The best cupcake conditor?

Jonathan David decided on a change in lifestyle, made aliya and now runs a successful bakery

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Jonathan David 521 (photo credit: Courtesy: Shmuel Meirsdorf)
Jonathan David 521
(photo credit: Courtesy: Shmuel Meirsdorf)
If you happen to be in Givatayim street market on a Friday morning and pass a stall selling baked goods, including incredible cupcakes, you are strongly advised to stop and buy one.
Everything in the stall looks, and tastes, delicious. But the cupcakes are special. Made with butter, nuts, best quality chocolate, they taste as good as they look. There are vanilla, lemon and orange with chocolate icing, and a cream-cheese topped carrot pecan one to die for.
Behind the stall and selling his home-baked goods is Jonathan David, who arrived here from Boston in 1997.
He’s an interior designer by training and has done that here plus many other jobs. Now he’s branched out into this new venture and is working hard to show the Israeli market there’s nothing quite like an American cupcake.
He grew up in a suburb near Boston, Natick and gained a degree from Boston College in Communications, followed by a diploma in design from the Boston Architectural Center.
His first job was in advertising as an account executive but he wanted to do something more creative and moved to New York joining a firm of architects and designers, Irvine and Fleming, who created homes for the rich and famous.
“Money was no object for our customers,” he recalls.
“We worked for the daughter of a duke, big businessmen and film stars, even a couple of Kennedys.”
With budgets running into millions and antiquebuying trips to London he feels he didn’t really appreciate how good he had it at the time.
At the age of 33, he decided on a change in lifestyle and became an oleh hadash after having visited Israel many times.
Arriving in Tel-Aviv, he went to Ulpan and then landed his first job, as a kitchen designer with a big company.
“I never saw a penny,” he says. “That was terrible, but otherwise I was having a good time. It was a very carefree period after the Gulf War and I liked the beaches, the night life and the weather.”
He made many friends and subsisted by doing odd jobs like waiting at tables, bar-tending and tutoring in English. And after eleven months he met his partner, Shmulik, then a young medical student, today a consultant radiologist in a large teaching hospital.
After a year he took a course put on by the Ministry of Labor for a technical writer and worked in this for several years. He also returned to his first love of interior design and did some freelance work, creating modest homes for Israelis rather than rich Americans.
When his partner needed to go to Canada on a medical fellowship, Jonathan went too and worked in interior design there. On their return, in December 2009, he decided he was ready for a change.
“I always liked to bake and at home growing up I and my siblings were taught by our mother, a home economics teacher,” he says. “I decided to join the Tadmor course and learn to be a pastry-chef.”
The eight month intensive course covered everything from nutrition and hygiene to the science of storing food and how baking powder works. For five days a week and seven hours a day he delved into the wonders of cake making and decorating, emerging as a fully-fledged “conditor” at the end of that time.
A six-week unpaid ‘staj’ (internship) in a bakery followed and he soon found work at a Tel-Aviv five star hotel, turning out mouth-watering desserts and cakes for the discriminating guests.
After a year, an issue of working on Shabbat came up and he decided he was not prepared to do that. He and Shmulik are Shabbat observant and keep a kosher home. The time had come to find something else.
He decided he would like to be self-employed and a visit one Friday to the local market produced its eureka moment.
“I saw that no-one was selling baked goods,” he says, booked a stall and set up in business.
He made 150 cupcakes and waited. His neighbor, selling halva, told him he would never succeed.
“I discovered that someone had tried selling cupcakes before and they looked beautiful but didn’t taste so great,” he says. “Then my neighbor on the other side, who sells cooked food, told me it takes a while to catch on and I shouldn’t be discouraged.”
He sold about thirty and each Friday did a bit better as people began to know him and realize his cupcakes were very special. He then decided to move on and add brownies and peanut butter squares to his repertoire.
“My goal is to make things you can’t find anywhere else,” he says. “I make cream-cheese brownies from high-quality chocolate with real cream cheese marbled in, and I’ve now branched out to pecan pie.”
He is also a highly talented miniaturist, making exquisite and perfectly executed room boxes and dioramas in twelfth scale. His work is currently on show in the Jaffa Museum of Antiquities and he has exhibited in Hadera, Ra’anana and Tel-Aviv.
He still does the miniature making as a hobby, but for the moment he is immersed in flour, butter and cream, turning out his wonderful baked goods. The stall is beginning to pay off and he is busy making special orders for happy events.
The American cupcake has made aliya and Jonathan David won’t let you forget it. ■