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MANILA, Philippines - Who is the pastry chef and cookbook author who has influenced the way Americans prepare desserts, as is known as the First Lady of Desserts?
She was born on Long Island and grew up in Manhattan. After high school, she enrolled at New York’s Pratt Institute, where she earned a degree in fashion illustration and later began a successful career working as an illustrator for the New York Herald Tribune. She left when her hobby of making hand-worked silver rings turned into a full-time job, and she began filling orders for fashion jewelry and later painted scarves for Macy’s. In the late 1940s, she moved to Miami Beach where she met her husband Ralph Daniels.
In the early 1960s she and her husband opened Inside, a coffee shop in Harbor Bay Islands. At the request of restaurant customers, she started giving baking classes in her home. When the crowds grew too large, Burdine’s, a local department store, began hosting the sessions.
Her career, however, took off in 1968 when the Republican Party held its Presidential Convention in Miami. She thought she’d drum up a little publicity for Inside by putting elephant meat on the menu in honor of the city’s guests. Having tracked down about 10 cases of canned elephant meat, she served elephant meat omelets with sauteed bananas and chopped peanuts on the side. Not one person ordered it, but it did receive a lot of press.
Even Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times, came by to get the story. What he went away raving about, though, was the amazing array of desserts she was serving. She offered him copies of the handwritten recipes that she’d been giving out to the restaurant’s customers for years. He was so impressed that he suggested she write a cookbook. She wrote Book of Great Desserts in 1974, which became an instant hit. She has also shared her recipes in Book of Great Cookies, Book of Pies and Tarts, and Book of Cakes.
For more than a quarter of a century, she has been influencing the way America prepares and eats desserts. Although she never attended cooking school or apprenticed in a fancy French patisseries, she says everything she knows came from her mother, from other cookbooks or trial and error.
Her signature dessert is Queen Mother’s Cake, a flourless chocolate cakemade with eggs and ground almonds, of which she says, “If there could be onlyone cake in the whole world, this would be my choice.”
She has won four James Beard Awards. Her Books of Great Desserts was elevated to the Hall of Fame in 1998.
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Last week’s question: Who is this German architect who founded the Bauhaus School and is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture?
Answer: Walter Gropius
Winner: Maria Leonora V. del Pilar of Makati City
