A Sweet Ending to Brunch, and a Week of Cake Events
The final Let Them Eat Cake celebration will be a Sunday brunch at W-S Prime in the downtown Marriott Hotel. Joe Trull, a pastry chef and Winston-Salem native, will return home with his wife, Heidi. They will both at least partly take over the kitchen at W-S Prime as Heidi makes shrimp and grits and Joe bakes some quintessentially Southern, yet modern, cakes.
(If you missed my Nov. 11 story about the cake events, click here.)
The Trulls first met at Glendale Springs in Ashe County, then worked at Emeril Lagasse’s Nola restaurant in New Orleans for several years. Now they own Grits and Groceries, a restaurant outside of Belton, S.C., about 30 minutes from Clemson.
“I think ‘eclectic soul food’ is about the best description of what we do,” Joe Trull said last week. “It’s a lot of Southern. But it’s really driven by what’s fresh, local and in season.”
Of the four cakes that Trull will make for the brunch, the cornbread apple cake particularly reveals his creativity and love of Southern food. “That came out of my love of cornbread and apples. I could eat cornbread, breakfast, lunch dinner and dessert. And I really like cornbread topped with cooked apples.”
Trull said that his Southern perspective on desserts comes down to simplicity, or knowing when not to mess with a good thing. “I don’t overwhelm ingredients with a lot of sugar and spice,” he said.
“In the apple cake, I want the texture of the cornbread, the flavor of the apples. I like to let the natural flavors come through without overwhelming them.”
Sunday brunch, featuring cakes by Joe Trull: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Nov. 22, W-S Prime, inside the Marriott Hotel at 425. N Cherry St. The brunch will feature the food of Joe and Heidi Trull, who own Grits and Groceries in Belton, S.C. Joe Trull will be making a chocolate-covered coconut-cream cake, cornmeal apple cake, pumpkin spice cake with molasses icing, and a holiday trifle that includes cake, cream, cooked cranberries and orange curd. Heidi Trull will make shrimp and grits. Larry McFadden, W-S Prime’s chef de cuisine, will round out the menu with such entrees as beef tenderloin, maple-glazed ham, omelets and waffles. The cost is $29 a person. Reservations recommended. Call 722-5232.
