Goshua

[ Foodie passion / Corporate Experiences ]

The joy of sweet treats: a journey through traditional desserts with five pastry chefs

Dessert as a gastronomic balancing act.

Some books are made to sell and some are made for sheer pleasure. This is one of the latter. Goshua has been filling clay jars with cuajada, rice pudding and custard since 1960, and wanted to celebrate ten years of El Club del Postre without inventing a story: the story was already there, in the milk of Latxa sheep, in lemon and cinnamon, in the memory of a post-war Pamplona. Our task was to give it shape.

Five desserts, five ingredients, five friends

We conceived the publication from the ground up: a structure in which each of the house's five signature desserts meets the ingredient that defines it and a chef friend who reinterprets it. From there we built the context — the voice, the pace, the palette, the silence between pages — and designed a book that reads like a long, unhurried conversation after dinner.

For us, the images are the most intimate part of the project. We didn't photograph the recipes; we interpreted them alongside their creators. Each proposal by Virginia, Sylvain, Joanna, Iñaki and Helena became a still life. Photography that interprets rather than documents. We looked to the classical still life without trying to imitate it: the single plane and deep ground of Sánchez Cotán and Zurbarán, a light that turns the ingredient into a portrait, and the restrained colour of the Dutch table, so that light can do its work on glass and earthenware. The gaze, however, is of today.

A book about desserts could not be launched in silence. It was presented at the Museo Universidad de Navarra, with the voice of Raquel Andueza and the theorbo of Jesús Fernández Baena placing the baroque at the service of the cuajada: the same sensitivity, the same balance, the same care for the right measure. We designed the evening and filmed it, and the footage holds what the book could not fit on paper: a room listening in silence before dessert arrived.

A night to listen to dessert

A book truly exists the first time someone opens it in front of others. That night was this one: the five chefs at the same table, Raquel Andueza and La Galanía setting the moment to music, and a hundred and thirty people meeting the book before anyone else. We designed the evening and filmed it.