Let them eat cake
Meryle Evans reports.
| More Front Burner in this issue |
| Discovering America bite by bite |
| My dinner with the pope |
| Beery endings |
| Beef, bees, and buffalo |
| Sustaining farms |
New York City—According to myth-busting historians, Marie Antoinette never uttered that infamous phrase, but the Viennese born Hapsburg archduchess came from a family of royal feinschmeckers who doted on Vienna's elegant tortes. So to mark the publication of a new biography of the ill-fated queen of France's offspring, Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter, author Susan Nagel enlisted Austrian chef Kurt Guttenbrunner to create a cake suitable to the royal court. Guttenbrunner, who tempts New Yorkers with classic Esterhazy, Sacher, and Klimpt tortes at Manhattan's Café Sabarsky in the Neue Galerie for German and Austrian Art, obliged with his newly confected Marie-Thérèse torte, a palace-worthy vanilla cake with chocolate ganache, brandied cherry swirled filling, and milk chocolate glaze. Why those ingredients? "I really liked the contrast of the softness of the milk chocolate exterior and the tough exterior Marie-Thérèse had to present," Guttenbrunner explains. "I also wanted to reflect her unique character, so I used a special technique—cutting the cake in two inch strips and wrapping one around the other—to make all of the layers vertical instead of the traditional horizontal."
Unveiled at the book launch, the torte was then served at the cafe to celebrate Mother's Day, an occasion fortunately more upbeat than Marie Antoinette's farewell to her child in prison.
