MILAN, Italy – Two of the biggest attractions at the last three editions of HostMilano have been the the FIPGC Cake Designers World Championship and the FIPGC World Trophy of Pastry Ice Cream Chocolate, organised by the International Federation of Pastry, Ice Cream and Chocolate.
Next year’s editions – which will be held on 19-20 October and 21-22 October respectively – promise to be more spectacular, intriguing, elaborate and colourful than ever, with many significant new features.
As the president of FIPGC, Roberto Lestani himself says. “It will be an extremely rich HostMilano for us, I want it to be an amazing event.”
What are the main new ideas?
The rules have changed, and there is now the chance to bring to the competition at HostMilano artistic pieces and work that was previously prepared ready to be finished at the event itself, live, to demonstrate individual skills. And so because there will be more time, we expect to see even more complex, beautiful and visually striking creations.
Will the Art Gallery be returning, and if so in what form?
It will be an exceptional event, organised in collaboration with Pastry Magazine (the federation’s own publication), and all the best Italian and international pastry, chocolate and ice-cream teams will be there. We’re expecting 50 demonstrations a day.
But there will also be seminars covering all aspects of the profession, from business management and marketing to customer care.
Will students from the hotel schools be talking part?
Yes. Together with MIUR, the Ministry for Education, University and Research, from 21 to 23 November we will be holding the second Italian Hotel Schools Championship, in which 30 schools will take part. The winners, together with other institutes, will be at Host2019 where they will do demonstrations, in what will be very stimulating surroundings for them.
Meanwhile, the selection process for the teams that will be battling it out at HostMilano is in full swing. In September it will be the turn of Australia.
Italy already has its representatives: the winning pastry chefs in the FIPGC Italian championships.
The team that hopes to win the World Trophy of Pastry Ice Cream Chocolate (pictured above), under coach Giuseppe Russi, winner of the 2017 championship, is made up of Milan-born Barbara Borghi, the first Italian woman to reach the final, and who will focus on sugar-paste sculpture and single-portion ice cream, Gianluca Cecere, from the Campania region, who will work on the chocolate and praline sculpture, and Umberto Soprano, from the Lazio region, whose area will be sugar sculpture and the modern cake.
Manuela Taddeo, from the Lombardy region, will represent Italy at the World Cake Designers Championship. “The monthly training sessions have already started,” says Lestani, “and from October the team will meet once a fortnight to share their artistic designs, taste them and, most importantly, work on getting the timing right on the day of the competition.”
