In Her New Cookbook ‘Love Is A Pink Cake,’ Claire Ptak Elevates Baking to an Art Form

For royal watchers, Claire Ptak will forever be known as the London-based California ex-pat who made the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding cake: an Amalfi lemon and Sandringham elderflower confection adorned with clusters of peonies. And yet the Violet Cakes founder had established a reputation in food circles for revolutionizing the world of baking with her seasonal approach to ingredients long before 2018. 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.

As a child growing up in Inverness, California—a town just north of San Francisco whose population hovers around the 1,500 mark—Claire Ptak would spend her August afternoons foraging for huckleberries to turn into pies. “It’s the sort of place where, if you have apples and your neighbor has blackberries, you exchange them,” the Violet Cakes founder recalls now of the free-love community where her parents moved in the ’70s, known for its hippie mentality and rugged Pacific coastline. “I grew up with the idea that fruits were only available at certain points in the year, and it always seemed natural to me that you baked with what you had available.”

After leaving home to pursue a degree in film, Ptak ended up joining the team at Chez Panisse in 2002, where the grande dame of American cuisine Alice Waters instilled her seasonal philosophy into the budding pastry chef. In those days, locals would turn up at the back door of the kitchen with baskets of fragrant Bearss limes in exchange for dinner, such was the restaurant’s commitment to using whatever was available outside its front door. “At that point, no one considered being a chef a fashionable profession, and it’s not what I had envisioned myself doing,” Ptak admits. “I had always enjoyed baking, but I never thought I would make a career out of it. There was just something about Chez Panisse, though. No one was shouting or throwing pans; the way that people moved around that kitchen was almost balletic. It had intentionally been designed to be a beautiful space in which to cook, and that translated to the food. The moment I stepped inside, I never wanted to leave.”