How Madonna Inn’s Pink Champagne Cake Became An Institution
Childhood memories of growing up at the historic Madonna Inn include, for Audrey Pearce, the granddaughter of its proprietors Alex and Phyllis Madonna, unfettered access to the bakery, where she remembers pastry chefs piping icing into small roses on her fingertips. This idyllic snapshot of time takes Audrey back to when she first became acquainted with the Madonna legacy: pink Champagne cake.
Until recently, Audrey believed the Inn’s famed pink Champagne cake was a family creation, baked into the Madonna name. Her assumption is no surprise considering the tower of buttercream, pink chocolate shavings and fluffy white cake has dominated the bakery production schedule since even before Audrey’s mother Connie was born.
“It’s a mainstay,” Audrey says of the cake. “But it’s been with us so long, the origin story was hard to uncover.”
Pink Champagne is distinctly West Coast but how this iconic dessert made it onto the gold leaf serving trays of the Madonna Inn has ties to the silver screen.
Less than 200 miles south of San Luis Obispo, the evenings in star-studded Hollywood were punctuated by the hollow popping of corks from Champagne bottles. It was the middle of the 1960s and what’s known as the Hollywood Renaissance was underway. The drink of choice for many young rouge-cheeked starlets was the rose Champagne, a drink that symbolized high society, the pinnacle of elegance.
“My grandpa, Alex Madonna, loved that idea of sophistication and he loved the color pink,” Audrey says.
He also loved dessert. “His favorite breakfast was two bacon slices and a piece of apple strudel with butter,” she says and smiles. “He had a gnarly sweet tooth.”
That chef, a Czech Republic native remembered only as “Steve,” crafted a Bavarian cream layered cake enrobed in pink-hued white chocolate shavings and topped with chocolate curls. Unlike many other pink Champagne cake recipes, the Madonna Inn variation features a cloud of whipped cream topping instead of the more common buttercream.
“It’s so light, fluffy and delicate,” Kelly Murga, the Madonna Inn’s former head pastry chef, says. “It has so much flavor but it’s not overly sweet.” Up until her recent departure from the bakery, Kelly arrived in the kitchen each morning, for the past three years, sometime between midnight and 4am to fulfill an average of 100 cake orders per day. After a period of meeting that demand, Kelly could build a pink Champagne cake faster than it takes to microwave a cellophane-wrapped frozen dinner. “Cutting, filling, frosting, shaving chocolate. Yeah, less than three minutes,” Kelly shares.
Growing up in Shandon, Kelly was no stranger to the lure of the pink Champagne cake and now, she holds the secret to preparing the coveted confection. “The recipe is secret but I can tell you it uses real cream and butter,” Kelly says. “The recipe hasn’t changed; it’s been the same for the last 50 years.”
Twice, though, the Madonna had to alter the cake when the supply of pink chocolate was disrupted, first in 2016 and then again in 2018. The maker of the pink oil that the supplier used to color the chocolate had abruptly ceased operations.
During the search for a replacement, the baking team had to make do without it. “We had to call it just Champagne cake,” says Audrey.
Customers were stunned and unaccepting of the change. “There was a huge outpour on social media,” Kelly remembers. “People were giving us ideas about how to make the chocolate pink, suggesting things like beet juice.”
Fortunately for fans and the bakers alike, a new supplier emerged and there was not a need to use the beets. “It goes to show how important that color is,” Audrey states. “Some people said it just tasted different without the pink and I believe them; colorology is powerful.”
Given its Hollywood roots, it’s fitting that the pink Champagne cake seduces celebrity fans, today. At her 2019 concert in Paso Robles, country star Kacey Musgraves shared with fans her love for the dessert. “She said it was so delicious, it made her mad,” Audrey says with a chuckle.
And the proof is in the pudding — or cake, more like it. Kelly says there’s no such thing as a “slow season,” only days of the year like Thanksgiving and Christmas when production was so steady she found herself taking a 16-hour-long “nap” after her shift. “I’m not kidding, that happens,” Kelly discloses.
Whether it’s celebrating a momentous occasion or welcoming guests over for dinner in what Audrey — and sometimes Kelly — have considered a second home at the Madonna Inn, the pink Champagne cake is the delicacy that makes these memories even sweeter.
