- Brianna Enders
- A selection of desserts from Best of the Bay award winners, William Dean Chocolates.
Twelve hours before, it was just a gift shop. But the mustache T-shirts, decorative coasters and melting clocks were moved aside for a red carpet to stumble down. The awards show-style backdrop for photos left plenty of room for elbows to brush against some of the food world’s biggest celebrities as the Dali Museum’s ground floor transformed into Nocturnal Cravings, a dessert-inspired evening hosted by Charm City Cakes’ (and former host of Ace of Cakes) Duff Goldman.
As part of the Enjoy Arts & Tastes festival converging on downtown St. Petersburg’s waterfront this weekend, the party capped off the festival’s first night. If playwright Martin Esslin had been there, he might have dubbed it the kitchen of the absurd.
- Brianna Enders
Scenes from Nocturnal Cravings:
The high-top tables scattered throughout the floor are covered in smooth black cloths, making them aptly reminiscent of a Dalinian hourglass’ bottom half and serving as pit stops along the way to the bar (scotch goes with chocolate, right?), then to local chocolatier William Dean’s table where you grab a plate of sweets that ignite long-dormant areas of the tongue.
A spin by TV journeyman and famed chef, Curtis Stone, as you pass under the museum’s “enigma” dome of triangulated glass to meet a Grey Goose ice sculpture and grab a rocks glass of their latest flavored vodka, Cherry Noir.
Pick up an Earl Grey crème de pot from Café Gala’s own Chef Chuck Bandel then head into the Raymond James Community Room, for an ocular array of Dalinian desserts.
Once inside, you hop in line behind Iron Chef champion Ming Tsai and grab some more crème de pot, this time it’s popcorn and comes from Edison Food and Drink Lab in Tampa where the baked apple filling oozes together with cheddar ice cream like a soft but cold apple pie in a uniquely absurd combination of unexpectedly delicious flavors.
The chef’s creations inside captured the spirit of Dali and his irreverence for societal expectations. Mozaic Sarasota served truffle flan egg shells with blood orange sorbet, inspired by the ever-present egg form in Dali’s works, while Cassis American Brasserie offered Cassis Royal, a Bavarian mousse with pistachio daquoise, white peach gelee and vanilla champagne glaze adorned with the iconic Dali eye.
- Brianna Enders
- Duff Goldman and Charm City Cakes’ Dali-inspired presentation.
The centerpiece, though, was the lavish cake from Goldman’s own Charm City Cakes. Executive Chef Geof Manthorne oversaw a small team to create what went beyond a cake inspired by Dali to a logic and reason-defying surrealistic concoction that you might have expected to see if Dali’s apron had been covered in flour instead of paint.
Rolled fondant, a little foam and a rice crispy edge recreated the infamous floating eye — a backdrop complete with eerily spindly eyelashes hovering over the cake. A head of foam and sheet cake, reminiscent of the Catalonian rock formations that inspired so many of Dali’s cranial creations, covered in crawling horse-elephants rested atop a melting clock hanging over the table’s edge that looked like it was pulled directly from “The Persistence of Memory.”
“Thinking of having a giant eye as a background is a little absurd,” says Manthorne. “But it’s also cool.”
The cake took three days to make and a harrowing two-day journey down the East Coast to arrive at the Dali, which is expected to keep it on display, probably until it disintegrates, says Manthorne.
With soft, electric blue light fading down the lobby’s helical stair-case and conversations drifting through the air about the pros and cons of owning an Opera Winfrey-faced sweater, you passed from the mind of Salvador Dali to his stomach and wound up in St. Petersburg, an absurdly cool, and tasty, little city.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2013.
