Imagine a table groaning under vast gateaux, scones with clotted cream, petit fours, tea loaves, miniature cakes, Black Forrest roulade, macaroons, coconut ice and baked cheesecakes. Drooling yet? That’s just the high tea at the Mount Nelson Hotel. Further down the passage at Planet, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant and one of our nominees for the Top 10 at this year’s Eat Out DStv Food Network Restaurant Awards, you’ll find insanely delicious concoctions like a hazelnut ice cream cube – with layers of ice cream and biscuit drowned in a hot chocolate sauce. Now you’re definitely drooling.
 
Vicky Gurovich is the woman responsible for all of this deliciousness. Heading up the pastry kitchen at the Mount Nelson, Vicky also recently found time to win the Huletts Pastry Chef of the Year competition, with her cocoa streusel with peanut and praline ganache, banana caramel and Valrhona Nyangbo chocolate; granadilla and passion fruit macaroons with poppy seeds; and a deconstructed trifle. And she’s also been selected by Eat Out editor Abigail Donnelly to prepare the desserts on the night of the Eat Out DStv Food Network Restaurant Awards.
 
“I think pastry is very rewarding. It’s very scientific, meticulous, and you still have a great freedom with flavours. All fresh ingredients are fair game,” says the Joburg-born chef, who trained at Technikon Witwatersrand Hotel School and worked in the UK, and the Saxon, before finding her calling in the Nellie’s pastry kitchen.
 
“I like to use the harder herbs,” she says, adding thyme to her fruit salad, and using coriander, pea and sweetcorn shoots and baby beetroot in other desserts. “They’re so sweet when they’re young.”
 
Vicky also doesn’t believe it’s necessary for puddings to be super sweet. “There’s no need to give people diabetes with your menu.” South Africans, she admits, can tolerate more sugar than the Asian and European guests, but ultimately, too much sweetness masks the palate.

Her most memorable dessert experience to date was at Michelin-starred London restaurant Textures earlier this year. “It was so, so simple: a white peach with passionfruit soup with sorrel and a basil granita. It was unbelievable.”
 
So what’s the secret to putting together a thoroughly delicious dish? “I think if I can recreate a happy moment from childhood, then I’ve done my job.”
 
Some of her dishes are inspired by these flavours and textures, reworked into something more sophisticated. For example, one of the restaurant’s popular dishes is a deconstructed soft serve ice cream, with broken down ice cream cone, caramel crunch and home-made Aero and Flake chocolate. “I loved malva pudding as a child, especially if my mom made it for me. And souskluitjies! Who doesn’t love a good, old stick toffee pudding? I believe there’s a place for peppermint crisp pudding and rice crispy treats too.”
 
Right now, Vicky’s working on several new dishes for the new season: whiter shades of pale is a study of white ingredients, with meringue, white chocolate cream, vanilla sponge; a chocolate bake, with chocolate and caramel, is the new chocolate offering; and as for fruity, there’s a dish using strawberries in many different formats – from consommé and sorbet to a terrine and dried strawberries.
 
But being a pastry chef is not all about desserts. The 15-strong pastry team works 24 hours a day, baking all the bread for the hotel, preparing biscuits, muesli bars, and other snacks, and creating all the desserts for the hotel’s two restaurants, Planet and Oasis.
 
And then there’s the high tea.
 
“Eish, that one’s a monster,” admits Vicky. One of the most famous high teas in the country, it books up well in advance. And while the menu changes every three months or so, to make the best of seasonal produce, there’s one thing that is never taken off the menu. “In season, some Saturdays we go through eight or nine baked cheesecakes!”
 
So what’s her secret? Any tips from the pastry master?
 
“I’d emphasise the importance of creaming properly. That is where you’re going to make or break your cake. Is it white? Pale? Fluffy?” She also insists that butter and eggs must be room temperature for baking. “That, and always put alcohol in malva pudding.”

By Katharine Jacobs

Vicky will be cooking the dessert at the Eat Out DStv Food Network Restaurant Awards on Sunday 25 November 2012. To book your ticket now, click here.