finding a solution often means working with the particular abilities of her hands, then practising until a movement becomes familiar.
That hands-on process gives each cake its own character. Small textures emerge that cannot be fully planned or repeated. A design can return, but its surface will always carry something individual.
“It is this irregularity and vulnerability of the hand that allows the strength of the underlying concrete idea to shine through.”
What comes next?
Creating cakes for people’s special moments has given Rose Studio’s work a meaning that extends beyond visual expression.
The studio hopes to share its process with others interested in exploring food more freely as a creative medium. There are also plans to dedicate more time to visual identity work, alongside food design, branding, product development and small-scale installations.
Each offers another way to explore the colour, form and material curiosity already present in its cakes.
Modern Makers: the joy of making
At BOTARI, we’re drawn to the choices that give an object its character: a colour combination, an unexpected texture, the trace of a hand.
Our Modern Makers series meets the people behind those choices, exploring their processes and the things they love to make.
