A pair of young entrepreneurs from Belsize Park are at the forefront of the next baking craze

Cupcakes are so 2005, macaroons very last year, and whatever happened to cake pops?

Now a Belsize Park baker is betting her savings on choux pastries being the next trend in sweet treats.

Instead of partying like most twentysomethings, Victoria Reid spends every spare hour whipping up batches of prettily decorated choux buns in the kitchen of her Eton Avenue flat.

She and her 21-year-old business partner Nadia Padidar launched their online ordering service Choux just six weeks ago and are already filling orders for birthday parties, engagement dos and corporate functions.

The pair met while training at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in Bloomsbury Square. “It was a very intense training and Nadia also studied pastry in Paris for nine months where choux pastries are really popular,” says Reid, 26. “It was while I was away with friends in Paris that we had a big conversation about food trends and one said that different flavoured choux pastry were really big in the city. I got back to London, looked around and couldn’t see anything similar, so I asked Nadia to come and help me set up the business.”

If cup cakes are ideal for children’s parties, and macaroons suit adult get-togethers, Victoria believes choux pastries – a hollow ball of pastry made of butter, water and flour filled with coffee, chocolate, lemon, strawberry, passion fruit, salted caramel or peanut-butter cr�me p�tissi�re – sit somewhere between the two.

“They can be a canap� at parties, or work for a five-year-old’s birthday with glitter on the icing. Most English people know �clairs and profiteroles, but instead of being filled with cream these have a custard-type filling called cr�me p�tissi�re.”

She added: “Trends in pastries and cakes have changed so much in the last few years. Big companies use them with a personalised message to say thank you to their clients, celebrities order them for parties and weddings.”

The duo fill every order by hand, but hope to expand by renting a commercial kitchen and hiring some friends from Le Cordon Bleu. They would like to get their wares into a major department store such as Selfridges.

“I have always loved cooking and wanted to do something with food,” says Reid, who has ploughed her life savings into the business. “We both really love what we do, which is lucky because we work long hours. My friends and family have eaten a lot of choux as we tried to get the product right. But it has been very rewarding and I am prepared to do anything to make it work.”

Choux delivers by courier to most areas of London. www.choux-london.co.uk