Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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144 but I might add hazelnut praline to it if someone wants to go the nut route." After baking and cooling cakes in the fridge, she frosts them and puts them back in to firm up. Then, she adds ganache covered with fondant. "There's nothing prettier than fondant—it looks like alabaster, with that soft matte fin- ish," says Smith, who uses a high- quality imported fondant with a citrus essence that she works until it is very thin, making application easier. Asked about ingredients, she says: "Butter, sugar, heavy cream, chocolate, and eggs—the classic French ingredients. Weddings are not a time for dieting!" Among Smith's repertoire are appliqué leaves made from white chocolate clay with corn syrup, which makes it more malleable. She designs florals with wafer paper—a somewhat newer mate- rial printed with edible inks. She will also use Sugarveil lace, which is merengue powdered sugar and edible gum that is mixed, set into a mold, dried in the oven, then laid onto the cake. She also paints with edible petal dust. Of the wedding cake tradi- tion, Smith says: "I really think it's lovely…it gives a certain focus and [guests] can compliment it and enjoy it. The best part is that drama—when everybody gets up to watch the bride and groom. It's good for all ages—you've got this mix of people, some don't know each other, there are things going on behind the scenes…but the cake always works." Kelly Delaney and Katrina O'Donnell CAKES FOR OCCASIONS For the last 19 years, Kelly Delaney has devoted herself to the mastery of cake making. Though she at- tended Ballymaloe Cookery School hyper-detailed work, she started making cakes more seriously in 2009. For instruction and inspira- tion, Smith turned to Alison Proc- tor's Simplifying Sugar Flowers. "I thought, 'I can do that.'" And that she did. "For a while, I was into more dramatic things, like my cater- pillar cake. I just love the whole engineering side of it." But once she had mastered more technically challenging work, she moved into wedding cakes, which she found enchanting for their elegance. Her very first wedding cake was made for one of her daughters. Now, with seven years of experience under her belt (and innumerable cakes from her oven), she has worked with dozens of brides and truly enjoys the process. "I like getting their palette and theme," she says. "I try to probe them a little to find out what is meaningful to them." Once she has direction, she weds the cake design with the venue. Smith offers clients a selection of flavors as a starting point. She finds most people are content choosing from among those options, but eve- ry now and then she'll get a request for something off-menu, like carrot cake, which had her doing some re- search (at that point, she hadn't had a carrot cake she liked). Eventually, she went with a recipe from English pastry chef Mich Turner, who adds brown sugar and citrus to a tradi- tional French recipe. "It provides a nice contrast to the rest of the cake's heavier flavors," notes Smith. Making a wedding cake is a week-long process during which Smith uses recipes from renowned French-trained pastry chef Rose Levy Beranbaum. She makes a clas- sic chocolate buttercream frosting that "tastes like the inside of a truf- fle—that's [Beranbaum's] recipe in Ireland and the Cordon Bleu in London, she says, "That was more for fundamental training—it had nothing to do with cake design." It was while working at the Ritz Carlton in Boston that she dis- covered her present-day passion. Originally interested in garde- manger and ice and fruit sculpting, she was, nonetheless, placed in the Katrina O'Donnell (left) and Kelly Delaney, Cakes for Occasions owner photographs by Katie Noble