crixa cakes

When I was a little girl growing up, my best friend's mom was known in our neighborhood for being a great cook and, more importantly to us kids, a great baker. The baked goods that came out of her oven were things of legend. Almost every day when we walked home from school (for miles, in the snow with no shoes on, if you must know) we could smell her cookies baking, the scent wafting through the air. This would make us all walk faster, and faster until we would break into a run, hair, lunch boxes (mine was Scooby Doo, although I would have preferred Aristocats) and book bags flying.

There was something magical about her ability to transform the simplest, most wholesome ingredients: eggs, butter, flour, sugar, milk and vanilla into not just an ordinary cake, but something divine. Crixa Cakes, a Hungarian Bakery, has that same magic, wizardry that you can taste in the goods they bake each day, from scratch, in their store.

Crixa Cakes is located on a wonderful tree-lined street and there is something fairy-tale-esque about the interior of the store. There are bakers bustling about, bags of flour on the counter, mixers mixing and bright colored copper pots hanging from the ceiling. And best of all the counters are piled full of cakes, cookies and pastries each more enticing than the next.

It was hard to make a decision but we settled on the Pave Vergiate, a flourless chocolate cake that is rich and flavorful and the Soprano Tiramisu that blends what you love most in a Tiramisu with the perfect addition of a layer of dark chocolate mousse. But what makes both of these cakes so extraordinary is that they are so light and airy. So light and airy it is hard to believe one cake is flourless and the other a cream cake unless there is some magic being involved.

The only thing that we regretted was not being able to sample every chocolate temptation: the Jamaican Rum Chocolate Mousse Cake, the Kiraly Raspberry Cream Cupcake, the Black Forest Cake, an intriguing Chocolate Mousse served in a white porcelain cup and the Rigo Jancsi Celebration cake, a cake created by a gypsy musician who won over the heart of a princess. I guess that means we're just going to have to return again and again to the magical kitchen of Crixa Cakes.

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ginger elizabeth

There is a famous Confucious saying, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." However, in our case, the journey was wasn't quite a thousand miles. It was about 90 miles each way but still it took over three hours which I think counts as extra miles.

Now, you may wonder why four fairly intelligent adults, (OK three), a quartet that included two surgeons would undertake a three hour trip from San Francisco to Sacramento. Your answer is because we all happened to be attending the San Francisco Tribal Arts show, because we are die-hard chocolate aficionados and mainly because of the Ginger Elizabeth Palet D'or Entremet Cake.

I came across this cake while surfing the web for new and exciting chocolatiers and was instantly spellbound. This chocolate cake had me at hello.

Among other things, the Ginger Elizabeth Palet D'or Entremet Cake was offered especially for Valentines Day as an "expression of fine chocolate" -- which is a terrific concept. I can definitely get my arms around the concept of a Valentine's Day cake.

There was the description, a "65% Maracaibo Venezuelan Chocolate Mousse, layered with Bittersweet Chocolate Ganache, Chocolate Dacquois, and Crunchy Chocolate Shortbread inspired by our popular Palet D’Or truffle and similarly garnished with gold leaf, this cake is made with a 65% bittersweet chocolate from the prized Maracaibo cocoa growing region in Venezuela."

And then to seal the deal there was the intriguing name Palet D'or which means disc of gold in French and I think perfectly romantic.

For all these reasons, I felt I had to have this cake and immediately campaigned for the side trip. (We had to pick up the cake ourselves because it's fragile, must be eaten immediately and Ginger Elizabeth does not ship the cake.) Surprisingly or not surprisingly, after everyone looked at the online picture and read the description it actually didn't take much convincing. I was honestly prepared for a much lengthier campaign.

The Ginger Elizabeth shop is located on a side street near the Sacramento Capital buildings (I wonder if Arnold comes by for a chocolate fix) with lot of nice restaurants around, not that you need any other type of sustenance when there is a chocolate shop nearby.

The minute we entered the store, we knew our decision had been a good one. The store is small but charming, complete with vendeuses dressed in matching white outfits and little white gloves. And, there is a wonderful selection of chocolates and gifts that could keep any chocoholic engaged for hours if not days.

Our cake was waiting for us as promised and looked "just like the picture." While we were torn about whether we would eat it right there on the spot in a completely uncivilized manner, we decided it would be best to take the cake back to our hotel and enjoy it after dinner.

After dinner, some of us were daunted by the quantity of chocolate so we invited a friend and her daughter to share the Ginger Elizabeth cake, which ended up giving us all the perfect amount of cake.

The cake as you can see in the picture is exquisite. The ganache is perfectly smooth, with an artistic ribbon of chocolate and an artfully placed foil of gold. When a cake is this beautiful, you don't want to make a mistake slicing it, so we enlisted the surgeons to cut the cake into six neat pieces. Then, we took our first mouthfuls. As we experienced the creamy mousse, the silky ganache, the texture of the dacquois and the buttery, and slightly salty crunch of the shortbread, so light and airy you feel you could eat a thousand cakes, a silence descended in the room. The Ginger Elizabeth Palet D'or Entremet Cake is easily the best cake I and everyone else had ever had: a cake to end all cakes; a cake that when you look up "cake" in the dictionary, you see its picture next to it; a cake where, if you love chocolate, you truly must have one slice in your lifetime.

After the last slice had been eaten, and the plates literally licked clean, our friends said they would be happy to drive back next year for another Valentine's Day cake. I think a new tradition has been born.










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