Any way you slice it, eating a tower cake at the Beeliner Diner is challenging, especially when a single piece can feed up to six people.
But what about baking one from scratch?
Last Friday night (March 21), Beeliner Diner co-owner Noelie Rickey showed customers how the restaurant (3648 King Street) makes its six-layer tower cakes.
“I can definitely get 60 portions, so I can feed 60 with one of these cakes,” Rickey told ALXnow.
Customers were given plain cupcakes chopped in half and icing to build mini-tower cakes while Rickey built the real thing, a six-layer lemon drop cake that, when all was said and done, would be 18 inches tall and weigh about 25 pounds.
“Whenever I do cakes, people are always so interested in what it takes,” Rickey said.
Rickey and her staff started making the tower cakes during the pandemic.
“It took a few tries, and we actually had a lot of cakes fall over,” she said. “The secret is we had to use a very particular kind of butterfly and so to cement it all together to keep it from toppling over.”
Rickey and her partners Markos Panas and Doug Abedje own Beeliner Diner, as well as Bread & Water Company in the Belle View Shopping Center and the Bun Papa sandwich restaurants, which can be found at Beeliner and the Capital One Arena in D.C.
It takes Rickey and her bakers up to 12 hours to make each tower cake. For customers at home, it could take considerably longer, she said.
“This cake would probably take you three days,” she said. “It depends on how many racks you have in your oven. You would have to bake off each layer, chill the layers, you need to be able to make enough buttercream, which in a five quart mixer, you would have to make probably two or three batches of buttercream.”
The cakes cost up to $150, and Beeliner Diner staff need two or three days notice to make them.
Rickey wants to start teaching baking classes at the restaurant.
“I would love to do a class where I actually go through a whole cake build, and everybody participates in doing an actual cake,” she said.
