(Bloomberg) -- Cake generally comes in a standard form: the cylinder. Or maybe a rectangle or a square.

Dinara Kasko is pushing the boundaries of basic cake geometry. Using heady algorithms, computer imaging, and 3D printing, Kasko creates sculptural works striated into sharp origami folds, bristling with spikes, or sliced into a grid of precisely pitched pyramids. Her desserts are a sensation on Instagram, where she has 630,000 followers.

Kasko’s desserts aren’t just mesmerizing—they’re also delicious. And now, they’re for sale in the U.S. for the first time.

A post shared by Dinara Kasko (@dinarakasko) on Jun 13, 2019 at 5:39am PDT

At the Boston-based Jonquils Café & Bakery, there are eight Kasko offerings including a cake that looks like a handful of cherries, concealing layers of dark chocolate mousse, cherry confit, and crisp crunch over chocolate sponge cake. There’s also a cubist apple and a vegan, artichoke-shaped cake-let, built from banana, mango, lime, lychee, and passion fruit compote over coconut sponge cake and mandarin mousse.

Kasko designs the products, prints the molds, and creates the recipes from her studio in the Ukraine; Jonquil’s cakes are baked on site by a pastry chef. On a June visit, Kasko approved of the results and the customers’ reactions which were often confused.

“They asked the waiter: ‘Is it a cake? Real cake? Not plastic?’ My main goal is to surprise people,” she says. 

Kasko didn’t start off as a gravity-defying pastry professional. Initially, she trained as an architect, and worked as a 3D visualizer. In 2013 her baking hobby kicked off into something more with a batch of raisin-speckled biscotti; six months later she won an online pastry contest with a cone-shaped stack of exotic fruits and chocolate.

“I am a designer, and I wanted to make something with my style and my ideas,” she says.

Her breakthrough came when she decided to create a pyramid-shaped cake, designed with modeling software. To turn the image into a mold, she had a prototype milled from wood—it was not a success. But googling “3D printer” unearthed a Ukraine local with a hand-built model. He printed the pyramid, she had it cast in silicone, then filled it. “When I unmolded this cake and saw it, I understood: Now I can do everything I want,” says Kasko.

Since then she has created desserts that look like rising bubbles, stacks of spheres, and rippling waves, which top her “geometric kinetic tarts.” Kasko generally starts with an idea—say, the peaks formed by ferromagnetic fluid—which she models and prints. Then, instead of stacking and frosting like most bakers, she works upside down: She fills her molds with mousse, presses in layers of cream, crunch, fruit, and cake, then freezes. In a dramatic reveal popular in her YouTube videos, she peels free the crisp shape and sprays it with a brilliant blast of hot-red glaze or deep chocolate shine.

READ MORE: Cédric Goulet Is Breaking the Rules of French Dessert

Kasko plans to extend her reach with a line of molds on Amazon coming out in September (beware the imitation ones online now), although you can buy some now on her own site. Dinara Kasko Pastry Art is scheduled to open this fall in Doha, and she’s creating an online baking course that will premier later this year. The other place to find her pastries is Pearls Desserts in Moscow. Says owner Vladimir Perelman, with Russian bravado: “Kasko’s fans—and there are billions of them—have discovered that these complex, geometric desserts are impeccable not just on the outside but on the inside.”

For the Home Baker

As one of Kasko’s “billion” fans—stranded a good distance from both Boston and Moscow, and there’s no shipping—I decided to go DIY. I know my way around a cake: There are over a dozen recipes for them in my 2014 book Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks Through Many a Conundrum, but nothing so compellingly complex as what I found on her website. Shoppers select solely based on appearance, so I went straight for the Tessellation—one of those mesmerizing patterns that repeats endlessly for reasons I failed to grasp in math class—and the Cherry Cake and purchased the molds from her web site for about $55 each, recipes included. 

The Tessellation mold came with a recipe for an unconventional carrot cake. Some ingredients were familiar to my pantry: eggs, flour, sugar, oranges, carrots. Some were not, like dextrose powder, pectin, citric acid, and white food coloring. I skipped the yogurt powder, made my own invert sugar, and never checked out of Amazon, where a $330 food-grade airbrush spray gun still idles in my cart. The rest—spices, oil, milk and such—I had on hand. Testing costs were $160 including the mold, but now I’ve got gelatin stockpiled for life.

Following the instructions, I baked a ¼-inch-high sponge cake and cut it down to a 7-inch square. I chopped a “confit” of mango and carrot, thickened it with gelatin and froze it into a thin sheet. I caramelized walnuts. I whipped a mouse, layered it with the other unlikely carrot cake components, and froze the whole thing solid. 

Twenty-four hours later, I pulled out the frozen form and peeled away the flexible mold, exposing perfectly clean, undulating waves. Given that I’d opted out of the spray-gun, and had failed at improvisation with plant mister, water bottle, and pump-action squirt gun, I pooled white chocolate in a shallow bowl, dipped and flipped. There were some drips, but, honestly, it looked stunning.

That first bite was a revelation. Brittle chocolate shell, creamy mousse, chunky fruit, crisp caramel, tender cake—all in a single forkful. Suddenly birthday cake seemed as flat-footed as a cylinder.

Inspired, I later took on the Cherry Cake, which was more complicated—and less forgiving. The glaze, composed of water, sugar, dextrose, pectin, glucose, citric acid, and fat-soluble food coloring, didn’t take well to decorating improv. The dip method produced less glazed cherry than pink glop. To be honest, I’m reconsidering that $330 spray gun. With cakes like these, it pays to go all-in.

To contact the author of this story: Leah Eskin in New York at

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kate Krader at kkrader@bloomberg.net, Justin Ocean

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