It’s a chilly Sunday morning in Pleasant Gap, but inside The Cakeshop by Tati, where Amy Heverly and daughter Alayna are waiting to pick up a king cake for Mardi Gras, it’s warm and fragrant. In addition to the custom-ordered cake, Heverly is picking up a lox croissant, a treat for her husband. A buttery croissant loaded with cream cheese and everything bagel seasoning, smoked salmon, cucumber, and avocado, it’s a recent menu addition that’s quickly becoming a customer favorite. Also in the bag are macarons for Alayna, who munches away while mom takes care of business.
“It’s amazing. Everything is amazing, and there’s always something different,” says Heverly. “We come every week.”’
The bakery, cozy and welcoming, sees a steady stream of customers, many regulars and converts to the unparalleled pastries and cakes produced by the husband-and-wife team of Derek and Tatiana Polay.
“It’s one of the only places around that does French pastries—from scratch,” employee Allyson Hobbs says from behind the counter. “They make them every single day. A lot of love goes into it.”
A lot of love—and a lot of butter. The Cakeshop’s philosophy, as stated on their webpage, is “Butter makes everything better.” Tatiana (Tati) says it takes 100 pounds a week to turn out the croissants, cookies, cakes, scones, and other delicacies they’ve become known for.
“It’s higher butterfat for the croissants but normal butter for everything else,” she says.
Tati and Derek are graduates of the Culinary Institute of America and have worked in some of the finest restaurants and bakeries in the country. They combine that experience and love of classic French pastry with an homage to Tati’s heritage (she’s a native of Lima, Peru) by offering not only traditionally flavored desserts but also incorporating a wide variety of Latin American and Asian flavors such as yuzu, adzuki bean paste, lucuma, cherimoya, and guava to create unique desserts. They even import purple corn to make chicha morada, a beautifully hued traditional Peruvian sweet drink with a rich flavor and a hint of spice.
“We’re really happy how accepting the clientele has been of the more unusual flavors. Miso pound cake sold really well,” says Derek.
From camp to Culinary Institute
As a young teen, Tati attended a summer culinary camp, eight hours of baking a day, all summer, which cemented her desire to pursue a culinary career.
She earned a degree in restaurant management after graduating high school, but found herself missing the hands-on time in the kitchen she’d come to love from spending countless hours cooking side-by-side with her mother and grandmother.
She enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America and arrived in New York a month before starting classes. Although she’d been studying English since age nine, she still found herself facing a language barrier. “It just goes so fast,” she says. “It’s different from what you learn in books.”
One way she hoped to overcome the barrier was to pair up with someone fluent in Spanish and English, and on her third day of orientation she met Derek, a Pleasant Gap native who, while not fluent, was able to help her navigate her way through the ins and outs of daily life, explaining the meaning of certain words or phrases. The time they spent together blossomed into romance and they married after graduation in 2016.
They moved to Manhattan, where under the tutelage of Madeline Lanciani, chef and owner of Duane Park Patisserie in Tribecca, Tati learned the artful decoration and precision piping that are a signature of her work.
“There were lots of orders that used shapes like squares and rectangles,” Tati says of the piping work. “She would make me scrape them off and do it again. She pushed me, but not in a bad way.”
Tati would go home after a full day of work and practice the technique until she had it right, spending as much as 20 hours a week piping tiny, perfect lines.
“It’s all about steady pressure,” she says.
Later, she worked under Charlotte Neuville, of Charlotte Neuville Cakes & Confections in New York, providing desserts and cakes for high-profile and celebrity clients like Vogue magazine and singer Cardi B. Their extremely high standards for show-stopping creations taught her to achieve perfection in both cake decoration and sugar art.
Derek, a State College native, also discovered his love of cooking at an early age, and after graduating from State College Area High School honed his skills in the kitchen at Gigi’s Southern Table and Centre Hills Country Club. As a CIA graduate in Manhattan, he worked in both the kitchen and floor areas of world-renowned restaurants such as Jean-Georges, LLama Inn, and Olmsted, and briefly, during one of the couple’s visits to Peru, Central, rated on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
“Latin food is what I’m really passionate about,” he says. His interest especially focuses on Peruvian cuisine, which makes frequent use of cilantro, chives, and mint.
“It’s bright and vibrant,” he says. “Every dish is loud and intense, and they round out every dish with everything in the palate.”
A fresh start in Centre County
Then the pandemic hit. After losing both their jobs and a friend to COVID-19, the couple decided to move here to be with Derek’s mother and sister.
Both took whatever jobs they could, but Tati spent her off time making cakes for friends and neighbors. A former neighbor even drove four hours from Manhattan because for a special birthday, only Tati’s cake would do.
“I would make one for somebody and they would recommend me to someone else, and they recommended me to someone else and it just grew,” she says.
It was increasingly clear she needed a dedicated work space, and through a series of fortunate turns, and help from SCORE volunteers, the couple was able to secure funding and open the business.
“We were a little worried because we wanted to specialize in classic French pastry and didn’t know if it would do well here, but it took off,” Derek says.
Another runaway hit: pop-up dinners, typically held the last Tuesday of the month both at the bakery and off-site. Dinners feature a variety of cuisines, including Peruvian, starring local, seasonal items, such as mushrooms in season from local suppliers. Dinners, which seat 18, are announced through an e-mail list, and always sell out at $75 to $100 a person. Derek’s signature dishes include a fluke ceviche with dashi leche de tigre, caramelized banana, and cashew.
“My favorite from the last menu in January was the roasted eggplant with a truffle and smoked eggplant duchess, with dill, chives, and caramelized onion au jus,” he says.
“For people who book a dinner, it doesn’t even matter what’s on the menu,” Derek says. “It’s more about the journey they’ll be taken on. They know they’ll be exposed to something new.”
Days begin at 5:45 a.m. and can run as long as 9 or 10 p.m., but Derek and Tati say the commute from their Pleasant Gap home isn’t too bad.
“It’s exactly one minute,” Tati says. “We timed it.”
Creating the beautiful cakes is a labor of love for Tati, who pores over details and strives not only for perfection but for meaning for her clients.
“I try to get as much detail as I can to make their cake extra special,” she says.
That attention to detail means she takes fewer orders than she could, but that’s all right with her.
“I do put my full focus on each of them so they come out as great as possible and as beautiful or intricate as I envision them,” she says. “If there is something that is not up to my standards, I am more than willing to redo it or start over.”
Heverly had Tati create a birthday cake for her husband that featured a Dodge Challenger.
“He told me he wanted a Dodge Challenger for his birthday, so I told him that was the only way he was getting one,” she says with a laugh.
“They’re unique,” she says of Tati’s works. “It’s the design and time she puts into it. You know it’s going to be something everyone is talking about.”
Cake orders should be placed a month in advance, farther out for orders during May, when the bakery is flooded with orders for Mother’s Day and graduations. Store hours are Tuesday through Friday 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., closed Monday. T&G
Robin Crawford is a freelance writer in State College.
