Love is a Pink Cake: Irresistible bakes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between

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Violet Cakes began life as a Broadway Market stall in 2008, finding its home as a thriving bakery-café on Wilton Way two years later. An establishment renowned for championing seasonal, sustainable ingredients (long before such principles were the buzzwords they’ve become today), Ptak’s time there ‘had an incredible effect on me,’ she says.

As she prepares to release her latest cookbook, Love Is A Pink Cake, Vogue caught up with Ptak about cutting her teeth at Chez Panisse, falling for British baked goods and why she takes a West Coast mentality with her wherever she goes. Add to that all the imperialism and so on, and we may have to take a moment to remember what we all liked about Britain in the first place. The plan is to ‘get everyone together from that community and have a party,’ which will be ‘really lovely. After months of winter, I dream of the time I can make her Peaches and Cream Angel Food Cake; her Roasted Plum and Brown Sugar Buttercream Cake; Nectarine and Cherry Cobbler; Blackberry and Rose Summer Pudding Sundae; Apricot, Chamomile and Honey Scones; Strawberry and Whitecurrant Coconut Meringue Cake; Raspberries Baked in Muscat Sabayon; Wild Fennel and Roasted Fig Friands; and, oh, her Grape Slab Pie!S.-style scones and serves cupcakes and slices of buttercream-filled and frosted layer cakes that someone like me raised in Chicago wants for their birthday. Or maybe it was 2020, when the country tumbled out of the European Union and into a series of grossly mismanaged pandemic lockdowns, oft-flouted by their authors. The overwhelming majority of the produce from her 16-acre holding in the foothills of the Black Mountains is now dispatched to Skye Gyngell and her team at Spring, but Ptak has known Scotter since the pair worked together at Spa Terminus in Bermondsey, often building her recipes around the literal fruits of Scotter’s labours: take the latter’s jostaberries, a mix between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant, which tart up Ptak’s moreish matcha cake. In this simple dessert, the subtle flavour of pears takes centre stage, flavoured simply with sugar and lemon and topped with a fluffy sponge.

Instead, ‘I was like, okay, well, we’ve got the England shoot, we’ve got the California shoot,’ deciding ‘to split the book up just into two parts’ – and suddenly, ‘it became very personal’: it was clear that ‘this is what this book is supposed to be about. I know so many of these recipes will become favorites baked again and again--a Violet recipe always works perfectly.The UK, she is now convinced, has the best cream in the world, and she’s currently planning a pilgrimage between tea rooms across the north of England.

It was on the merit of those cakes that Ptak came to notoriety: Without the frilly piping, fondant, or stiff sponge of British celebration cakes, hers are neat, intentional messes in the style of the time, with dramatic swoops of icing and arranged with flowers. It’s a slightly less conventional recipe, though, that she counts as her favorite from the California section: tequila pumpkin pie. Pipe a thick ring of coconut icing around the perimeter of the bottom layer to create a dam for the filling. I definitely referenced Chez Panisse a lot when building it,” Ptak, who has an eye for design, notes. What’s in Pink Cake is more specific, less twist-on-a-staple and more out-there (for a given value of “there”): Find not one but two riffs on traditional British summer pudding, or a standard coffee-walnut with Fernet in both the cake and the frosting.

Put the butter and 500g (2 cups) of the icing sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer and beat until smooth. Mocha Buttercream Tiramisu Cake; and since I couldn’t wait for Summer to make it, I decided to give her beguiling Brown Sugar Victoria Sponge a go with some blackcurrant conserve rather than the quick, fresh strawberry jam in Ptak’s.