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Californian pastry chef Claire Ptak will bake the British royal wedding cake

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Recently it was announced that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle chose pastry chef Claire Ptak, the owner of the East London-based Violet bakery, to make their wedding cake. Why is this news? Not only is Ptak not a Brit (she’s from Inverness, Calif.), she’s been asked to change direction when it comes to what’s typically served on a royal couple’s big day.

According to longstanding tradition (as in forever), a royal wedding cake is a tall, architectural fruitcake of reconstituted dried fruits and raisins and topped with huge drooping floral arrangements befitting a beauty pageant winner. (Prince William and Kate’s showstopper was an eight-tiered iced one, festooned with 900 fragile sugar-paste flowers.) Ptak’s, on the other hand, will leave fruitcake behind.

According to the Kensington Palace Twitter feed: “Prince Harry and Ms. Markle have asked Claire to create a lemon elderflower cake that will incorporate the bright flavours of spring.” It will be decorated with fresh flowers.

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What has the London cake community abuzz, however, is the frosting.

“It’s the magic word: buttercream,” says Valeri Valeriano, who runs Queen of Hearts Couture Cakes in West London with her partner, Christina Ong. The pair has written four books on buttercream.

Here in the U.S., a classic wedding cake is covered in the delicate butter-and-powdered-sugar mixture. In the UK, however, says Valeriano, buttercream is considered a starting point ingredient, a sort of soft, sweet mortar, which is then covered by a layer of stiff translucent fondant or marzipan. On top of that, bakers use royal (yes, it’s called that) icing, a mixture of egg whites and baker’s sugar, to pipe intricate 3-D garlands, latticework, roses and borders. “Buttercream is never used as a proper decoration to make your cake.”

According to reports, Markle and Ptak met when the former interviewed the latter for Markle’s now-defunct lifestyle blog, the Tig. It’s been assumed that hiring Ptak instead of a royal baker was Markle’s decision and, if this is true, there’s something touching about that. While abiding dutifully to the many rules of a royal engagement and marriage, the future princess’ choice of a fellow Californian as their baker — Markle was born and raised in Los Angeles — means that when it comes to the cake, she’ll have something that suggests a little bit of a hometown wedding, albeit one on steroids.

Or maybe Markle was as impressed by the deliciousness of Ptak’s baked goods as I was when I stopped by Violet bakery a couple of years ago. Ptak has made a name for herself in London over the last 10 years by merging a California sensibility — she loves organic, seasonal ingredients — with the fact that the British love to eat cake.

Located in Hackney, a sort of Silver Lake of London, Violet bakery is small, two stories high and smells of things like baking ham, cheese and leek scones mixed with squash, brown butter and sage quiche — and the perfume of just done cupcakes. On the day I visited, Ptak, who spent three years as pastry chef at Chez Panisse before moving to London, had lots to say about the superiority of English dairy products and why salads aren’t on the menu. Most intriguing, she held forth on fruitcake. As it turns out, she’s actually a fan.

To read this article in Spanish click here

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food@latimes.com

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