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Print The 6-inch cake that pastry chef Casey Shea delivered was a barrel-shaped whirl of salted vanilla buttercream, sequined with sliced berries and candied kumquats. On an early March menu, Shea had presented her customers, who ordered via Instagram, with four cake options: coconut chocolate, banana hazelnut, blood orange with lemon whip and blackberry and a surprise chef’s choice based on what she found at the farmers markets. A good kind of surprise could be uplifting right now, I thought. Springtime was in view. Maybe there’d be some ripe red fruit layered underneath the frosting? Newsletter Get our weekly Tasting Notes newsletter for reviews, news and more. ....
“I used to say I hate making cakes,” Hannah Ziskin says. Now, slices of her slab cakes sell out in minutes, and people drive across Los Angeles for whole cakes in blood orange and carrot, crowned with minimalist flourishes of buttercream and delicate edible flower petals. She wasn’t supposed to be baking for a living anymore. But, as with so much, the pandemic upended everything. When Ziskin, a pastry chef with a long resume in San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2018, she thought she was done with the restaurant industry and its long hours, low pay, and casual harassment. She even learned to code. But when a chef she admired, Melissa Perello, called to talk about a gig at her new Los Angeles restaurant the Michelin-starred chef’s first in the city Ziskin decided to take on one last pastry chef job. Several months later, COVID hit, and M.Georgina shut down. ....