A dough,a rod,an ocean.Praha → America
How a Czech family carried a five-hundred-year-old recipe across the world — and what happened next.
Where it
came from.
Central Europe, long before us.
The chimney cake — trdelník — is older than anyone in this family. It was being baked over open coals in Central Europe centuries before Steve and Tereza were born. Village fairs, market squares, the smell of cinnamon and wood smoke.
Steve grew up with it. Not as a product or a concept — just as food. The kind of food that means something without needing to explain why.
Their first festival booth in the Czech Republic was small. A borrowed grill, a handwritten sign. The line surprised them.
One grill.
A new country.
2018.
They packed what they could. One custom-built grill, a bag of flour, and enough belief to make the move feel reasonable.
Atlanta was the first home. They started with local markets — church fairs, craft fairs, anything they could book. People had never seen a chimney cake. They wanted to know what it was, how it was made, where it came from.
By the end of the first weekend, the dough was gone and the list of questions was longer than the line.
Steve and Tereza answered the same questions all weekend. They didn't mind.
First American booth · 2018
The recipe
didn't survive
the Atlantic.
American flour is different. The gluten content, the milling, the moisture. The dough that worked perfectly in Prague behaved strangely in an Atlanta kitchen. Too dense. Wrong crust. The taste was close — but not right.
They didn't announce this. They just kept adjusting. Testing batches on off-days. Calling back home for measurements that didn't translate. Starting over.
It took months. The recipe they arrived at is not the recipe from home — and it is exactly the recipe from home. The ingredients changed. The proportions shifted. But it tastes the same. Which was the point.
"The flour changed. The water changed. The country changed.
The taste didn't. That was the work."
Then everything
stopped.
Then it didn't.
2020. Festivals cancelled. The booth stayed in storage. There was no plan for this — no contingency, no savings buffer large enough. Just a family in Atlanta, wondering if this was over.
It wasn't.
When festivals came back, something had shifted. People were hungry for real things — handmade food, outdoor markets, things with a story. The first Renaissance faire was Texas in 2022. The line at the booth was longer than ever.
They moved to Florida. The booth became booths. The family grew alongside the business.
Six states.
Every autumn.
Proudly nomadic.
California. Georgia. Ohio. Texas. Alabama at Christmas. Scarborough.
Steve and Tereza have set up the booth in parking lots at dawn, in fields in the rain, in hundred-degree Texas heat. Their children have grown up helping.
The festivals are where the business lives. The website is just a door.
Festival booth · Texas
The grill · Florida
The family · 2023
California faire · 2024
Ohio autumn · 2024
A permanent home on the faire grounds.
For years, the booth went up at the beginning of the festival and came down at the close. The windmill stays. Built by hand at the Texas Renaissance Festival in 2025 — the first permanent chimney cake structure in America.
The kit is
on its way.
Merch is in the shop now — the baking kit follows this October, shipped from our kitchen in Florida.
Join the Kit Waitlist