VFX icing on her Cake

From a visual effects artist to a cake designer, Poonam’s journey was no cake-walk.

What she does today and what she was meant to be are poles apart. Poonam Maria Prem has been a biotechnologist bitten by the visual effects bug and she became the VFX designer for Oscar-winning The Golden Compass and Life of Pi, but never did she know then that a whisk and a rolling pin was her calling.

Now, a full-time baker, Poonam is pretty happy managing her firm Zoey’s Bakehouse, named after her daughter. “I had a fulltime job at Rhythm and Hues Studios, an American visual effects and animation company that bagged the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for The Golden Compass and Life of Pi. But I had been baking for long. Being in a creative field, I always tried putting up something creative onto cakes as well. With exposure to reality shows on larger-than-life cakes, I started making such cakes for my family and colleagues,” she explains. The life-changing event happened three years ago. “I have been looking for a birthday cake with animals for my daughter when I realised that Hyderabad lacked heavily in the genre of pastry art. That one cake sowed the seeds for what I am today.”

Quitting a well-paid job for something she was not quite sure of —wasn’t it difficult Poonam says, “I have worked as VFX artist for 10 long years. It’s a fantastic field, extremely creative and ever evolving, but like any other job, it gets tiring and my work-life balance was a mess. As each year passed, my work hours increased. At times, I would leave home before my daughter woke up and returned only to find her asleep; I didn’t want to miss being a mother. Also, I didn’t want to be one of those who left job and did nothing; that would have made me very cranky.”

While working on the VFX of Percy Jackson 2, she had put up a Facebook page for fun which turned out to be a hit. “I realised my page had quite a big number of visitors, I started slowly getting calls from people interested in buying designer cakes. I was doing a double shift — long hours at office to come back home and start whisking eggs at night while Zoey slept,” recalls Poonam, whose client list include a few politicians, TV actors. She laughs, “The best part is that they never say their name while ordering the cake; we come to know only when the cake is picked up.”

Making a mark in the bake world is no cakewalk, she says. “Cake decorating is not easy and India is not self-sufficient in good raw materials. Sourcing things and speciality tools from around the globe is a challenge. I am a self-taught artist, but it has taken hours, months and years to reach where I am. For some who might think that cake decorating comes naturally, it really doesn’t; it’s ever-evolving and one needs to keep up with the market trends. Very similar to the fashion world,” Poonam signs off.