One of Chef Hanna's wildly whimsical cake creations is this burger-and-fries combo.

At the helm of Sucré, Tariq Hanna has reinvented what it means to have a sweet tooth in New Orleans.

“The unfortunate truth about the cake world is that we are much like plumbers.”

A surprising analogy perhaps but since he’s been named one of the ten Top Pastry Chefs in America for 2011 by Dessert Professional Magazine, Tariq Hanna knows of what he speaks.

“The materials only cost so much, but it’s the hours of actually scaling, mixing, baking, layering, icing, wrapping, decorating, stacking, delivering and setting up, not to mention the hours spent ahead of time making the flowers, cutouts or figurines, etc., that chalks up the cost,” he said.

“When the client is on board, knowing how much attention to detail goes into a project, they know the final outcome is always spectacular because we tend to go above and beyond their expectations.”

Hanna made a name for himself as a cake maker extraordinaire after a little more than five years in New Orleans. “I moved to New Orleans ten months after Hurricane Katrina, bringing a lot of history with me gleaned for my twenty-year career,” explained the pastry chef at the helm of Sucré, now one of the premier bake shops in the area.

After opening his shop on Magazine Street, Hanna said he learned that there are things New Orleanians tend be adventurous about but cakes are not on the list.

“People were so accustomed to what they had grown up with that after years of perfecting my chiffon and Genoise cakes, I was met with resistance,” he said. The same was true for his salted caramel butter cream cake that he had been baking for fifteen years. But he added, “… once they ate the cake they couldn’t get enough.”

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