My most recent book, HOTEL OF SECRETS, is set in the winter of 1878, at the height of Vienna’s ball season. This sumptuous tradition of formal winter balls still continues today in Vienna, and, providing they adhere to the right etiquette, it is even possible for foreigners to attend! Unfortunately, many of us cannot fly to Vienna to dance the night away, and therefore I have asked the characters of my book for advice on creating the perfect ball experience in your own home.
Maria Wallner, hotelkeeper: There are five elements of a ball: the food, the music, the clothes, the company, and the surprise. It’s best if the surprise is something like a dozen psychics ready to tell the crowd’s fortunes, rather than, say, an assassination attempt or a fire.
Eli Whittaker, American Secret Service Agent: Those weren’t surprises. They were crimes.
Maria: They came as a great surprise to me, I assure you. Oh, also sometimes there’s a flood. Or a wild boar attack—
Eli: That didn’t happen at a ball, we were in the middle of the Vienna Woods—
Maria, with great dignity: I wasn’t talking about the one that happened to you, I was talking about the one that happened at the Hotel Annecy last week. Possibly it’s best to leave the surprise out. Let us say, then, that there are four elements of a home ball. First is the food. Hannah has agreed to let us share her almond cake recipe, although only because no one will read it until 150 years in the future.
The Hotel Wallner’s Famous Almond Cakes
Recipe by Hannah Adler, head chef of the Hotel Wallner
Translation into English by Eli Whittaker, updated for the modern home cook by the editor
Ingredients
½ cup unsalted butter, melted, browned, and cooled
2 large eggs
⅔ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon rose water
A pinch of salt
1 cup flour
Instructions
Pre-heat your oven to 375, and then melt and brown the butter. While it’s cooling, combine the eggs, sugar, almond extract, rose water, and salt, and beat until the mixture is creamy and thick. Slowly add the flour. Add the cooled butter (carefully! Make sure it’s properly cooled, we don’t want scrambled eggs!) and mix together.
Grease a mini-bundt pan (a madeleine pan will also work, but will produce a less satisfying shape) and put a heaping spoonful into each mini-bundt mold. Bake for 12-14 minutes, or until the tops peaking out of the molds are puffy and golden around the edges.
Wait a few minutes until you won’t burn yourself taking them out of the pan, and then enjoy!
Maria, continuing: For the music, go down the street and ask your nearest violinist to play in your home for the evening. (ed. note: your computer will suffice) Waltzes are the thing. I especially recommend the Vienna Blood Waltz and Tales from the Vienna Woods, or Brahms’s 16 Waltzes. As far as company goes, it is perfectly acceptable to waltz by oneself, either in the privacy of one’s own home or in the middle of the street
Eli Whittaker: Providing you don’t do so in front of oncoming carriages.
Maria: —but it can also be nice to do so with a friend or loved one. Finally, the clothes. While it is again, perfectly reasonable to waltz and eat almond cakes in your dressing gown, or even in the nude, many like to use a ball as an excuse to put on their grandest attire, with as many rhinestones and layers of skirt as possible. I hope you put on whatever makes you feel grandest, stuff yourself with almond cakes, and dance to waltzes until the sun comes up.
HOTEL OF SECRETS by Diana Biller
Diana Biller’s Hotel of Secrets is chock full of banter-filled shenanigans, must-have-you kisses, and romance certain to light a fire in the hearts of readers everywhere.
During ball season, anything can happen— even love.
It’s ball season in Vienna, and Maria Wallner only wants one thing: to restore her family’s hotel, the Hotel Wallner, to its former glory. She’s not going to let anything get in her way – not her parents’ three-decade-long affair; not seemingly-random attacks by masked assassins; and especially not the broad-shouldered American foreign agent who’s saved her life two times already. No matter how luscious his mouth is.
Eli Whittaker also only wants one thing: to find out who is selling American secret codes across Europe, arrest them, and go home to his sensible life in Washington, DC. He has one lead – a letter the culprit sent from a Viennese hotel. But when he arrives in Vienna, he is immediately swept up into a chaotic whirlwind of balls, spies, waltzes, and beautiful hotelkeepers who seem to constantly find themselves in danger. He disapproves of all of it! But his disapproval is tested as he slowly falls deeper into the chaos – and as his attraction to said hotelkeeper grows.
“A beautifully researched and emotionally complex experience, Hotel of Secrets is an opulent slice of Viennese tradition as rich as a torte and as layered as a complicated line of Strauss. With intrigue and danger that nips on the heels of its luscious waltz, Biller’s lush and atmospheric escape is dolloped with romance and the deep, complicated and sigh-worthy characters that always shoot her to the top of my auto-buy list.” – Rachel McMillan, author of The Mozart Code
Romance Historical [St. Martin’s Griffin, On Sale: March 28, 2023, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781250809452 / eISBN: 9781250809469]
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About Diana Biller
Diana Biller lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their very good dog. She loves rainy mornings and sunny afternoons, and curling up with a good book in any weather. Before becoming a full-time writer, she went to law school and spent her clerkships writing romance novels in the law library.
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