OK, here's my latest cake from the Contemporary pastry team.
- When: March 3, 2019
- Where: California Gill
- Size: 6-inch
- Flavors: Vanilla cake with chocolate chips + layered chocolate ganache and peanut butter buttercream frosting.
- Price: 179 magical dollars
I wanted to surprise my friend with a California-themed cake including a lot of references to the Monterey/Central Coast area where she used to live, like a rocky coast with Cypress trees, an otter and California poppies. This is the inspiration pic my husband drew for me:
And these are the instructions I sent to the Contemporary's cake team in an email:
"
Size: 6 inches
Cake Flavor: Vanilla with chocolate chips
Cake Filling: Layered chocolate ganache and peanut butter
buttercream (not mousse)
Design: SEE ATTACHED PDF
- Cover cake in turquoise fondant extending down over the cake board and trimmed to look like a pool of water surrounding cake
- Jagged gray fondant rocks surrounding base of cake
- 3-D green Cypress trees encircling sides of cake (frosting, fondant or....? No screen prints, please!)
- Top covered with orange California poppies (made from sugar or fondant but not frosting).
- Brown fondant sea otter floating on his back on the 'pool' of fondant on the cake board, holding a shell. Little ripples in fondant to indicate motion."
Getting this cake made was like pulling teeth! Chef Brian is on some kind of hiatus, and the person I was working with couldn't or wouldn't understand what I wanted. First they said they couldn't sculpt an otter and that the only tree screen print they had was the Tree of Life (note that my PDF said "3-D trees" and my email instructions literally said "No screen prints" on the trees!).
Then, magically, the otter and piped trees were OK and I was quoted $119 for a 6-inch cake, but the only sugar poppies they had were the red-and-black
Wizard of Oz kind. Which, of course, look nothing like orange California poppies. So I asked if they could paint the poppies orange. (A sort of reverse Queen of Hearts situation there!) Yes, but the centers would be black and it would cost $30.
Could they paint the centers orange too? Yes, but now the cake would be $179.
This is what I got:
I thought the otter was fabulous—very cute, and the detail on the shell was fantastic. The colors were nice and bright. The ripple of fondant extending over the cake board was exactly as I wanted it. And the cake was delicious! I was happy they'd used the peanut butter buttercream under the fondant too, instead of vanilla, and it tasted great.
I was a bit surprised that they'd casually tossed multicolored sprinkles around a cake that the requester clearly had a specific vision for based on her Type A instructions, but it didn't bug me too much.
Mostly, though I was shocked by how dinky my $179 cake was! Every other fancy fondant-covered cake I've had made—at the Contemporary and elsewhere—has been the tall, 4-layer kind. This was a stubby 2-layer cake like the ones you get at the grocery store. It threw off the proportions of the rocks and the trees too, so they didn't look as impressive as in inspiration image. I guess from now on I need to add "Four layers" to my rocket-schematic level of detail when I request a cake.
Fortunately, I happened to catch the Private Dining contact on a Saturday when we could have most of our 16-message correspondence over the course of one day, rather than several days or weeks. But considering that both my recent cake orders from the Yacht & Beach Club took one phone call apiece, required exactly zero begging/pleading, and turned out exactly how I wanted them, I don't think I'll be working with the Contemporary anytime soon if I can help it.
