Coffin Cakes!/ by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor and Cookbook Coauthor
A couple of nice things have happened. For one thing, a small team of pastry bakers has moved back into the old pastry production bakery in the back of the Dahlia Lounge. When the new pastry and bread bakery was completed in South Lake Union (where Serious Pie Westlake is located), all the bakers moved over to those nifty new digs. Which was great… BUT it left any empty space in the Dahlia. Since my little test kitchen is tucked away behind the Dahlia’s pastry bakery, we missed them very much when we (Julie, Beth, and myself) were back there testing recipes every day for the Dahlia Bakery Cookbook. We missed their advice, to be honest we missed borrowing their tools and ingredients, but most of all we missed their high spirits and their delightful presence.
The good news is- a few pastry bakers have been moved back to the Dahlia to do the delicate finishing work for the Dahlia Bakery: icing and decorating layer cakes, decorating cupcakes and cookies. I’ve been back in the test kitchen most days the past couple weeks, doing a little testing and retesting for the book. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like the pastry bakers bring a vital energy back to the Dahlia. And I love watching them work.
The other fun thing is: it’s almost Halloween so the decorating work is wild, wacky, and fun! Look at these “Coffin Cakes,” (photo top.) I was entranced watching Kelsey put them together, step by step, with her paint brushes, tool box of paste food colors, parchment decorating bag, and all the other tricks of the trade. Stop by the Dahlia Bakery sometime soon to check out the spookalicious treats the whole Dahlia Bakery team has been hard at work on. If it’s still on the Dahlia Bakery lunch menu, pick up a cup of Chef Brock’s jambalaya- it’s delicious.
RSS Subscribe