Let them eat cake!
Meghan’s hipster wedding secret revealed
FOR generations, royal weddings have been celebrated with a slice of gloriously elaborate tiered fruit cake. No such tradition for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who have abandoned the old favourite for an organic, sustainably sourced lemon and elderflower creation from a Hackney bakery.
The couple, who will marry on May 19, have rejected the white-iced fruit cake chosen by Prince Harry’s brother, father and grandmother, instead treating their guests to a cake with buttercream icing and fresh flowers for decoration.
Made by Violet Bakery in east London, the cake closely reflects Ms Markle’s own tastes. In 2015, she interviewed Claire Ptak, the bakery’s founder, for her lifestyle blog, admitting that she was “fan-girling mighty hard” over the vegan cookies, and that Ms Ptak “has hit the nail on the head with her London bakery serving up delightful treats that have garnered a cult following (in that ever so civilised British way)”.
Prince Harry and Ms Markle have already made clear their ambition to break with tradition for their wedding, with a Kensington Palace spokesman saying the event will be “a moment of fun and joy that will reflect the characters and values of the bride and groom”.
Their choice of cake will mean they will be unlikely to keep the top tier, as is the tradition with fruit cake, which is often carefully preserved to celebrate the birth of a first child.
Slices of fruit cake from previous royal weddings dating back as far as Queen Victoria still occasionally emerge for sale at auction after being treasured by guests for decades.
Ms Ptak, who was born in California and now lives in Lon- don, trained as a pastry chef under Alice Waters and worked as a “food stylist” before opening a stall on Broadway Market to showcase baked goods she made at home. Endorsed by chefs including Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, she opened Violet Bakery in 2010. Staff at the bakery, a small white-washed building opposite a council block on a residential street, said they were “very excited” to have been chosen to make the royal wedding cake. A Kensington Palace spokesman described the bakery as a “culinary gem”, and added: “Prince Harry and Msmarkle have asked Ms Ptak to create a lemon elderflower cake to incorporate the bright flavours of spring. They are very much looking forward to sharing this cake with their wedding guests.” Ms Ptak said: “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be chosen to make Prince Harry and Ms Markle’s wedding cake. Knowing that they really share the same values as I do about food provenance, sustainability, seasonality and most importantly flavour, makes this the most exciting event to be a part of.” Ms Ptak has described her work as “rustic but modern, feminine but not girlie”, saying she had foraged for elderflower on Hackney Marshes. She spent the last royal wedding making cupcakes for a street party in Hackney, and produced fairy cakes with the Queen’s face on them to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.
In 2011, The Telegraph said that the Violet Bakery was “widely considered the best cake shop in London”.
Yesterday, however, it emerged that it had been given a hygiene rating of two by the Food Standards Agency in December, meaning “improvement necessary”, with the bakery saying it was down to making “structural changes to our ventilation system”.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, we learn, are not to have a fruity wedding cake but one in which organic lemon and elderflower figure. This is a matter of some importance. For one thing, a tendency has grown up in the current generation for cake to be the means of interpretation and expression of events both private and public. The anniversary of Magna Carta or the launching of an aircraft carrier are marked by cutting a cake quite as naturally as births, marriages and retirements. Of course, as with Christmas, we take our cue still from Queen Victoria. A slice of her wedding cake baked in 1840 was auctioned a couple of years ago and fetched £1,500. It was a fruitcake, which had probably helped its longevity. Will lemon and elderflower, organic or not, survive a night under the pillow and then decades in a tin so well?