Katalin Nagy

Professional Recipe Developer · Food Writer

Experience

I am a professional recipe developer with 10+ years of hands-on experience creating recipes, testing, and publishing baking content. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to develop recipes for Silicomart and several other brands, showcasing their ingredients and tools in ways that are both inspiring and genuinely useful to home bakers.

Every recipe you see on Spatula Desserts is personally developed and tested by me. Unlike many other bloggers, I do no recipe outsourcing, no AI, no shortcuts!

My recipes are step-by-step, trustworthy, and built for every level, precise where it matters, forgiving where it doesn't, and always honest about what is actually happening in the kitchen and why.

I also teach online baking classes, small-group sessions designed to help home bakers build real skills in a fun, guided environment. Teaching is something I feel strongly about. Small groups mean every participant gets real attention, answers, and a learning experience rather than just watching someone bake on a screen.

Here, I am, posing after one of my macaron classes.

My goal in every class is the same as my goal on this blog: to make baking feel approachable and understandable, not intimidating. Teaching people how to bake is genuinely one of the most satisfying parts of what I do.

Beyond Spatula Desserts, my food writing reaches a broader audience through Yahoo, where I cover everything from dessert recipes and roundups to culinary culture and emerging food trends.

Writing for Yahoo pushed me to think beyond dessert recipes and look at food through a wider, socio-cultural lens: what people are craving and why, what is trending, what stories are worth telling, and why certain foods capture a cultural moment.

It is a different kind of writing from recipe development, one that requires me to connect the dots between the kitchen and the world outside it, and I genuinely love that challenge.

Education

I graduated with an economics degree and spent over a decade working in market and consumer research for large-scale international companies, including Mondelēz International.

That meant designing and running focus groups, in-depth interviews, and large-scale quantitative studies to understand the consumers' experience and preferences. I ran product tests where real consumers evaluated taste, mouthfeel, appearance, and overall liking, and translated those findings into insights that shaped actual product decisions. That kind of training gives you a very different relationship with food. I learned to think analytically about why something works and what drives certain consumer behaviors and preferences. I bring this corporate background to Spatula Desserts more than I care to admit.

Throughout my earlier professional career, baking was always my safe space, a hobby I deeply admired and constantly wanted to get better at. It helped me through stressful periods and was often the only thing that could truly switch my mind off.

That passion eventually pushed me to invest in proper baking training at pastry schools and programs in Europe. Understanding the science behind baking changed everything. I finally had a framework for why things worked and why they didn't.

But the deepest knowledge came later, from sheer repetition. Over time, you can tell by the smell and the way the edges look whether something needs two more minutes or is already done baking.

And then there are your questions. Honestly, I've learned as much from the people who read this blog as from anything else. When someone asks why their cake sank in the middle or how to properly cream butter with sugar, it forces me to explain my recipes more clearly and sometimes go back to the kitchen to test something I thought I already understood.

I am also, unashamedly, a professional food taster. I have never once walked past a promising-looking bakery while traveling without going in. Every trip is partly a research mission: tasting, analyzing, pulling apart flavors and textures, and thinking about how I could recreate this at home, and how I could make it even better. Some of my favorite recipes on this site started life as a bite of something extraordinary somewhere in the world.

Here I am taste-testing in Paris. We missed our flight connection and ended up with a 12-hour layover, which, honestly, was the best thing that could have happened. We visited four bakeries. Zero regrets.

Personal

Spatula Desserts is a family project, and none of it would look or feel the way it does without my husband Balazs, who is behind the camera for all the food photography and video production on the site.

Balazs was my biggest supporter before I had any success. Before the website, the followers, or before it made obvious sense to anyone from the outside. He believed in what I was doing when it was still just a passion project. He made late-night grocery runs more times than either of us can count when I had run out of an ingredient mid-recipe. He never once complained.

When we eventually made the decision to leave corporate life and focus fully on Spatula Desserts, everything shifted. He went from supportive husband to full business partner.

Outside of work, we play tennis, enjoy cooking and BBQing, are always in some sort of renovation project, and have a soft spot for feeding, rescuing, and neutering stray cats to give them a better life.

We also love traveling together, and wherever we go, food is always at the center of it. We eat our way through every trip with genuine curiosity, not just for the pleasure of it but because that constant exposure to different flavors and food cultures is one of the biggest sources of inspiration for what ends up on this site.

Here we are taste-testing in New York (at a fancy Korean bakery), Danish pastry in Copenhagen, eating an entire Japanese cheesecake somewhere between Osaka and Tokyo on the train, and trying the famous ice cream brioche in Sicily.

Featured Recipes by Katalin

I must admit, I like eating and baking equally! Unless I passionately fall in love with the flavors and textures of a dessert, you won't see it on my blog! Here are my current favorites;