Pallés Ana - From the Bakery of Afternoon Tea: Book of Cakes

Copyright 2013 by Ada Palls and Ana Palls

All rights reserved

Cover design, styling & editing by Natalie Fauble

Published in the United States by

A Piece of Conversation Publishing
P.O. Box 270724
Louisville, CO.
www.apieceofconversation.com

Palls, Ada and Palls, Ana
From the Bakery of Afternoon Tea: Book of Cakes 1st ed.
Book Industry Study Group
1. Cooking / Courses & Dishes / Cakes
CKB014000
ISBN: 978-0-9882965-2-7

Read the Afternoon Tea Blog

Other Titles by the Authors:

From the Bakery of Afternoon Tea: Book of Pies
Everyday Alchemy: Transformative Cooking With Herbs

Acknowledgements

Afternoon Tea was born from the love and support of our families who believed in our dream of offering wholesome, homemade goodness to the community. We dedicate this book to our family, friends and customers who never failed to support, encourage and inspire us throughout the years. Our heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to all of you for generously sharing your lives, celebrations and milestones with us all along the way.

Most of all, we'd like to thank Ana's daughters, Natalie Fauble and Elizabeth Yelen, whose talents and hard work made this book a reality. We never could have done it without them.

Now let's have some cake!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FROSTINGS

INTRODUCTION

Beautiful cakes! Lavish cakes! Big or small, frosted or plain, to eat cake is to indulge in a little bite of heaven.

Everybody loves cake. Rich and decadent, or light and fluffy, cakes are a gift and a party all in one. Cakes are a luxury...large, sumptuous and stately, and always mean that some kind of celebration is at hand. A dessert table would look very sad indeed without a large, generous cake sitting in the center like an elegant grand dame.

To bake a cake is to make something special. We bake cakes in someone's honor, to commemorate an event, or to show our families our love and appreciation. Cakes are the way we pay tribute to the people and special moments in our lives. Time and care and effort have been put into making a cake worthy of the occasion.

Rich, fluffy layers of cake and luscious frosting is the stuff of dreams. A beautifully decorated birthday cake is nothing short of magical, and there is nothing quite as tempting as a creamy slice of cheesecake. A piece of cake just makes you feel warm, loved and happy.

At Afternoon Tea, cakes were huge business. Every weekend was a parade of cakes for birthdays, weddings, bar mitzvahs, grand openings, anniversaries, dinner parties or ribbon cutting ceremonies. Whatever the occasion, a cake just always seems like the right way to celebrate it.

From southern classics to winning flavor combinations, these cakes have stood the test of time. We have been making these recipes for the last 30 years or more because they have proven themselves countless times over with our customers and with our own friends and families. Whether you're whipping up a batch of cupcakes, or attempting your first 3-layer cake, these recipes will be the ones you can count on every time, just like we do. They're just as welcome and delightful today, as they were when we started our bakery.

We hope you enjoy our cakes and come back again and again to try a new one at your next celebration. Happy everything!

AFTERNOON TEA

In August of 1986, sisters Ana and Ada Palls opened the doors of Afternoon Tea bakery in Miami, Florida, offering classic home-baked cakes, pies, cookies, breads and other tasty goodies.

We didn't have any experience or training in the bakery business at all. We were just two young women who loved to bake from scratch and decided to do what we loved for a living.

We opened the doors of our bakery quietly, without any fuss or fanfare, but we did have a counter stocked with plenty of our home-baked specialties. We held our breath and waited for customers to find us.

It wasn't long before people began discovering our bakery, and it was an instant love affair between us and our customers right from the start. Other home-bakers started spreading the word: "If you want a home-baked cake or pie as good as your own, you have to go to Afternoon Tea!"

In those tentative early days of the bakery, what scared us the most were frosted layer cakes. Not that we hadn't baked plenty of them through the years for our own family birthday parties, but a "professionally decorated cake" was a different story altogether.

We naively considered not offering frosted layer cakes at all. Luckily, we only seriously entertained that thought for maybe two seconds, at the most. Good thing, too, because iced layer cakes were to comprise a huge percentage of our business.

Since we decided to boldly move forward with cakes, Ana and I thought it would be wise to enroll in some cake decorating classes right away. We simultaneously tended to our brand new shop during the day, and went to classes at night, in order to provide the kind of cakes our customers were looking forbeautifully decorated homemade cakes.

We quickly discovered that Ana had quite a talent and artistic flair for it, and besides roses and other standard decorations, she was soon creating elaborate scenes and cartoon characters on cakes upon request. A local parish brought her the architectural blueprint of their newly built church that was about to open, as well as a picture of their original stained glass design. Ana did a technically amazing masterpiece of recreating both drawings on a couple of full sheet cakes for their ribbon-cutting ceremony. It was the first of many more to come.

Then we started getting requests for sculpted cakes. King Kong, volcanoes, airplanes, a cowboy boot, and even a machine gun peeking out of a violin caseeach new cake was a challenge in creativity and assembly.

And then there were wedding cakes, which required not just talent, but nerves of steel to assemble the most important cake in a woman's life 4-stories high without incident. Since all of our icings were made with only butter (no shortening) and we were delivering them all over Miami in the scorching heat, we had at least a couple of close calls.

There was the time we delivered a wedding cake to a lovely hotel banquet room on Biscayne Bay in 100+ degree heat and watched helplessly as the borders slid down the sides of each cake tier. No amount of air conditioning or dry ice in our delivery van was going to keep that frosting from melting that day. We arrived at the hotel with the cake on a rolling cart, and Ada immediately commandeered the hotel kitchen. "Where is your walk-in freezer?" she asked. They must have seen the panic in her face, because none of those chefs questioned her for a second. They pointed the way, and Ada wheeled the cake right inside. Pastry bag in hand, and extra frosting in a container always along for the ride, Ada made quick repairs, piping on a new border and letting the cold freezer firm up the butter frosting just in the nick of time for the reception.