Simple, elegant, effortlessly chic: Those words have reflected Meghan Markle's style, and it also applies to the future Duchess of Sussex's wedding cake. Fruitcake may be the traditional pick for royals — and watercolor, geode, and jet black cakes may be trendy — but Markle and her groom-to-be, Prince Harry, are carving out their own path. They're planning on serving a lemon elderflower cake, Kensington Palace revealed this morning, and they're enlisting the help of a baker known for her seasonally based, sensational flavors.
Claire Ptak is the brains behind Violet Cakes in London, and her background complements Markle's. Like the humanitarian, she's from California, and Ptak says the couple shares her passion for "food provenance, sustainability, seasonality and of course, flavour!" Markle and Ptak have history, too, making this cake all the more personal — she interviewed the baker for her lifestyle site, The Tig, years ago, Kensington Palace tweeted.
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The flavor combination may seem unexpected, but that's exactly what Ptak excels in: delicate, thoughtful pairings that rely on the sweetness of seasonal fruit to shine, rather than refined sugar. Her cookbook exemplifies this ethos, featuring strawberry-ginger poppyseed scones, chocolate-oat cookies sweetened with agave syrup, and a Loganberry-vanilla birthday cake. Ptak's not into food made for Instagram; for her, it's all about taste.
"What’s interesting to me is making the flavor significant. I believe you can really work with flavor in baking, not just with savory food," Ptak told Grub Street in 2015. "That’s what was really interesting to me — not the nuance of building something really visually impressive."
Meghan and Harry's cake will be topped with buttercream frosting and fresh flowers, giving it a homespun, effortlessly chic vibe. Ptak makes hers by folding fresh fruit purees, homemade flower cordials, espresso, dark chocolate, or dark caramel into whipped butter and sugar, according to the Violet website.
Elderflower should add a lightly floral flavor, and if it's turned into a syrup, it should give the cake a slightly sweet, honey-like taste, too. It balances out the zesty citrus of the lemon cake, and it's a nod to the flower's popularity in foods and drinks in the U.K. in recent years. Clearly, Meghan and Harry are aware of the trends; they're just not ruled by them.
The closest you can get to a taste of that cake — if you aren't invited to the wedding, that is — is by trying the lemon drizzle loaf recipe from Ptak's cookbook. Or her lemon yogurt spelt cake recipe, with a dash of elderflower syrup to liven it up. The foreword's written by renowned chef Alice Waters, who mentored the Violet baker in her early years. (Ptak's career started at Chez Panisse in California, before she moved to East London to open Violet Cakes.)
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Early on, Ptak started racking up acclaim, getting named one of "London's rising culinary stars" by CBS This Morning in 2015. Jamie Oliver has called her his "favorite cake maker in the whole world." When Kensington Palace announced Ptak would be the royal baker, chef Nigella Lawson was quick to tweet her support: "Good choice!" (Lawson has hired Ptak as a food stylist in the past.)
Photos of the cakes on Violet Cakes's Instagram account shed some light into Ptak's style — which will likely carry over to the royal wedding cake. Popular UK wedding planning app Bridebook estimates the dessert will cost £50,000 — or roughly $70,005. Violet doesn't disclose its wedding cake pricing, which is listed as available "upon request," though a tiered cake that serves 60 would set someone back £210 ($294).
The exact cost may never be revealed, but on May 19, we'll get to see the final cake, as the couple exchanges vows.
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