Letter from the Editor

By Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

My office sits directly above the bakery at our market in Downtown New Orleans. You know when you walk past one of our bakeries and it smells just so amazingly good? Well, my entire office smells that way every day.

It mostly smells like freshly baked bread — we bake our famous French bread throughout the day. It’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, and my favorite for po-boys. But during king cake season, which is right around the corner, the office has that warm smell of gourmet cinnamon dough, and oh my God , some days that smell is so fragrant it makes me want to eat my chair.

And it’s not enough that I smell sugar and cinnamon and yeasty breads when I’m upstairs in the office. I’m also in and out of the store downstairs on a daily basis. It always smells just so good, like fried-chicken-and-rotisserie-chicken so good. Like smoked-brisketand-sausage-and-ribs so good. And whatever delicious thing Charles is making in the kitchen for the hot food line — so, so, so good. There’s that beautiful bakery, of course, and a boiling room for seafood. There is nothing else like the spicy smell of crawfish boiling. I’m not even surprised that someone actually made a candle with that scent.

Every office has a sweet spot, where it’s not too hot, not too cold, and it’s the perfect place to work. Ours is our small conference room, which doubles as our magazine photo studio. You see the conference room table in many of our photos. It belonged to a friend of mine, whose dad used it as a desk. There’s a small air vent in the conference room that goes directly down to the bakery. You hear bursts of laughter and pure joy through that vent — it’s clear just how much our bakers and decorators absolutely love what they do. And you smell those intoxicating smells. On days when I have to deal with numbers and spreadsheets, I will lock myself in that conference room so I can be more productive, and so I don’t bother everyone else in the office with my complaining. I worry the bakers can hear me grumbling to myself....

I have never been much of a cook, and I’m certainly not a baker. I never moved past the light-bulb-powered Easy Bake Oven my parents gave me for Christmas — so the inspiration for this holiday issue came directly through that vent.

We took pictures of most of the cakes in our bakery case downstairs for this issue, including our wraparound cover. (Yes, we shot them on our conference room table.) When I was writing our baking and frosting and icing tidbits, I learned that a cake with ganache or buttercream can last three to four days in the refrigerator. But that is only true if you don’t leave the knife in the cake box; we polished off our cover cakes, plus a three-tiered Gentilly cake, in just two days.

On the pages that follow we share a recipe for a homemade version of our berry Gentilly cake. Our berry Gentilly cake is the second-most-famous cake we sell (the first being Doberge). I would eat our Gentilly cake frosting from a bowl with a spoon if I could. (If I could? Who am I kidding — I would, and I have.) Now our bakers have started making a different seasonal Gentilly cake every month of the year. If you want to be one of the first to know what each flavor is when our bakers unveil it, follow us on social media.