Beulah Levy Ledner, born into a Jewish family in
St. Rose, Louisiana, opened a bakery in New Orleans in 1933. She became very successful after creating her "Doberge cake" adapted from the Hungarian/Austrian
Dobos Cake, a cake made of nine
génoise cake layers filled with
buttercream and topped with a hard
caramel glaze. The doberge cake is based on a recipe originating in
Alsace-Lorraine. Ledner replaced the buttercream filling of the Dobos Cake with a custard filling and iced the cakes with buttercream and a thin layer of
fondant. In 1946 Joe Gambino bought the name, recipe and retail shop, including her recipe for doberge cake and a promise that she would not reopen in New Orleans for five years. After a couple of years of illness, she reopened in a new location on Metairie Road in the New Orleans suburb of
Metairie under the name "Beulah Ledner, Inc." As her business and popularity grew, her son, Albert, designed and built a new building and a new machine to mass-produce sheet cakes using his mother's recipes. She opened her new bakery on May 21, 1970; she ran it until she retired in 1981 at the age of 87, when she sold the shop and doberge recipe to Maurice's French Pastries, which was still in the business of baking and selling doberge cakes in Metairie as of early 2022. ==See also==