Founder of Sydney’s Gabriela Oporto, infuses her globally famous range of cakes with tantalising goodness using the power of imagination and a dash of Chilean flair.
“Whenever I make a cake, I imagine the person sitting in front of me eating it,” says Oporto, who was born in Australia and raised with a strong Chilean heritage. “I ask ‘how can I make this cake extra special so that the person ordering the cake says ‘oh my goodness, this is amazing’?
"I literally picture the person in my head eating the cake and imagine the answer. By doing that, I put a lot of extra love and extra care into my baking. That’s why the cakes I make feel personalised.”
The baking sensation, who appears as a guest on SBS’s , has been making cakes at home since she was four years old. Yet, Oporto only turned professional in 2017, when she started a cake-making business from her apartment.
Bakealicious’ cakes celebrate Oporto’s Chilean heritage and the traditional milk caramel ingredient, dulce de leche, while elevating like cheesecake, red velvet, chocolate, carrot and Victorian sponge. She also makes vegan and sugar-free cakes, cupcakes and the beloved Latin American favourite, empanadas.
Over the past seven years, Oporto’s popularity has boomed. So much so, her cakes have even been ordered (and enjoyed) by pop music sensations, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles during their Australian tours.
“To make Taylor Swift’s cake, I first thought about her character and personality when designing it. I researched what she liked and found out that the milk bar cake in America – a sponge cake with confetti sprinkles – is one of her favourites.”
I literally picture the person in my head eating the cake and imagine the answer.
This was the inspiration for the Bakealicious Eras Cake which she created for Swift (and later, customers). It is a confetti sponge cake soaked in condensed milk, using a technique adopted from the traditional Latin American dessert, tres leches (milk cake). It also fused the Chilean cake, mil hojas (thousand layer cake, similar to the French version mille-feuille) with the decadent flavour of Chilean condensed milk caramel, dulce de leche.
“I added dulce de leche, because that’s just part of me.
“Finally, I decorated topped the cake with dulce de leche buttercream horns, pastel glitter, and a purple pom pom flower because she’s always wearing beautiful, sparkly dresses. Purple is Taylor’s favourite colour.”
Gabriela Oporto's top baking tips
Over the years Oporto has picked up a number of baking tricks. Dipping into years of experience, the 38-year-old baker advises home cooks to use fresh cream (milk-based or vegan), whenever and wherever possible.
“It’s the one ingredient I can’t go without. You can use cream to fix a lot of mistakes when baking. Whether you make a strudel pastry, a sponge cake, cupcakes or a carrot cake, you can always add a little bit of cream to add moisture and give your creation a real boost.”
Oporto’s love of cream hails from her Chilean culture. She tells SBS that traditionally, Chilean cakes don’t use buttercream, fondant or sugar-based icing. Instead, they’re always smothered with lashings of cream for a natural look and beautiful taste.
“Cream gives desserts a feeling of freshness. You can regulate how much sugar you put into the cream as well, so it doesn’t have to taste too heavy.”
Oporto’s other piece of cake-making advice is to savour the underappreciated ingredient of time.
“One of the key things you have to have when baking is patience,” she says. “I feel like people like they get a bit agitated when they’re making a cake, because they just want to see the results straight away. But sometimes it's all about waiting.
“You need to take the time that’s needed to beat the eggs and the sugar, the butter and the sugar, and so on.”
To become a good baker, you have to experience a lot of failures.
Learning to bake cakes involves trial and error – a process that Oporto’s younger self had to slowly learn over years of cake failures and successes.
“To become a good baker, you need a lot of practice and may have to experience a lot of failures. Baking is not a quick thing to learn. But if you want to learn, you need to keep practising and be determined.
“Cakes that have passion, that are made with love and care, taste amazing. So it’s really worth the effort.”
