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Thursday, October 24, 2002

By Suzanne Martinson, Post-Gazette Food Editor

Wanted: Hard-working person willing to toil long hours, starting early in the morning. Short fingernails and strong back required. Top-quality work under extreme time pressure a prerequisite. Must have artistic ability.

Julie Walsh would be a shoo-in if she answered our ad for a pastry chef. The London cake baker for the rich and famous has an entry on her resume that nobody can match -- she created Queen Mother Elizabeth's 100th birthday cake.

	Julie Walsh of Cordon Bleu London creates a floral arrangement to decorate a cake at a class at the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

In August 2000, Walsh made the cake that was wheeled into the palace drawing room for the queen mother and the royal family. It featured a pictorial history of the life of the woman devoted subjects called the "queen mum," mother of Queen Elizabeth II. She was "short and sweet," says Walsh.

Walsh talked enthusiastically about that career highlight last week when she visited Pennsylvania Culinary Institute, Downtown. She created a breathtakingly beautiful cake to demonstrate English techniques to the school's advanced pastry students -- certainly much less pressure than being received by the queen mother. "There was a long line of people in formal dress, and there I was in my chef's whites."

Walsh's proud mother lived long enough to watch her daughter on the telly from her hospital bed. She died of a brain tumor two weeks later.

The cake must have been nothing short of spectacular. The queen mother, who died in April, was the patron of the Craft Guild of Chefs, which bought the ingredients for three tiers of four-sided, 18-inch-tall layers.

The cake itself was the traditional Victorian fruitcake, made with currents, raisins, sultanas (white raisins), glace cherries, candied orange and lemon peel, candied pineapple, whole almonds and enough spirits to propel the Royal Navy -- stout, Courvoisier, Cointreau and, in the frosting, gin, which the queen mother favored.

On the first tier, Walsh painted watercolors of the 100-year-old as a baby, a teen, a new mother and a grandmother. The second tier portrayed her four residences -- Windsor Castle, Clarence House, Buckingham Palace and the Castle of Mey.

The last tier spotlighted her favorite charities and hobbies, which included racehorses and her beloved Corgi dogs. Walsh painted the Queen Mother's favorite dog, who had passed on. "I don't know if she recognized it," the chef says.

Hard to know what to do for an encore.

Discreet treats

But Walsh is used to challenges. And our ersatz classified ad doesn't even mention the problem-solving skills she needed to create a life-sized Wurlitzer out of chocolate.

"It had to play music, too," says Walsh, who slipped a CD player inside the hollow chocolate shell and plugged it in. Behind the intricate chocolate mesh in the 5 1/2-foot-tall chocolate "player" were 30 pounds of M&Ms, which spewed out for the children at the wedding reception to enjoy.

All in a week's work for the 35-year-old Walsh, cake maker for royalty, pop stars and commoners -- and a teacher, too. She is head patisserie chef for Le Cordon Bleu London, the classical French cooking school where she has worked for seven years.

The Queen Mother's cake put its decorator in the spotlight, but strictly mum's the word for other celebrities. She can't talk about the work she does because the rock star or the lord and lady won't hire her again.

"Some of them won't even let me put a picture of their cake in my album because they don't want me making money on their name," she says.

One celebrity couple was particularly anti-publicity. The bride was out of sorts after the press carried news of her wedding dress, and then the gossip papers had an item about the wedding cake.

"I got a curt phone call," Walsh recalls. "The assistant thought I leaked the story. I told her only three people knew about the cake -- the bride, bridegroom and me -- and I didn't tell."

The gossipy story was inaccurate, too.

Though most of Walsh's customers are commoners like the American bride and the foreign diplomat who laid out the $5,500 for the chocolate Wurlitzer, she also works for the aristocracy and has visited many a palatial place to confer on cakes. "You go to them -- they don't come to you," she says.

One of her favorite clients was the wife of an adviser to Princess Diana. The woman liked to surprise her husband with special cakes. Among Walsh's creations: a cake carved into a Bentley car; a chess set made of cake; and a cake that looked like a stack of books that was topped with an edible replica of his Toby mug.

'It's a vocation'

Walsh made her own wedding cake -- five tiers, rolled fondant with lilies, jasmine and ivy-- and she still smiles at the result, though the marriage ended after five years. "It a tough trade to be married in," she says. The pastry chef is usually the first person in the kitchen and often can't go home until after the dinner service.

"It's a vocation -- you have to love what you do. I am quite passionate about what I do."

She promoted that vocation last week at Pennsylvania Culinary, which recently merged with International Culinary Academy. The school is endorsed by the Le Cordon Bleu Academie D'Art Culinaire de Paris, founded in 1895, and local graduates receive Le Cordon Bleu diplomas, which Walsh describes as "very useful today in America and Europe to show a standard of excellence."

In one 7 a.m. class, she demonstrated how a single-layer pound cake could be into turned into yin/yang parts -- "two cakes for the price of one," she jokes in her distinctly English accent. To a writer the cakes looked like two beautiful giant apostrophes. Walsh iced them with rolled fondant, then created flowers with what the English call "sugar" and Americans know inelegantly as "gum paste."

The orchid, roses, stephanotis and leaves looked so real they invited an inquisitive nose. Though they appeared fragile, they felt like porcelain. With the deftness of a pro who can make the intricate look easy, Walsh twisted and turned, pushed and pulled to put together mini bouquets. "It would be good to have eight hands," she says.

Despite the early hour (good training for chefs who may someday be up at 4 a.m. to bake breads for hotel breakfasts), the 14 advanced students -- about equally divided by gender -- seemed enthralled.

The cake looked simply too beautiful to eat.

In England, as in America, wedding couples often save one layer for their first anniversary. (Gum paste flowers last almost forever.)

Other traditions differ. "In England, pastries or sorbets are purchased for dessert, and only a small taste of wedding cake about an inch square is served with coffee."

Coffee? Don't the English drink tea? "We have more Starbucks in London than you have here," she says.

Her eyes lit up when she heard about Pittsburgh weddings' popular Cookie Table. "I heard someone say she was going to make 'wedding cookies,' and now I know what she meant."

Walsh, a horse lover and dog lover who figured she'd work with animals, went into chef's training at 16, later studying chocolate in Switzerland and sugar in France. At one time, she worked full time at a hotel and, as co-owner of a shop in Windsor, made as many as 30 wedding cakes on a weekend.

She's learned to expect the unexpected. When a bride picking out a wedding cake saw her fiance pick up the newspaper to read the football scores, she threw her ring at him and stomped out.

Another time, on the way to the reception, Walsh's hatchback was rear-ended. "After the shock had worn off, and the police had sorted out the accident, it took me an hour before I could bear to look in the cake boxes," she says.

Sure enough, the cake had plowed forward and was a mess. "I turned the bad side to the wall and called the bride. 'Have you lost any of the tiers?' the bride asked."

No, she hadn't, and she was able fix it. Today, Walsh packs her cakes in Styrofoam, pads them with pillows and a duvet and typically arrives at 10 a.m. for a 3 o'clock wedding, loaded with extra flowers, frosting and gum paste.

Walsh told the young culinarians that you remember your failures much more vividly than your successes. "You can make the best cake in the world, but if the decorating doesn't look right, that's what people will remember."

She estimated that the cost of a decorated cake is probably 70 percent labor and 30 percent ingredients. Customers have flown her to Portugal to deliver and set up their cake.

Her creations range from a simple birthday cake for $85 upwards to in excess of $4,500.

For the Queen Mother's cake, she labored for "100 hours, easily."

That one was free.