A short gallop from the roaring crowds of Pimlico Race Course, a Baltimore classic confection was conceived more than three decades ago.
The Pimlico Cake – characterized by layers of yellow chiffon cake filled with vanilla Bavarian cream and cloaked in dark chocolate ganache – has become a time-honored tradition for Baltimoreans celebrating the Preakness Stakes thoroughbred horse race, which will be run for the 150th time on Saturday.
The cake originated at the former Pimlico Hotel restaurant, a neighborhood mainstay that was founded in 1948 and operated at the corner of Park Heights Avenue and Heyward Avenue, down the street from Pimlico Race Course, for its first 30 years. The restaurant then moved to Commerce Center, a Pikesville business park off Reisterstown Road just outside the Baltimore Beltway, where it remained for another decade until closing its doors for good in 1991.
The Pimlico Cake had its fair share of fans while the restaurant was open, but its fame was truly baked into Baltimore’s cultural identity after the Pimlico Hotel closed, said Gail Shavitz Kaplan, daughter of the late Pimlico Hotel founder Leon Shavitz.
Kaplan explained that the simple combination of three main components – though each requiring expert execution – keeps the Pimlico Cake alive not only as a Preakness treat, but a timeless Baltimore favorite.
“I think people love the cake because it’s authentic, it’s pure, it’s not too sweet,” Kaplan said.
She added, “The balance is just perfect and it’s simple. It’s very simple because it’s yellow cake and chocolate, but the ratio and the way that it looks, with it being five or six layers, makes it so appealing and unusual today.”
Still served
Since the Pimlico Hotel closed, other local eateries and culinary businesses have taken up the mantle of baking the cake each year for the Preakness, including the Owings Mills-based Classic Catering People, where Kaplan now works as the company’s business development leader.
Some other contemporary bakers of the Pimlico Cake include Atwater’s, with locations at Belvedere Square, The Shops at Kenilworth, and Catonsville; The Center Club in Downtown Baltimore; and SugarBakers Cakes in Catonsville.
Atwater’s makes Pimlico Cakes special to order yearround, but the restaurant only puts the cake on their menu in the month leading up to the Preakness. This weekend, they expect to sell 70 to 100 Pimlico Cakes, including both five-inch and seven-inch options, said Mike Hynes, production manager at Atwater’s.
“The Pimlico Hotel was a lot more than just a slice of cake, but I think [the Pimlico Cake] was definitely one of their signature items,” Hynes said. “I think at the end, it was one of the big ones that really spoke for who they were and what they were doing.”
Hynes, who has been with Atwater’s for 12 years, said the restaurant began making Pimlico Cakes long before he started working there.
Founder Ned Atwater even shared his recipe with a Baltimore Sun reader who wrote to the newspaper in 2008 in search of a way to satisfy her Pimlico Cake craving.
Pitfalls of making Pimlico Cake – and how to avoid them
The Pimlico Cake requires a great deal of care and precision, Kaplan said.
“Pastry is all about who touches it,” she said. “You can have the same recipe, but it just tastes different.”
When making the chiffon cake layers, bakers must whip the egg whites and gently fold them into the rest of the batter.
As soon as the two are combined, time is of the essence.
“As soon as they get mixed together, it needs to go into a pan and to go into an oven…. That is key to the texture of the nice, soft, fluffy cake. That’s a really important step,” Hynes said.
When it comes to the Bavarian cream filling, bakers should be careful to temper their eggs.
“Pastry cream is tricky,” Hynes said. “If not cooked right, you’ll have scrambled eggs inside your Bavarian cream. And if it cooks too long, it can be really thick.”
Hynes recommends pouring your cream filling through a fine mesh strainer to remove any remaining chunks.
“You still want to try to temper your eggs and get that right, but a lot of pastry cooks always strain their pastry cream just to get any last little bits of possible clumps out,” he said.
Once the cakes have cooled, the cream filling is ready, and the layers have been assembled, next comes the dark chocolate ganache.
Like your eggs in the cream filling, it’s important to temper the chocolate. Skip this step and you could be left with a less appetizing – but still edible – appearance.
“It goes from a really shiny, beautiful [appearance] to it looking grainy if it sits for too long,” Hynes said.
Crushed walnuts – though not traditional to the original Pimlico Cake according to Kaplan – are added around the sides of Atwater’s version.
“They make it shine,” Hynes said. “With the black-eyed Susan on top, the dark of the chocolate, the bright from the walnuts, it’s just kind of smiling at you.”
For optimal taste and texture experience, Hynes recommends taking the Pimlico Cake out of the fridge an hour before serving.
“Eat it at room temperature,” he said, adding “What is butter like when it’s right out of the fridge? It’s hard. After a little bit of time out of the fridge, butter is soft and so it’ll really affect the texture.”
History in a bite
While “the horse is the symbol for the race and the day of the actual Preakness,” the Pimlico Cake has become “a symbol for the party and the festivity side of it,” Hynes said.
Customers seeking Pimlico Cakes come from a variety of backgrounds, according to Hynes.
Some are tourists who are mainly in town to watch the Preakness. They will typically order a slice of Pimlico Cake to try.
Locals, however, will often buy full cakes to serve at their Preakness watch parties at home. Many have even bought the cake to mark birthdays and other celebrations throughout the year.
And still others buy the cake to do their part in keeping alive the memory of the Pimlico Hotel itself.
To truly know the Pimlico Cake is to know where it all started.
Kaplan’s father Leon Shavitz and his business partner Nathan Herr operated a 24-hour delicatessen called Nate’s and Leon’s at 850 West North Avenue.
Eventually, Shavitz struck out on his own and followed his deli customers as they moved to Park Heights Avenue.
In 1948, when Kaplan was 8 years old, her father bought the Pimlico Hotel. By 11 years old, she was working as a hat check girl in the restaurant.
“My father would never let me be a waitress because at that time that was not ‘appropriate,’” Kaplan said. “But he let me be a hat check girl…. The coats, they were mink coats, and they weighed more than any tray with dishes on it weighed, but that was ‘appropriate’ for me to be a hat check girl.”
Growing up, Kaplan’s mother Minna didn’t cook. Instead, they always ate at their family’s restaurant.
Kaplan married her late husband Lenny when she was 19. She would go on to have three kids, earn her undergraduate degree and graduate degree at Loyola University Maryland, and work in Baltimore City Public Schools and the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Shavitz never ran the business as a hotel; the dozen hotel rooms on the second floor, previously used by jockeys, were converted into card rooms. But he kept the Pimlico Hotel name as an homage to its previous use.
In the beginning, the first floor comprised just a bar and a dining room. But Shavitz renovated and enlarged the space to accommodate a center dining room and bar, flanked by two other smaller dining rooms: on the left, the “Red Room,” the more formal of the two; and on the right, the “Leonate Room,” a portmanteau of “Leon” and “Nate.” Both of the side rooms were often used for private events and celebrations.
“It became a hangout,” Kaplan said, adding “it was the place to be.”
The Pimlico Hotel prided itself on being an upscale restaurant with affordable prices, somewhere anyone could dine. They regularly hosted themed nights, like talent night on Mondays and Chinese food night on Thursdays. There was even a crab night, back when crabs were 25 cents apiece.
The restaurant had a huge menu where customers could order anything their hearts and stomachs desired. Well, almost anything.
“The only thing that was missing on the menu was gluten-free and vegan,” Kaplan said. “In that day’s world, there was no such thing.”
With its proximity to the race track, the Pimlico Hotel often saw visitors for the Preakness and other races.
“There were lots of out-of-towners that we would see every year, and all the big boys and the owners were there, and the jockeys were there,” Kaplan said.
The restaurant attracted big names, like piano player Bruce Westcott and bandleader Freddie Stevens, who both performed there. Even acclaimed singer Frank Sinatra would dine at the Pimlico on occasion.
“I can tell you the booth that he sat in,” Kaplan said.
Their bartender, Rex Barney, had played baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and went on to become a public address announcer for the Baltimore Orioles until his death.
But it was the employees and neighborhood patrons who made the Pimlico Hotel so beloved in Baltimore. The restaurant even named the Coffey Salad after one of its waitresses, Claudia Coffey.
“Everybody became a star,” Kaplan said.
She added, “Regular customers would go back and say hello to the chef or say hello to my father who was there…. It was a family restaurant by a different definition. The people that were there, the employees, were the family.”
When Shavitz died in 1977, he left a void in both the family and the business.
“My father was the glue,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan’s husband Lenny and her sister Reta’s husband Al Davis took over the business, which moved to Commerce Center, but tensions soon emerged.
“When that move occurred, they discovered that they were unable to work together,” Kaplan said. (She added, “My sister and I were able to repair our relationship, and had a wonderful relationship. It took a few years but that happens in families.”)
Al bought out Lenny, with Al running the Pimlico Hotel in Pikesville until it closed in 1991. Lenny would go on to work at several other Baltimore-area restaurants and businesses, including The Polo Grill and The Classic Catering People.
Kaplan believes people continue to love the Pimlico Cake – and by extension the Pimlico Hotel – because of how the restaurant made them feel.
“Restaurants historically and food historically, the definition is gathering,” she said. “The Pimlico Hotel executed that so well in making everyone feel welcome and important and giving people quality. It represented what the city, and that neighborhood in the city, was about then.”
Today, she feels privileged when someone recalls their own memories of her family’s restaurant.
“There’s nothing like seeing people that I see today say, ‘Oh, I remember you from the Pimlico Hotel because my grandmother took me there.’ It’s a wonderful legacy,” Kaplan said.
