Let them eat cake

Meryle Evans
Posted: September 3, 2010

New York City—Designing a signature dessert for a luxury hotel brand was a piece of cake for Christophe Michalak, head pastry chef at the legendary Plaza Athénée in Paris, one of the Dorchester Collection’s seven prime properties in Europe and the United States. The cake, a deliciously elegant four layer single-serving square constructed from the bottom up with a crispy peanut base, Caribbean creamy chocolate, milk chocolate mousse, and peanut/caramel topping, is iced with white chocolate tinted a different color for each establishment.
To introduce the color-coded confection, a group of Dorchester Collection pastry chefs convened at the New York Palace in the spring for a sweets reception pairing the cake with creations from their own repertoires. Italian cassata with marzipan, ricotta, and candied fruit was a natural for Giglio Imperiale of Milan’s Hotel Principe di Savoia. Jean-François Suteau from The Beverly Hills Hotel whipped up white chocolate and grapefruit gelée tartlets with pink centers to match the hotel’s cake color, as did pastry chef Camille Lesecq of Le Meurice in Paris, who named his pale green “detox maca-rons” for the health protective qualities of their matcha tea with a cream filling and candied grapefruit. Palace pastry chef David Carmichael opted for a spring-appropriate deconstructed strawberry rhubarb Pavlova, and Simon Jenkins of the Collection’s forthcoming Coworth Park on the outskirts of London, opening this summer, focused on warm weather with a refreshing cucumber soup, cucumber/lime sorbet, lime jelly, and mango foam. With another new venture, London’s 45 Park Lane, scheduled for early next year and the company’s goal to build the portfolio to between 15 and 20 by 2015, the Dorchester Collection cake could have a bright, rainbow-hued future.