Almond hazelnut cake with mascarpone filling and a vanilla bean-flecked custard buttercream decorated with violets and white wild roses.. I also made --somewhat incongruous but delicious in its own right--mint ice cream flavored with a handful of spearmint poached from a then- uncultivated neighboring garden plot. (After eating the cake and ice cream we walked to the garden to find that at last, our garden neighbor had dug the entire plot, and the mint, thyme, oregano and all other perennials had been purged and were nowhere to be found!)
