
Once melted, remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly, but keep away from draughts. In a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water (make sure the bottom of the bowl is not touching the water), melt the chocolate and butter, stirring occasionally. Place the skinned toasted nuts into a food processor and blitz until roughly chopped but not a powder. Open the cloth up and carefully lift out the toasted nuts, leaving behind as much of the skins as possible.

Bring up the sides of the towel to make a little satchel and rub the nuts together to slough off the skins as much as possible. Remove the nuts from the oven and turn them out on to a clean tea towel.

(Watch they don’t burn as this will spoil the flavour of the cake.) Toast the hazelnuts on a baking tray until deep golden and the skins are cracking off – about 15 minutes. You can buy toasted blanched hazelnuts but the flavour is inferior as they deteriorate much quicker once toasted and so inevitably taste slightly stale. I recommend using whole hazelnuts with the skins on and going through the process of toasting and removing the skins yourself. Preheat the oven to 150C fan/gas mark 3½ and grease and line a 20cm cake tin with baking paper.
#Vodka whipped cream recipe full#
Now, 18 years later, they have a full pastry team, and I tease Ruthie that I should apply for a job.Ĭr eme fra iche or whipped cream to serve When the other cofounder, Rose Gray, saw me she asked what the hell I was doing there – not only was I terrible at phones, but I belonged in the kitchen. When I first moved to London, I tried to get a job at her restaurant but, at the time, they didn’t have a pastry team, so I ended up answering phones. My friend Ruthie Rogers (the restaurant’s cofounder) always makes each guest feel like the most important person in the room. This is inspired by my favourite cake at the River Cafe. Chocolate hazelnut cakeĬhocolate hazelnut cake. If you haven’t got one already, invest in a small set of digital kitchen scales. Cake is such a positive thing.”Īt Violet we weigh everything, including liquids. It’s such a caring, thoughtful thing to do. “You put so much of yourself into baking something, even if it’s a batch of cookies that takes half an hour. And I thank them very much because my business definitely quadrupled.”Īt the heart of Ptak’s book is the idea that baking is an act of love.

“I felt a real down-to-earth rapport with them. She gave them six options and they chose the lemon and elderflower one. In 2018, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry hired Ptak to bake their wedding cake. The most involved recipe in the book is also her best known. Her love of British baking is still evident in recipes for brown sugar victoria sponge and treacle tart. She loved shooting the Californian half of the book over a balmy week in August 2021 at the wood-cabin home of the late sculptor JB Blunk, the father of a childhood friend, but she’s always happy to come back to London. Seasonality and freshness are important too, as is preserving the integrity of the ingredients – making them “taste more like themselves” by playing with flavours and textures, and lifting them with salts, sugars, acids and fats. “There’s a slightly lighter touch with certain things,” she says of her style of baking. Later, she went back to her roots and embraced a more Californian approach, but with British ingredients.
