We also hear of “my friend Ruthie Rogers” of the esteemed River Café, Roger’s late business partner, Rose Gray, and Waters’s daughter Fanny Singer, along with mentions of Skye Gyngell and Jeremy Lee. Violet sells the best birthday cake in London, at least to a Chicagoan born in July with a raspberry buttercream preference; the rye brownies in her last book have become my go-to, along with its flourless chocolate cake.

And you will find that even the classics—yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting, treacle tart with whipped cream—can be improved upon by following Ptak’s advice. It's divided to reflect the two sides of her life, with recipes such as black tea poppy seed muffins from her California birthplace, and apricot, chamocile and honey scones from her English home. Some people really do make Edna Lewis’s stone fruit lard pie with Scott Peacock at Alice Waters’s house for the Chez Panisse 40th-anniversary bash.The overwhelming majority of the produce from her 16-acre holding in the foothills of the Black Mountains is now dispatched to Skye Gyngell and her team at Spring, but Ptak has known Scotter since the pair worked together at Spa Terminus in Bermondsey, often building her recipes around the literal fruits of Scotter’s labours: take the latter’s jostaberries, a mix between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant, which tart up Ptak’s moreish matcha cake. I moved straight to Hackney from the Bay Area, and there was nowhere to even get a coffee near us at that point; we would have to go to a concession stand inside Homerton Hospital for cappuccinos.

I was like, “Oh my god”,’ says Ptak, her honeyed California tones still strong after 17 years in the UK. Gradually add more sugar as needed until you get the right consistency – you want a spreadable and creamy icing that is simultaneously as light as can be. He painted his most famous work, Guernica (1937), in response to the Spanish Civil War; the totemic grisaille canvas remains a definitive work of anti-war art.

They’re both transformative, but her point is deepened by how networked and integrated are the worlds of art, dining, and fashion, the bourgeois cultural sphere that draws people like her, and me, to London. The plan is to ‘get everyone together from that community and have a party,’ which will be ‘really lovely. They cut beautifully, look great on a stand, and make a traybake out of the most British possible tart. The overwhelming majority of the produce from her 16-acre holding in the foothills of the Black Mountains is now dispatched to Skye Gyngell and her team at Spring, but Ptak has known Scotter since the pair worked together at Spa Terminus in Bermondsey, often building her recipes around the literal fruits of Scotter’s labors: take the latter’s jostaberries, a mix between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant, which tart up Ptak’s moreish matcha cake.