Last update - 00:00 11/10/2007
Baking as couture
By Haim Handwerker
NEW YORK - $120,000. That's what Plaza Hotel owners Yitzhak Tshuva and the Elad Group paid for the giant birthday cake that marked the 100th anniversary of the landmark New York hotel last week.
New York celebrity baker Ron Ben-Israel created the 3.5-meter-high, two-ton cake. Ben-Israel calls the Soho studio where he works a "couture cake studio." The price tag is not exorbitant if one considers that more than two months of work went into preparing the cake.
The cake, an exact replica of the hotel, was inspired by an enormous sketch of the Plaza that hangs in the entrance to Ben-Israel's studio. Ben-Israel says he devoted the first month of work to research and planning. He began to prepare the cake only during the second month.
"It was an operation," he recalls. "We created the cake piece by piece, and delivered each part by truck. We made the walls out of rolled fondant. We made the roof twice. It was a very complicated structure. At first, we didn't know how it would hold together. I only understood how we had to build the cake after receiving an aerial shot of the [hotel] roof. Seventeen people worked on this project, and toward the end we worked around the clock.
"The truth is, I was petrified until the last moment. I didn't know if the cake would make it through, or if we would finish in time."
The cake even tasted good, and that is no small feat. The flavor of most oversized cakes is unremarkable. It is very difficult to inject subtle flavor into a cake - or any other dish - when the emphasis is on size.
In a workshop Ben-Israel calls the "sugar room," 10 workers labor over sugary flowers and other embellishments. The master baker follows fashion codes: He releases a new collection every few months. The crowning stroke in the current collection is a vanilla cake with six different spices and an apple-buttercream filling.
Ben-Israel usually designs cakes for weddings and other social events. His clients include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Uma Thurman, Robert Downey Jr. and Ronald Perelman. "The cakes that I typically design feed 200 people and cost $3,000," he says. But, "I also made cakes that cost $25. New Yorkers invest a lot of money in their cakes. They just love to eat here. In Los Angeles, where I don't work, there's money, but Hollywood is afraid to eat. They're afraid that paparazzi will photograph one star or another with frosting on their lips or taking a big bite."
The baker himself is a frequent star in the local media: Ben-Israel will soon appear in an issue of New York magazine, and he has been written up in the New York Times, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Vogue, which voted him the number-one baker in 2004. Martha Stewart took Ben-Israel under her wing and presented him on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," and he has appeared on ABC's "Good Morning, America," the "David Letterman Show," and other programs. He also teaches at the prestigious French Culinary Institute in New York.
Ben-Israel, formerly of Tel Aviv, arrived in New York in the late 1980s. In Israel, he attended the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Tel Aviv, and danced with the Bat Sheva and Bat Dor companies. From there, he traveled to Canada and France, where he earned a living as a dancer. However, when he reached his 30s, he realized that he could not continue to dance much longer. He discovered his aptitude for baking cakes after trying a number of occupations, and studied cake baking in Canada and France.
Ben-Israel admits that he is stubborn, obsessive, and pays relentless attention to detail.
"I've been asked if I ever dropped a wedding cake. My response is no, but I have certainly thrown cakes at people who annoyed me," he says. "I've worked in a lot of kitchens, and I created a space here where I like to work. Cake bakers usually work in very small kitchens - I created an expansive workspace."
He has yet to bake cakes in Israel, but when visiting, he goes to Levinsky Street in Tel Aviv, the Nahalat Binyamin market area, and the Jaffa flea market. "They have treasures in those shops that people brought with them from Europe in the 1940s. I bring them to New York to use in my cakes here."