I recently returned from a wonderful trip to New York where I had the pleasure of working with a renowned American cake decorator Elisa Strauss. She designed Charlotte York’s second wedding cake for an episode of Sex and the City.
I am always looking for new and exciting techniques and loved her sexy shoe-and-shoebox cake. I emailed Elisa and three weeks later found myself with my partner Steve, on a plane landing in NY to a beautiful sunny day.
Imagine my surprise then, on waking up on our first full day to see eight inches of snow on the ground outside. I’m not known for being tall and I can tell you that stepping off a kerb in NY and watching my foot, ankle and half my leg disappear into the slush, was a bit of a shock.
On the first day I was to visit Elisa in her studio. Steve had worked out a route for me to walk, crossing Central Park. I just had to walk a few blocks along and Bob’s-your-uncle, I should be there. I wrapped up warm and prepared for my assault across the cold and windswept park. Steve insisted I’d be fine if I kept following the map. What the maps don’t tell you (but the locals did) is they don’t reflect the true roads within the park, and I found myself walking alongside a dam, being passed by joggers, praying I was heading in the right direction. Eventually I popped out on the other side of the park and to my surprise I wasn’t far from 87th Street. But on approaching the first building looking for number 102, I saw it was 742. Oh my God! How far was I to walk to get to 102? Anyway I kept going, only much faster as I was already late. On the next block it read 100 – must be a mad numbering system. I thought I must be near, another few paces and Ta-da… 104………………. What! Spinning round like something out of The Exorcist, all I could see around me were apartment blocks, where had I gone wrong? But then I spotted Elisa’s famous handbag cake in a basement window. I went down the dark steps hoping I hadn’t stumbled on the wrong side of town and discovered the buzzer for her studio. Phew!
As a little foot note: Within half an hour of arriving Steve telephoned the studio to make sure I’d got there. He told me later that as he’d watched me leave the hotel he felt like he was watching me go to my first day at school, and was worried and a little guilty he wasn’t taking me. Aaaaah!
Eliza and her team were lovely. I spent two blissful days making a shoe-and-shoebox cake, popping out at lunchtime into a café for a bowl of soup, feeling very much a New Yorker. How quickly we become accustomed to city life. Of course I also did the touristy things expected – Empire State, Grand Central, Statue of Liberty but the most poignant was the September 11th Ground Zero Visitor Centre which is full of powerful images. The most heart-rending thing was listening intently to a lady volunteer talking about some of the people who died that day, and pointing to a photo of a handsome young fire-fighter and explaining that he was her son. I could not stop myself sobbing.
