Pastry Collective
It started at a small table,
with a wooden spoon.
Scroll, and the rest tells itself.
The chef
Hi, I am Nicolaas.
I have spent more than 30 years getting sugar, chocolate and butter into places they were never meant to be, walls, ceilings, occasionally my own eyebrows, and I have loved nearly every reckless, sticky minute of it.
Somewhere in there I picked up a few medals, trained under people far more patient than me, and fell hopelessly, permanently in love with this craft and with teaching it to anyone bold enough to try. You are your own destiny. That is not just something I believe, it is something I have spent three decades proving, one plate at a time.
The long version
What the Ears Missed, the Hands Found
How a sickly farm kid from the Free State who couldn't hear properly became one of South Africa's finest pastry chefs, all of it true.
Chapter 1
The kitchen before the kitchen
I actually grew up on two farms, my parents' farm near Bethulie, and my grandparents' farm near Venterstad. For the first few years of my life I wasn't a particularly promising specimen. Chronic asthma. Ear problems bad enough that for a stretch of my childhood I was functionally deaf, and there were operations to try to fix it. I spent a lot of time indoors, which for a farm kid is its own kind of punishment, all that space outside, and I couldn't go play in it.
My grandmother, Lammie Louw, was Venterstad's most passionate baker, the kind of woman who baked because she loved it, not because anyone asked her to, and she's the one who worked out what to do with a small boy who couldn't run around outside and couldn't hear you properly when you told him to sit still. She pulled me into her kitchen. I couldn't reach the stove knobs. I hung around anyway, watching her make koeksisters, cakes, tarts and pies, and cook hearty food for the family, handing her things, getting in the way in the manner of small children everywhere. My hearing came back eventually, after my grandmother and the rest of the family had prayed hard for it, over and over, a huge miracle from God, they still call it, but by then the kitchen habit was set. It wasn't a hobby I picked. It was the thing that was available to me when everything else wasn't.
My father, Nicky, owned a grocery store in Bethulie town, with a bakery attached; my mother, Rina, worked the shop with him. By the time I was about thirteen, I was splitting most of my time between the farm and Bethulie. I was a big kid, built like a bull, which is where the nickname came from. Everyone at Hoërskool Pellissier called me Boel, and they said it with respect, because by the time I was in my teens I had a head of height and a shot put in my hand on the school athletics track.
Chapter 2
The christening cake that started it
On the athletics track at Bethulie I was the one putting the shot. You crouch with the iron under your chin, lean out over your knee, and then everything comes up at once and the weight goes. Lekker, Boel, the other boys would shout. That was the name I had at Hoërskool Pellisier, and they used it with a bit of respect, mostly because I was a head or three taller than them in my school shoes.
What none of them expected was where I went afterwards. Tracksuit on, straight home, because there was a wedding cake standing there that still had to be finished.
Home was the big green house in Greystraat, across from the NG church. My father, Nicky, had the shop in town. My mother, Rina, helped me in the workroom. I had been in a kitchen since I was small, hanging around my ouma Lammie Louw of Venterstad, the master baker in the family, back when I could barely see over the top of the stove.
It turned into something of my own at about thirteen, when I saw a pink christening cake in a book and could not leave it alone. A day or two later I baked one myself. Nothing went wrong, which felt like permission. That evening there were cars stopping outside the house, people who had heard about the cake and wanted to come and look at it.
After that it did not slow down. By fifteen I had baked hundreds of them, two wedding cakes over one Christmas, and orders were coming in from right across the Free State. I would start a week or so before a wedding. The fruit cake came first, my gran's, the base of everything, and that part I could do easily by then. It was the decorating that took the time. It was always the flowers.
I sat two whole days, morning to evening, to get the chrysanthemums right for one cake.
To make a single flower I would fetch my tools from the kitchen cupboard and start. Watch anyone handle petals that thin and it is hard to believe those are the same hands that fling a shot and a discus around a field and grip a rugby ball on a Saturday.
Not everyone thought a boy who baked cakes was doing anything worth respecting, and there was a word they used for it. It never bothered me.
I have the talent to bake well and I have to develop it. The others have learnt to take me as I am.
There was a girl for a while. She helped me run a cake stall one Saturday and between us we cleared forty five rand, which we thought was a fortune until we counted the hours. It did not go much further than that, and I have never been sure whether it was the stall or how quick I was at the stove that put her off.
I already knew where it was going. Hotel school after matric, then a chef's apron, and cooking for the kind of people whose names end up in the papers.
Chapter 3
The teachers who mattered
I did two years of in-house hospitality training at the Protea Hotel in Bloemfontein afterwards, as planned, housekeeping, front of house, banqueting, back of house, all the usual early rounds, until the day I got into the kitchen and made my first proper dessert. That was the moment I knew where I belonged. From there I went and studied Hotel Management properly, at the Central University of Technology in the Free State, where Chef Sune Niemand was one of my lecturers. She played a huge role in my career, then and for years after.
I got a placement with Linda Kotze, the patissiere at the Park Hyatt Rosebank, and she's the one who actually taught me, nurtured, corrected, pushed. Six months in, I was selected for the Junior South African Culinary Team, competing in Maastricht, in the Netherlands, against pastry chefs from sixteen other countries. Ninety-two platings from a mystery basket, in three hours. I won gold and was named the world's most promising pastry chef, for a white chocolate and cranberry mousse with creme de cassis, a cinnamon cake, creme anglaise and an apple and pear compote. Not bad, in hindsight, for a kid who'd learned to make fudge standing on a chair next to his grandmother.
Maastricht wasn't the only one, either. Over the years that followed I went on to win silver at the EXPOGAST World Championships, and represented South Africa again at the ICA Culinary Olympics, where our team took bronze in the sugar showpiece category and I placed fifth in the world individually. I picked up first and second place for showpiece work at the Salon Culinaire along the way too.
Chapter 4
London, and the year at the Savoy
The prize for winning was a placement at the Savoy in London, and it turned into one of the most important years of my career. The hours were savage, ten in the morning until three the next, most days, and I still found time after all that to make sugar roses at home and sell them back to the hotel for 25 pounds each, because apparently I hadn't learned yet that some limits exist for a reason.
It was only a year, in the end. In the uncertain months after September 11, 2001, when travel seized up and the whole hospitality trade in London went quiet almost overnight, I made the decision to come home.
Chapter 5
Home, and building a name
With Chef Sune Niemand, I opened a little place called @ the Square in Clarens, in the Free State, an artists' town, all-day menu, my first real go at running something myself. Two years of that, and then I joined the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton, working alongside chefs Desmond Morgan and Rudi Liebenberg, which is where Taste magazine found me in 2003 and called me, with what I still think was a fairly generous straight face, a "pastry chef extraordinaire." I was making daily desserts, wedding cakes, high tea for parties of ten or more, and doing demonstrations for anyone who'd watch.
From the Michelangelo I moved to the Saxon Boutique Hotel and Spa, where I spent three and a half years as executive pastry chef, one of the longest single stretches of my career at that point. It's also where I helped open the Saxon International School of Pastry, my first real attempt at teaching properly rather than just showing off, and the direct ancestor of everything I've built since.
Chapter 6
Building the school we actually wanted
Teaching turned out to be the part I couldn't leave alone, and none of it happens without Chef Lesley Jacobs. He's the one who believed in me enough to start running classes out of my garage together, not just as a friend, but as a business partner willing to bet on an idea that was, at the time, exactly as unglamorous as it sounds. A garage with two determined people in it, it turns out, can teach a lot of chefs. That grew into the FBI Chef School and Patisserie Academy, with campuses in Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, and I spent fourteen years there as co-owner and operations director alongside Lesley, diplomas in pastry and culinary arts, six-week courses in everything from wedding cakes to chocolate work, and, eventually, a fair few thousand students who came through those kitchens.
Somewhere in that stretch of years I also baked Nelson Mandela's birthday cake four years running, cooked for Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt and President Mbeki, and built a chocolate rhino out of a ton of chocolate for rhino conservation awareness, still, as far as I know, the largest one anyone's made, along with a full wedding dress made entirely of chocolate. And with my father's help, I worked out how to turn chocolate on a wood lathe, shaping it the way you'd shape timber, to get petal work no piping bag could manage. I still don't know anyone else in the country who does that.
Chapter 7
One last turn in the big leagues
After fourteen years at FBI, I took on a chapter I hadn't planned for: I joined Hyatt South Africa as Group Executive Pastry Chef, and was promoted to Culinary Director a year in, setting pastry strategy and standards across their hotels nationwide. It was the most senior, most corporate role of my career, and I don't regret a day of it. But by February 2026 I knew I wanted something smaller and more hands-on again, the kind of kitchen where you actually know the people standing at the bench with you. Two months later, in April 2026, I opened Pastry Collective.
Chapter 8
Why Pastry Collective exists
Everything above, the ears, the garage, the Savoy, the rhino, two years at an international hotel group, promoted halfway through to run pastry strategy, is the long way of explaining why Pastry Collective looks the way it does. I know exactly what it feels like to be the kid nobody thought should be in the kitchen, and exactly what it feels like to have one person, a grandmother, a mentor, a teacher who actually paid attention, decide you were worth the time. This studio is my attempt to be that person for whoever walks through the door next: no snobbery, no sighing at your technique, just good music, good mess, and a genuine love of the craft. Whether you're chasing your first proper cake or pastry, or you've simply always wanted to try your hand at sugar or chocolate work, you'll fit right in. I promise you, whatever you think your excuse is, I've heard a better one from a fourteen-year-old in Bethulie.
And now