Castle From A Cloud

June 22, 2026 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Pavlovas are a dessert that always impress for how simple they are. I have them on the brain right now because I’ll be making a couple dozen for a VIP dinner the day after tomorrow and I’m coming off a bit of an inspirational drought. I’m on the porch in the shade with a lowball of grog beside me and a cigar I may or may not smoke.

Named for the ballerina Anna Pavlova, they are giant baked merengue bowls filled with whipped cream and fresh fruit. If you’ve ever made angel food cake, macarons, or “forgotten kiss” cookies, you already know how to do the hardest bit. Pavlovas look so impressive and dainty, it makes people think they are difficult when the truth is they are a masterclass in Technique, Patience, Fresh Ingredients, and Not Getting Too Fancy.

Simple things are always like that. No space to hide when you fuck up a step. It’s a “you had ONE JOB” scenario, and how well you did that One Job is there on the plate. Overdone? Underdone? Cracked? Everyone’s going to see and then eat it anyway, because it’s sugar, cream, and fresh fruit that you worked hard on. In that way, pavlovas are a reminder that it’s all just food.

Writing can be like that too, I’ve found. You work at it, you pace it right, tease out the story, don’t outsmart your common sense, and hopefully you end up with something people will enjoy.

A selfie of the author- black flat-cap with pins, olive green chef coat, brown canvas apron, smiling face with mutton-chops, and holding up a plated dessert

My boss and I had loosely discussed the VIP dinner dessert. The last dinner we did, he chose a riff on carrot cake because he knew it was the winemaker’s favorite and she would be in attendance. I did my best work on it and everyone loved it. Happy ending. The winemaker enjoyed it, but wondered if it really paired well with the wine that had been selected. I’d never gotten to taste the wine or even get notes on it, so the carrot cake was good… but overshadowed the wine at a VIP dinner at a winery. We could do better.

This time around, the winemaker showed me their advertising copy with tasting notes and poured me a little scoot to try. It was tangy, floral, and spoke of peaches and stone fruit. I jotted down notes in my phone along with her suggestion to avoid going too sweet, or the wine might taste sour in comparison. That’s easy to do with anything that isn’t “dessert wine”- ice wine, ports, or the kind of muscats you find glued to the lips of bridal shower attendees. A pavlova might actually be the perfect answer.

Initially, the boss and I had discussed a riff on another dinosaur Oceanic classic, Peach Melba. Instead of the poached peaches and raspberries on ice cream, however, my boss very much wanted a tart for the dinner. Tarts are easy to plate, clean to cut, and are easy to get cute with. Pile on the flavors, the textures, the colors, and a good cross-section will shine on anyones Instagram, hopefully tagged with the location and brand of the wine,

We both did trials of our tart ideas but neither quite fit the bill, and I kept assembling pavlovas in my mind. I’ve learned that some ideas won’t leave me alone until I take a crack at making them. Writing is a bit like that as well- you pay attention, and you’ll find a story worth telling the best you can.

A picture of Anthony Bourdain eating with the quote superimposed in white over the picture reading, “Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman- not an artist. There’s nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen- though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying.”

The pavlova shell would be flavored with jasmine green tea. The herbal/floral scent compounding the flavors above and giving a bittersweet foundation- a blank sky for a flock of birds to be seen against.

I debated a diplomat cream filling- pastry cream lightened and folded with Chantilly- but decided even that would be too much. Pastry cream is a custard. Custard means egg. Egg is earthy, sweet, and grounding- a distraction. Instead, whipped creme fraiche with vanilla- a little sweet, a little sour, not too fancy, This and the shell would be vehicles carrying the fruit- important to do well, but no one marvels at the foundations of a house.

It would be Peach Melba inspired, like the chef and I agreed. Stone fruit was coming into season, and this would be what spoke to the wine. It would have to be gently handled. Highlighted. Elevated to stand out on the plate and point toward the wine. I imagined grilled apricots- another touch of bitterness in the char to caramelize the sugars and announce the sunshine in the golden flesh. Fresh raspberries are always good as they are.

You glaze the fruit on a plate. That’s just how it is. Cooks are craftsmen, and it’s our job to imitate nature and make it look like whatever we served you just grew like that. If there is fresh fruit on a plate, it needs to look like we just ran out to a garden and plucked a fistful of raspberries wet with morning dew from the bush. We have to make ourselves disappear in your mind when you look at the plate– wizards and elves and faeries just poofed this perfect plate of sustenance in front of you with no human hand intervening.

A meme from AZ Quotes showing Chef Marco Pierre White next to a quote in white on a black background reading, “Mother Nature is the true artist and our job as cooks is to allow her to shine.”

Glaze adds sweetness, but done right it can add more without drawing attention to itself. I imagined the berries and grilled apricots, shining in the light on the plate atop their hillock of whipped cream and egg. A little hill. On the hill up to the winery, I knew there was a honeysuckle bush- I smelled the blossoms every morning. Pungent, light, floral, fresh… I needed THAT on the plate.

Early one morning last week, the idea couldn’t live in my brain anymore, and I put it together. “Just make it happen, get it out of your head, and don’t fuck around.”

That’s why the VIPs this week are getting pavlova, you got to read about how it was made, and I have an empty glass beside me. Putting the right things together and putting the work in to treat them right means you’ll more often that not have something to enjoy.

Grilled Apricot Pavlova with Raspberries and Whipped Creme Fraiche

Stay Classy,

The Temple

January 22, 2026January 22, 2026 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

My idea of a “fancy night out” wasn’t entirely determined by period movies. A good chunk was my parents.

Growing up, my parents would occasionally fancy themselves up for special occasions and go out. My older sister was left in charge, $60 was left in the foyer for Dinos (or Michelli’s if we want pizza that night instead of subs) and my parents would head out. My father actually owned a tuxedo and one of my clearest memories of those times was my dad in a matching cummerbund and bowtie, with a chained ribbon around his neck and a smaller version on my mom’s.

As I got older and I ingested more media, visions of what one actually did in a tux and pearls clarified beyond “go off and leave me with my sisters.” Images of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting dolled up for the movies seemed old fashioned because that’s common and casual these days. Going to a concert also didn’t feel appropriate because I’d been to or seen rock and folk concerts. If there was a tuxedo in that crowd, it had to have been either a prank or a prop.

The opera or symphony, however… THAT felt like the kind of thing you dressed up for. The period pieces were definitely old-timey, but the buildings still exist and walking into one makes you feel like you ought to dress the part.

A photo of a music hall, taken looking down at the stage from the very back, highest row. — The Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Continue reading →

The Inhale

November 12, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

A chilly night, but not as chilly as it will eventually be. I’ve decided a thin-but-thermal cotton hoodie, t-shirt, and sudra will do as I get out to unwind on my Saturday. I’m at the Beer Bus, of course- I felt the need to gently socialize, and the bartender on weekends is a cool guy, but we don’t know each other quite well enough to chit-chat. I’ll bother him for a beer, do a little small talk, then I know he’ll go into his own world and chat with more regular customers while I do my thing. I get to just observe, drink some good beer, and write a bit.

A place that takes care to curate their beer offerings is worth hanging around…

Continue reading →

Making A Menu

April 20, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

When you work in a restaurant with enough backing and fancy enough clientele (or minimal backing and working-class clientele, but you’re the chef-owner with a shtick), menu flips make the tedious bits of the job worth it. After making the same dishes over and over again for months, sometimes beyond the season it even makes sense to keep selling them, doing a little spring cleaning on the menu feels positively invigorating.

This years dessert menu is already selling well, but the core theme of the selection isn’t just “seasonality”. Pick a menu from any restaurant- from the neighborhood diner to the latest Michelin-starred hotspot- and what goes into the menu is just as much about convenience, defensibility, economics, and business sense as any high-minded philosophy about sustainability, slow food, or “decolonizing the diet.” That’s because we don’t just sell food- we sell a night out. We sell a fantasy. We sell pleasure– so we make sure there’s something we can sell to as many people as possible.

Continue reading →

Home Brew

February 11, 2025February 11, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

It’s perfectly understandable to me how haunted houses can exist. We have the idea of “ghosts in the machine,” “Artistic DNA,” and omnipresent-but-unspecific “vibes”- why not “ghosts in the interior design?” Ghosts that can follow a person or people from place to place, creating the sense of where they’ve been before, and writing an intangible living atlas in the frontal lobes of Those Who Know.

The house where I was raised is a minimum hour drive away and five-plus years back in time from being swiftly and silently bulldozed. My parents now live in an ivory tower of an apartment, nineteen floors above center city Philadelphia. They brought some of their favorite decor from their old house was well as my Bubba’s similarly-leveled house, and have moved into an apartment roughly a twentieth the size of where we used to all live together.

Ghosts in the decor, then, is the only way I can explain spending a few days in the cluttered but cozy guest room and walking out the door in the morning expecting a staircase to the right. It’s the only way I feel like the living room of the Philadelphia high-rise has a piano and fireplace in it that I can feel but not see in their decor of wood, white, cream, gray, and Judaica.

Everything about our old house is there, tucked under the carpet or back in a closet, felt but not seen until you cross the threshold out to the hall. Then I am most certainly in Philadelphia.