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pone and honey, swirled with black raspberry
jam, all topped with raspberries,
blackberries and candied purple basil. By
the way, that black raspberry jam in the
filling? It was handmade by Mortensen
herself from berries she bought at Sunnyside’s
outdoor market. She also bought
the purple basil there, and she candied it
herself, too.
My second treat was a sweet coconut
and vanilla cake with vanilla bean buttercream.
It was filled with a horchata caramel
and toasted candied coconut. It was
the most sugary of all of three desserts,
but since Mortensen uses a lot less sugar
in her icings than most bakers do, “You’re
not going to get a cavity from eating most
of my stuff,” she explained.
The third dessert, though, was my absolute
favorite. In my questionnaire, I’d
said that Honey Bunches of Oats was my
favorite cereal, and Mortensen made a
“cereal milk cake” with cereal milk buttercream:
she literally steeped Honey
Bunches of Oats in milk for 20 minutes so
that the milk would taste like the cereal,
and then she used that to make the buttercream.
The cake was filled with homemade
cherry, raspberry, strawberry and
elderflower jam, which tasted heavenly.
Topping off the cake: a sprinkle of freezedried
strawberries and honey nut cereal
“crack” on top. It was the most “me” dessert
I’d ever had, which makes sense, because
Mortensen literally invented this
recipe just for me. It was the dessert I
never knew I wanted until I tasted it.
Mortensen, who has performed in “Les
Miserables” on Broadway and in the first
national tour of “Wicked” as the Elphaba
understudy/ensemble, only recently got
into the baking business.
She used to “sleep bake” when she was
stressed out in high school, waking up in
the morning with a clean kitchen, three
dozen cookies on the counter, and no
recollection of having made them.
But it wasn’t until she was on tour
with “Wicked” that she began to bake
frequently in her free time. After she finished
her stint on tour, one of her best
friends on the tour, Queens resident
Sarah Schenkkan, asked her to make her
a birthday cake. Mortensen had never
made a cake for an event before, but
she asked Schenkkan a couple questions
about what flavors she liked (a precursor
to the current more extensive questionnaire)
and got to work.
“I asked her to make my cake because
she was always inventing all these incredible
desserts — and, since we toured together
and then lived close to each other
Vanilla coconut cake
Cereal milk cake