LITTLE ROCK — The cake sits, waiting. Perfectly robed in fondant, with creamy cheesecake sandwiched between airy layers. Waiting for the couples’ cut. Waiting for the first bite. But greedy hands get there first.
“Someone just called me screaming, ‘You’ve got to come back, somebody’s stuck their fingers in the cake!’”
Temptation is a hazard of the pastry industry Dona Blankenship has worked in for more than 25 years.
After years of handling chocolate, only once has Blankenship gotten sick of its cloying smell. She had been hired alongside another girl to make truffles in New York. Ten thousand chocolate truffles.
“We’re talking hand-rolled and hand-dipped,” Blankenship said.
Chocolate starts to liquefy somewhere around 85 degrees. A truffle’s center ganache, a blend of cream and chocolate, melts gently when eaten, but there’s a price that’s paid: hand-rolling truffles is a dreadful struggle.
But Blankenship has cold hands.
“It’s one of the things they’ll ask you when you’re applying to pastry schools,” she said. “Temperature is everything in pastry.”
Her cold hands have paid off, taking Blankenship and her bachelor’s degree in art through schools including Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School and La Varenne and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. She has studied under former White House pastry chef Albert Kumin and washed dishes for Wolfgang Puck at the start of his career. She has ignored the reproach of French chefs who bristle at the sight of a woman in the kitchen.
Blankenship’s hands have deftly repaired smushed cakes, stacked layers more than 6 feet high, formed chocolate feathers for life-size swan cakes and turned mounds of Belgian chocolate into sculpted dancing figures.
“She is such an artist,” said Becky Clement, who has worked with Blankenship on special events for years. “She made a cake stand out of a really expensive chandelier once. ... She wants everything to be a little different, an original.”
For nine years, Blankenship has donated her talent to a fundraiser squarely in her wheelhouse, the annual Chocolate Fantasy Ball, benefiting Ronald Mc-Donald House charities of Arkansas. She began providing trays of truffles in the earliest years of the fundraiser, and soon upgraded to providing elaborate, all-chocolate sculptures. On Saturday, Blankenship’s hands will be on display as part of her latest creation for the ball. The carving depicts a group of chocolate hands reaching up to balance a chocolate, child-scrawled sign reading in chocolate, naturally - “You are our support.”
The hands are Blankenship’s, a combination of chocolate and corn syrup, poured into a mold she made herself.
The sculpture is entirely edible, but Blankenship strategically positions a pile of her truffles at its base to distract overly eager appetites.
“If the first person into the party started eating the sculpture ...” Blankenship foresees.
Yeah, it would not go well.
THE CHOCOLATE SHED
After years of training and working in New York and Miami, Blankenship returned to her home state in 1994. She was born in Hot Springs - a middle child in a family of 10 - and decided to return when her mother’s health began declining.
“Growing up in Hot Springs, I just wanted to get out,” Blankenship said. “It was just kind of dull and boring. You’re a kid, so of course you think that way.”
Blankenship first escaped to the University of Dallas, where she earned a degree in art. Though she has trained her artist’s eye on the kind of works that appeal to the tongue as well as the eye, she has continued painting, sculpting and working with ceramics throughout her life.
When she moved back to Arkansas, a house down a forest-enclosed road in North Little Rock caught her eye, though not for a dwelling. The property’s freestanding garage, no bigger than a big city apartment, would work perfectly for a shop. It was out with the garage door and in with the convection ovens, an industrial stove, shelves upon shelves.
The workshop is nearly impossible to see through the trees from the road, even in winter. But get close enough, and you can smell your way to the door.
Inside, chocolate is nearly always being tempered - a certain way of melting that gives the chocolate a glossy finish - and the smell seems permanently infused in the walls.
At Christmas time, Blankenship and a small team spend long days putting together hundreds of boxes of delicate fresh cream truffles for clients across the United States. With centers infused with tea, her bed honey, muscadine and more, the addictive bites have been a seasonal tradition for Blankenship for 25 years.
“I was working on them this year and realized it was my 25th anniversary,” Blankenship said. “I thought, ‘Really?’ I cannot believe it’s been that long.”
Growing up, her mother and grandmother would sit eating dinner, already talking about what to cook the next day. The TV was stuck on The Galloping Gourmet or Julia Child, so it’s no surprise that Blankenship can spend hours tucked away in her shop in the woods, never tiring of mixing cakes and candies.
As long as she has been back in Arkansas, Blankenship has run her business solely out of that shop, save for a few years in the late ’90s when she opened “Donatello’s” in the River Market, an effort to expand demand for specialty cakes and candies.Alas, the storefront didn’t, and the burgeoning event services and made-to-order confections filled the whole of the business model. She closed up the retail shop, but the name Donatello’s stuck with her.
PURE IMAGINATION
In 1984, Albert Kumin criticized American chefs who weren’t sufficiently trained in the art of spinning sugar and sculpting chocolate. This was in the New York Times. Students who wanted to learn had to go to Europe, he said. So the pastry chef to President Jimmy Carter decided to open a school where the sensory delights of sugar would be visual as well as tasty.
It was there that Blankenship began to see the world of dessert.
“I strive to achieve an ‘Oh, wow’ moment from the onlooker with the showpiece or wedding cake,” Blankenship said.
Blankenship’s skillful creations have included a pair of life-size swan cakes, chocolate necks entwined into a heart - this for a simple birthday party; an exact replica of the early River Market skyline sculpted from contractor’s blueprints; all-star basketball player Joe Johnson’s Nikes turned into an edible likeness, complete with shoebox.
Kumin would be most pleased with the work Blankenship has done carving chocolate, though. It’s an art that requires patience, an eye for detail and a strong back. Higher temperatures are good for carving, but chocolate needs to be colder to set. Inside her shop, a separate room in back is kept temperature- and humidity-controlled to help the setting process.
“When I’m carving, I’m carrying the piece back and forth between rooms,” Blankenship said. “You can carve smoothly when it’s a little more warm ... but if I’m trying to glue it together with the chocolate, I’ll do it in the cold.”
Blankenship’s art background has become inseparable from the work she does now. It lives in every detail of her creations. Even sewing plays a part: Clothing patterns help her visualize how fondant will drape over cakes.
“A lot of people don’t know how much work goes into this, because a lot of people don’t make anything from scratch at all,” Blankenship said. “What I’m doing is coming from flour and egg and chocolate.”
She has yet to roll out an Everlasting Gobstopper, but if her portfolio is all sounding a bit Willy Wonka-inspired, it won’t shift the comparison to know she once made lollipops 18 inches in diameter on two-foot dowel rods.
THE DREAM TEAM
Blankenship’s willingness to stretch her imagination has made her a central agent in the Little Rock party circuit.
After dazzling a client with a delicate, pale pink wedding cake, events planner Patti Cannady began calling on Blankenship for many of her top clients. Along with florist Becky Clement and Stephanie Caruthers of Trio’s Restaurant, the ladies formed a dream team. They don’t function under any formal title, but when Cannady has a client, she knows whom to call first.
“We’ve moved wedding dates around her schedule,” Cannady said. “I think she’s an Arkansas icon, I really do.”
The team does about six events each year, and Blankenship often travels as far as Dallas or South Carolina for work.
Wedding cakes are taken in layers on the road, pieced together and detailed once they reach their final destination. It isn’t unusual for Blankenship to end up working all night on a cake at the reception venue.
Clement and Cannady recall an East Coast wedding where a sudden change in decor spurred Blankenship to add a few extra last-minute details to a client’s cake.
“Someone had orchids hanging from the ceiling that we didn’t know about,” Clement said. “She stayed overnight to add orchids to the cake. She didn’t have to, but she’s always trying to bring all the details together.”
What Clement calls Blankenship’s “can-do spirit” doesn’t always come pain free.
The cakes she makes and transports can be heavy. Between the layers, filling and fondant, some cake pieces have clocked in at well over 100 pounds.
“I’ve totally messed up my back,” Blankenship said. “I have a bulging disk from lifting cakes and from bending over and doing detail work all day.”
There have been times she has wanted to quit cakes - she has scaled back her business from what it used to be - but when it comes to the dream team, no isn’t an option.
“It’s like a party when we get together,” Blankenship said. “We have so much fun. I look forward to Patti’s calls.”
And after more than a decade working on parties together, few words are necessary among the team of women.
“If we say ‘bigger’ or ‘grander,’ she understands,” Cannady said. “She gets to touch lives at the highest and happiest occasions and she’s remembered so often for those cakes.”
DONATELLO AT RED CLAY
In August, Blankenship put together a wedding cake that was a little different from the ones she makes for clients.
A small lavender pound cake with simple fondant dressed with three small lavender sprigs was all she wanted after she and her husband, Ken Blankenship, wed in a courthouse ceremony.
Ken’s family owns land in Roland, and in a few weeks Blankenship will close her shop in the woods for a shop in a house on a horse farm. Valentine’s Day, the holiday nonpareil for any candy maker, will be her fitting last day in the old shop in North Little Rock.
“Valentine’s Day, that’s it,” Blankenship said. “I dip the last strawberry and we’re out of here.”
With the move comes a new name: Donatello at Red Clay Herb Farm. There will still be cakes, and the annual truffle rush around the holidays. But now, as the name implies, Blankenship is throwing herbs into the mix.
The plans for the farm include growing culinary herbs such as rosemary, basil and lavender to sell as starter plants and herb mixes. Blankenship also plans to grow muscadines and play around with herb infusions for her chocolates.
The farm in Roland is a far cry from days walking to school in New York and Paris, and Blankenship is quick to admit she didn’t always see such a rural life in her future.
“I would never have thought Roland,” Blankenship said. “But there’s a raw commodity here with the land, and I’m eager to explore it.”
Creativity, Blankenship says, has to be fed. In between her next cake and designing her new space, Blankenship is putting the finishing touches on an elaborate forest scene of cypress trees and ducks sculpted out of plaster fit to be a fixture in her new dining room. Sometimes, just sometimes, Blankenship needs to create a piece of art that survives the dessert course.
“For me, it’s just food and art,” Blankenship said. “That’s pretty much it.”SELF PORTRAIT Dona Sloan Blankenship
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Hot Springs, May 2, 1960
FAMILY: husband Ken Blankenship; step-daughters Jayma, 17, and Jennifer, 23; step-granddaughter Emma
I HATE TO MAKE rice pudding. Have you seen rice pudding? Come on, it’s rice, and it’s floating in this pudding stuff. Gross.
WHAT’S ALWAYS BY MY BED: My laptop. I answer a lot of e-mails at the end of the day.
MY GREATEST PROFESSIONAL WEAKNESS is over thinking. I have a tendency to go too detail-oriented.
WHAT’S ALWAYS IN MY REFRIGERATOR: Butter, Frotera Grill’s chipotle salsa and eggs
IF I COULD LIVE ANYWHERE OUTSIDE ARKANSAS, it would be Paris, although my husband would not. I’d like to live in the city; he loves the country.
MY BIGGEST GUILTY PLEASURES: Dark chocolate, cabernet and fresh goat cheese
PEOPLE I’D INVITE TO A FANTASY DINNER PARTY:My mother, Ana, and my husband, because they never met
PEOPLE WHO KNEW ME IN HIGH SCHOOL thought I was very quiet, but smart. I was on the honor society, and I graduated a year early.
I KNEW I WAS GROWN UP WHEN ... Has that time come?
ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Creative
High Profile, Pages 35 on 02/10/2013