Love Is a Pink Cake

May 1, 2023
Former Chez Panisse pastry chef Ptak famously delivered Harry and Meghan's lemon and elderflower wedding cake at the Royal Wedding. The Violet Cakes bakery owner shares that recipe here, along with her love for pastries both flavored and colored by nature. Peach leaves imbue custard with almond flavor, and fig leaves give a coconutty aroma to some of the summer fruit recipes. Taking inspiration from her native California and adopted British homeland, her desserts run the gamut from more basic cobblers, angel cakes, brownies, and pastry doughs to sweets featuring complex flavors, like blackcurrant and violet sorbet, pistachio green plum cake with candied violets, wild fennel and roasted fig friands, and ras el hanout snickerdoodles. Grape slab pie, which calls for Concord or Fragola grapes that must be seeded by hand, "will take you a long time to prepare" Ptak writes, reassuring that "it will be so worth it to see the purple smiles of your very satisfied friends." Ptak's love for nature's bounty shines through in this collection for fans of farm-to-table baking.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
Ptak (The Violet Bakery Cookbook), the baker behind Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s wedding cake, shares drool-worthy sweet and savory baked goods from her upbringing in California as well as her adopted, and adapted, favorites from England. The bakes are stunning yet achievable; the secret to getting a tender crumb for the four-layer blackberry jam cake is to blend fat with flour rather than first creaming it with sugar, while helpful process photos make the involved chocolate and violet babka buns approachable. Throughout, Ptak shares wisdom that will be treasured by home bakers: the addition of Anejo tequila complements the caramel notes in a pumpkin pie, muffin batter should always be under-mixed, and soaking poppy seeds in black tea releases their floral flavor. She also pays respect to the efforts of American and British growers, highlighting seasonal bounty in recipes for a galette flavored with lime, bee pollen, and pink-fleshed apples from a garden in her home state’s Marin County, as well as a matcha cake made with jostaberries—a cross between gooseberries and black currants—produced by a biodynamic farmer in Herefordshire. Ptak asserts that “baking is, in its own way, a love story,” and her own love shines through. This is a treasure trove.

June 10, 2024

Born in California, where she honed her culinary chops at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, and then moving to England, where she opened Violet Bakery in 2010, food writer and stylist Ptak (The Violet Bakery Cookbook) has a culinary philosophy that reflects both geographic locations. Her latest cookbook perfectly illustrates this with its two sections: California and England. Further divided by time of day, the book includes 75 recipes with a range of sweet and savory treats, including brown-sugar Victoria sponge, double-chocolate sea salt cookies, and old-fashioned doughnuts, all of which embrace the author's core culinary mantra about the importance of flavor over form and using the best possible ingredients. A smattering of gluten-free, vegan, and processed white sugar-free recipes are also folded into the mix. Those new to the kitchen may find Ptak's occasional use of less accessible ingredients such as fernet and jostaberries in her recipes--not to mention her mix of U.S. and British cooking terms--challenging. VERDICT Home cooks with some experience with a whisk and spatula will likely be inspired to branch out into new baking adventures by Ptak's charming, warmly encouraging writing style and methodically laid out recipes.--John Charles

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