Let Them Eat Cake
Entertaining December 10th, 2009
A sideboard packed with beautiful cakes is always a particularly festive sight during the holidays—and a great way to entertain. In fact, it is one of the things I most remember about the annual Christmas Eve parties my mother’s best friend Bossy hosted when I was growing up.
In the years before Bossy’s daughters and I were allowed to avail ourselves of the bar, we made frequent trips to the fine English sideboard instead. It was invariably piled with candy dishes of divinity and bourbon balls, silver trays of pecan tarts and lemon squares, stands featuring caramel cakes and pound cakes and an impressive chocolate torte. But the most exciting—and exotic—thing of all was the first Red Velvet Cake I’d ever seen.
These days Red Velvet Cakes are all but unavoidable, but they are still show-stoppers—and they can still be delicious. In fact, the new cookbook, Dam Good Sweet: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth New Orleans Style, has by far the best recipe for one I’ve ever tasted. New Orleans native and noted Washington D.C. pastry chef David Guas has concocted a super-moist cake with rich cream cheese icing and red crumbs on the outside for even more drama.
Bossy’s groaning dessert sideboard was part of a larger “cocktail supper” menu, but you can center an entire party around holiday cakes. Be sure and serve lots of Champagne and silver punch bowls with Brandy Milk Punch or Artillery Punch or both. Hire a great dance band or jazz combo, move the dining room table and roll up the rug, and invite people over for dessert and dancing after a big event like The Nutcracker or an earlier holiday dinner.
On my own sideboard, I include Guas’s red velvet cake, of course, along with a Blackberry Jam Cake from Nancie McDermott’s excellent Southern Desserts (its fantastic caramel icing is a nod to the caramel cakes of my youth), and a Golden Lemon Almond pound cake from dessert guru Rose Levy Beranbaum’s new book, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. Holiday macaroons and a double almond chocolate almond cake from Sucre round out the spread. J.R.
Above left, from left: A double chocolate almond cake from Sucre embellished with fresh raspberries sits on a Bernardaud Grenadiers service plate from Corzine and Company; a William Yeoward Inez vase from Hollyhock is filled with fragrant Christmas greens and white lilies; an antique English silver cake knife (circa 1880) from Corzine and Company rests on Matteo “Folk” linen napkins from Pied Nu; a mercury glass Cody Foster “Season’s Greetings” ornament from Pied Nu; Hollyhock’s William Yeoward “Country” cake stand with red velvet cake; John Derian “Clover” cake stand with Golden Lemon Almond cake from Pied Nu; whipped cream in an early 19th century Georgian footed wine rummer from Hollyhock; diamond cut glass covered jar from The Mercantile filled with blackberries; Vagabond tall glass pastry stand from Pied Nu with double dark chocolate and candy cane macaroons from Sucre; Blackberry Jam Cake on a Frances Palmer pottery cake stand from The Mercantile; William Yeoward Deidra vase from Hollyhock filled with roses.
Shop Corzine and Company, Hollyhock, Pied Nu, The Mercantile, Sucre, and The Stationer on TAIGAN
