For some reason, Meghan Markle seems especially eager this year to remind people of the fact that she married into the British royal family by sharing previously unseen photos of her and Prince Harry at their May 2018 wedding at Windsor Castle and of them looking romantic and sexy while dancing together at their evening reception.
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And one person who played a key role in the May 2018 royal affair has joined Meghan in celebrating the eighth anniversary of her globally televised wedding. That’s Claire Ptak, the Bay Area-reared baker and former Chez Panisse pastry chef who went on Instagram Tuesday to thank Meghan and Harry for trusting her and her team with the job of baking the royal wedding cake.
In her post, Ptak shared photos of herself and her staff from her London bakery, Violet Cakes, making her famous lemon-elderflower cake which was displayed and served at the lunchtime reception hosted by the late Queen Elizabeth II. In her caption, Ptak said: “Thank you @meghan and Harry for trusting me and my team to make your wedding cake 8 years ago today! It’s not every day you get asked to ‘do what you do’ and design a cake for a prince and princess with the entire world watching.”
Ptak also described the “magical week” leading up to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s wedding, emphasizing “the LOVE” that was “in every single room, palace, castle and kitchen we were in.”
“Not only from the generosity of Meghan and Harry and the entire royal family but how we were welcomed by teams of professional, friendly and kind loyal staff,” Ptak said. “It took 6 of us 5 days and a LOT of lemons and elderflowers to make that cake.”
Ptak certainly has a rosier view of some people’s feelings in the lead-up to the wedding, given the subsequent “tiara-gate” reports that the queen was ticked off by Meghan’s demands to be given special access to the tiara she would allow her to wear. And then there were the reports that Prince William wasn’t pleased that Harry appeared to be rushing into marrying the American former TV actor and that either Meghan or Kate Middleton were left in tears over a particularly contentious fitting for bridesmaids’ dresses.
And, of course, Meghan and Harry are now notoriously estranged from his royal relatives, which could explain why none of the wedding photos that Ptak shared from Meghan’s Instagram show anyone but Meghan, Harry and Harry’s friend, singer Elton John in them. None of Meghan’s photos show the late queen, William, Kate or King Charles. The former Prince of Wales stepped in to help walk Meghan down the aisle after her elderly father, Thomas Markle, suddenly bailed from the wedding after he became embroiled in a paparazzi scandal and suffered a reported heart attack.
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A recent report also listed some of the celebrity wedding guests who are no longer considered to be friends of the Sussexes — if they ever were friends in the first place. The Daily Mail reported that the Sussexes have fallen out of favor with David and Victoria Beckham, George and Amal Clooney and Idris Elba. Even Oprah Winfrey has been “long-arming” the Sussexes because they have become divisive figures in popular culture, entertainment journalist Paula Froelich told the Daily Mail. Winfrey only wants to stay connected to the couple in case one or both will want to do a tell-all interview in the future, Froelich said.
As previously mentioned, the only celebrity guest who shows up in both Meghan and Ptak’s posts is John, who performed at the lunchtime reception. Ptak writes that her cakes “were displayed in front of @eltonjohn and his piano then lanced with Harry’s sword.” She also said: “We had been invited into Buckingham Palace to bake the cakes safely away from paparazzi gathering outside our small bakery in East London.”
Ahead of the wedding, Ptak got plenty of attention as the official wedding-cake baker from America, with reports describing her childhood in the small Marin County town of Inverness, next door to Point Reyes National Seashore. She also worked as a pastry chef for Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse before moving to London to open her own bakery there.
The week of the wedding, Ptak released a video, detailing the cake her team was preparing. She noted that the recipe would break with the British tradition of serving a rich, multi-tiered fruitcake soaked in alcohol for a wedding. Ptak’s cake would instead “invoke the sights and tastes of spring,” as E! reported. For Meghan and Harry’s multi-part cake, Ptak actually baked three lemon sponge cakes, filled each with lemon curd and covered the cakes with a Swiss meringue buttercream that is “light and fluffy, kind of satiny and super delicious.”
As reported by E!, the recipe called for 200 Amalfi lemons, 500 organic eggs, 44 pounds each of butter, flour and sugar and 10 bottles of Sandringham Elderflower Cordial. She said the cake took a team of six bakers five days to create, and it was presented with fresh-cut roses and elderflowers.
Over the years, Ptak has used Instagram to recall her triumph at Meghan and Harry’s wedding or to let fans of the Sussexes know that she also had the honor of baking the first birthday cake for the couple’s daughter, Lilibet. Meghan and Harry celebrated Lilibet’s birthday at their former Windsor Park home, Frogmore Cottage, in June 2022, while in the U.K. to celebrate the late queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
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