Representing Ptak's then and now, the new release is really two books in one, with the first half focusing on California and the second on England. Pink seems to be a theme for Ptak, a self-professed cake lover whose second cookbook, Love is a Pink Cake: Irresistible Bakes for Morning, Noon, and Night (available in the US on ), came together in between pandemic lockdowns. In 2022, Ptak also had the honour of making the couple's daughter, Lilibet's first birthday cake – which had the same interior flavours as their wedding cake, but was iced with a princess-like pink strawberry buttercream instead of plain white. And not only were Ptak and Markle fellow Californians, but they would joke about how they both moved to London for their English boyfriends. In myriad ways, the Californian-turned Londoner was the ideal baker for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who as Ptak said, "also cared about the provenance of ingredients". When they met up in person, Markle told Ptak, "It's not only about who is going to make our cake, but what cake you're going for make us." The cake of choice was a relatively unassuming, multi-tiered delight flavoured with Amalfi lemons and an elderflower cordial extracted from flowers harvested at Sandringham House, the late Queen Elizabeth's private country residence. Several years later, according to Ptak, the American actress and her then fiancé, Prince Harry, reached out to her regarding their upcoming wedding, after presumably sampling some of her cakes on the sly. Markle then interviewed Ptak, who clearly left an impression on her. When her first cookbook, The Violet Bakery Cookbook, came out in 2015, Ptak sent a copy to Meghan Markle, who ran a lifestyle blog at the time called The Tig. By 2005, the pair married and moved to the English capital, where Ptak would later open Violet Cakes in a country-like cottage in Hackney. She worked at Chez Panisse for three years, and likely would have stayed longer if it weren't for meeting an Englishman, who convinced her that London's food scene was "really happening". Ptak had already embraced Waters' local foods vision, which she attributes to the "gift" of being from California. Eventually, she became a pastry chef at Alice Waters' legendary Chez Panisse restaurant in nearby Berkeley, after impressing the renowned farm-to-table pioneer with a wild huckleberry tart made from foraged fruit for her job trial. The American chef, author and food stylist started baking at a young age, working in professional kitchens as soon as she could get a work permit at age 15 in Point Reyes, California. In her small bakery-cafe, Violet Cakes, Claire Ptak brings a California ethos to East London, combining her passion for seasonality and simplicity with English-grown ingredients – a combination that would catch the eye, and taste buds, of royalty.
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