Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  Henry, our heating and cooling guy, assured me that air conditioning wasn’t customary in local bakeries because it doesn’t get hot here. But as I watched a side of buttercream slide off the side of my cake like a piece of Alaskan glacial shelf succumbing to global warming, I got the sneaking suspicion that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

  Cool Whip, of the concave clavicle, was the only hire we’d made. It was a small store and we had small ambitions. We figured we’d get a few customers in our first few weeks and grow by word of mouth. This way, we’d be able to learn on the job at a comfortable pace. So she was our part-timer, working with me from 5 a.m. to early afternoon and then leaving for her shift as a line cook at Vermont’s busiest roadside diner, the Wayside.

  Out front, Sandy and Ray worked like pros, Ray making espresso drinks and Sandy manning the register and packing up pastries. She tied up each box with a flourish. It had occurred to us, the night before, that Ray might have too much on his hands with both the register and the espresso machine on our first day, even though we hadn’t advertised our opening. So my sister took a few hours to memorize the register and offered her services as counter lady in exchange for unlimited coffee and pastries. We’d spent a week together stocking shelves and prepping. It was officially her honeymoon, but Sandy wouldn’t be anywhere else. Manning the register seemed easy and safe enough.

  By late morning we had a line that stretched out the front door and continued down the block. Vermont may be rural, but its residents can text as fast as anyone in the big city. And everyone who walked in the door IM’d ten friends to tell them there was a movie star serving pastries on Elm Street.

  Our local news crew knocked on the kitchen door to ask for an interview. I wasn’t in any condition and I didn’t have the time. So the news team set up sticks across the street and started interviewing the poor souls waiting in line in sweltering heat. Sandy poked her head into the kitchen every few minutes.

  “Associated Press is here, they’d like a few words.”

  “Your local news anchor is here, she wants an exclusive.”

  “The governor’s here. He’d like to pop in and say hello.”

  And so it went, for the entire day. A line of local dignitaries to the left, waiting to catch sight of the movie star under the guise of wanting to speak with me. And then a line to the right composed of local civilians waiting to catch sight of the movie star under the guise that they wanted pastry. We were wiped out of everything. No cakes or cookies. We’d ground the last bag of coffee beans. Our shelves were bare. We had to start this all over at 4 a.m. in the morning, but we still had to wash a mountain of dishes and clean the kitchen and the store. We put the closed sign up an hour early. We called in for pizza, our friends Whit and Caroline drove in an hour from town to wash dishes, and we locked up at 10 p.m. When we got home, we turned on the local news. We were the headline story.

  Ray called Jenny, who lived in the neighborhood, happened to be a trained barista, and had offered her help when she saw what we were up against our opening day. So for the next few days Sandy hung out in the back, washing dishes, organizing, helping me bake, and answering phones with a very strange accent. When she had a moment to sit, she dragged a chair from the office and sat next to me with the laptop and started going through our shop emails.

  “Your inbox says 8,000.”

  “What do you mean? What does 8,000 mean?” “It means you have 8,000 new emails. Should I look at them?”

  Every email, each one, was an order for macaroons. And the number kept going up every time we hit the Refresh button. The news of our minuscule shop opening had spread a little farther than rural Vermont. The Associated Press news service carried the story to every small-town outlet in America; it was in USA Today and on the national evening news. An AP photographer had made his way into the shop. He agreed to take pictures of pastries only, nothing and no one else. He lied. A picture of Sandy mid-pastry transaction was splashed over the international newswire and was voted Newsweek readers’ favorite picture of the week. While this would have been a boon to a mass-production facility manned by Keebler elves, it was a catastrophic scenario for a fledgling bakery manned by a lone pastry chef and a paper-thin part-time assistant. The workload involved in keeping the shop filled was breaking me. The added weight of Internet orders threatened to shut us down on the first day.

  Our crew started to expand. Cool Whip quit her diner job and came on fulltime. On our day off, I hired part-time workers to scoop macaroon dough to fulfill orders. We hired a dishwasher and more kitchen crew. Our neighbor Joanne volunteered her time and assembled hundreds of shipping boxes in our tiny back office; we had to dig her out of her cardboard dungeon at the end of each day. And Ray kept his eyes open for counter help. He’d never intended on making this his full-time job. But it was starting to look like one.

  Sandy had to leave eventually and when she did, Ray and I were really and truly on our own. She made one last circuit of the kitchen with a label maker, adhering little inventory tags to shelves and drawers to keep them organized. She dipped into the sink and finished off the dishes, her manicure ruined by now and the tender flesh around her nail beds waterlogged.

  Today I look through the glass to the outside world in the shop pretty fearlessly. We still get lines out the door midmorning when regulars are jonesing for breakfast and a shot of caffeine. But there’s a trained staff, not a movie star among them, who handle transactions and barista duties with aplomb. I’ve got a trim staff in back, but we’re efficient and can keep up with demand.

  There’s a picture of me on our grand opening morning from our local paper, grinning the manic grin of a sleep-deprived idiot who had no business opening a pastry shop. It was the hottest August on record and I’d taken to wearing colorful kerchiefs on my head, believing this was an attractive way to keep my hair back. My face was gloriously sweaty and my apron encrusted with flour and chocolate. Now it’s three years later and we’ve survived. Just barely.

  We finally have air conditioning. And I’ve got a lovely collection of kerchiefs in the back if you are interested.

  Apple Pie

  ON OPENING DAY, I had a rather limited selection. Small carrot cakes, chocolate cakes, fruit tarts, croissants, scones, and sticky buns. Toward late morning, I brought out little apples pies and within minutes they were gone. My apple pie is damn good. So good, in fact, that I had to make a decision. Either make pie every day and drive myself crazy with the work hours that go into it, or limit pies to a single day of the week. I took the second option, and now Friday is pie day. You’re guaranteed to see caramel apple pies, small and large, in all their glory. Along with cherry, blueberry, lemon meringue, banana cream, and coconut cream.

  For any pie, the crust is king. Most American piecrust recipes call for lard or shortening to get that typical diner-dough tenderness. I can’t get on board with that; I like a little flakiness too. And that means pounds of butter. So I go straight for the mother lode, quick puff pastry.

  As for the apples, I caramelize them first. Cooking them a bit in advance, along with butter, sugar, and a few spices, gives the filling a complex and mouthwatering flavor. It also fixes the problem of filling your pie high with raw apples, covering them with your second layer of dough, and then finding that while the top crust is still appealingly lofty, all the apples have baked away to nothing inside. By caramelizing the apples first, you’re guaranteed that the contents won’t settle during baking; when you cut into a tall pie, you’ll find tall layers of apples.

  MAKES ONE DOUBLE CRUSTED PIE

  For quick puff pastry

  4 cups all-purpose flour

  1¼ pounds (5 sticks) cold unsalted butter

  1 teaspoon salt

  ¼ teaspoon lemon juice stirred into ¾ cup cold water

  For the filling

  8 Granny Smith apples

  Juice of 1 lemon

  ½ cup packed light brown sugar

  ½ cup granulated sugar<
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  ¼ cup all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon cinnamon

  ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

  ¼ teaspoon cloves

  ½ teaspoon salt

  4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  ¼ cup heavy cream

  1 large egg

  Sanding sugar

  FOR THE PUFF PASTRY

  Place the flour in a large bowl. Cut the butter into 1-inch pieces. Add to the flour and incorporate with your hands, pinching and massaging the butter into the flour, making sure to leave discernible chunks of butter intact. You don’t want to incorporate the butter so well that it is starts to look like cornmeal. Chunks of butter are good.

  Dissolve the salt in the water. Add to the flour and butter and mix gently with your hands until dough comes together slightly.

  Shape the dough into a rough square and let it rest for 10 minutes.

  On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough into a ½-inch-thick rectangle. Give the dough three single turns, followed by one double turn. If the dough feels rubbery after you have completed a few turns, let it rest a few minutes before you continue. Cover and refrigerate. Your dough block should be approximately 12 ȕ 6 inches.

  FOR THE FILLING

  Peel and slice the apples. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Combine the sugars, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt in a large bowl, add the apples, and toss to coat. In a sturdy pot large enough to hold the apples, melt the butter with the vanilla and cream. Add the apples and cook until the fruit is soft and the mixture thickens.

  TO ASSEMBLE THE PIE

  Once your quick puff is nice and cool, take a sharp knife and cut in half. Take a look at the dough where you’ve sliced through. You should see layers of dough and butter. Some larger chunks of butter will be peeking through. This is a wonderful thing. When you roll, you want to press down on these layers. You don’t want to lay the cut side down; make sure the layers are parallel to the rolling table and you are pressing the layers down into each other, maintaining the layer structure and ensuring maximum puff and flakiness. Roll each piece into a 10-inch circle. Transfer the first circle to a pie plate and crimp the edges. Freeze for at least ½ hour. Wrap the second 10-inch round in plastic and refrigerate until you are ready to assemble the pie.

  When you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350°F. Take the frozen pie shell from the freezer and with a fork, stab the bottom of the shell a few times. Line the shell with foil or parchment and fill it with dry beans or rice as a weight. Bake until the edges are slightly golden and the bottom of the shell no longer looks wet and raw, about 15 minutes. This is called blind baking and ensures that the bottom pastry won’t be soggy.

  Beat the egg with 1 tablespoon water to make an egg wash.

  Remove the foil and the rice or beans and transfer the filling to the shell. Place your second dough circle on top of the apples. Brush the top of the dough with the egg wash and sprinkle with sanding sugar. Bake at 350°F until the top crust is golden brown and the filling is bubbling, about 45 minutes.

  At this point, you may be upset that the pie doesn’t have that perfect edge that most double-crust pies have. There’s a very good reason: usually great-looking pies are composed of crappy pastry that doesn’t puff and flake. The dough is bland and hard and pretty much comes out of the oven looking exactly like it did in its unbaked form. But these pies also don’t benefit from the initial blind bake; instead the filling is added to the unbaked bottom layer of pastry, the second pastry disk is placed on top, and the edges of the bottom and top crusts are crimped together. It keeps everything so tidy! But who wants a perfect-looking pie with a dry, hard crust and a soggy bottom?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lamb of God and Star Giant

  2 p.m.

  HERE’S A LULL IN THE STORE between 2 and 3 p.m. Lunch service is all but over; everyone in town is back at work digesting. We’re puttering away in the back, prepping for the morning. In the front of the house, there’s a little organization and cleaning going on. Our afternoon pastry and coffee pushers, Meeka and Phayvahn, are organizing the shelves. I look after them from the kitchen, the mother hen. I never thought I had a maternal side.

  I blame Agnes and Adrienne for finding it. They were the rambunctious kids manning the counter in our early days. The moment the lull hit, they’d start searching for the store football. They’d bolt outside, leaving the store unmanned, and start a ribald and perilous game of touch football in the middle of the street, drafting unsuspecting joggers onto their teams and dive-bombing passing cars with their loopy passes, stopping oncoming traffic and chasing the pigskin as it headed straight for the storm drain.

  On Fridays, we celebrate pie day and fill the store top to tail with any and all manner of pies. But for Agnes and Adrienne, it was also “lie day,” and they would spin outlandish yarns for unsuspecting customers. Agnes had half of the town convinced that she was a grandmother twice over at the age of twenty-five.

  We came by Agnes and Adrienne through Jenny. Jenny lived in the Meadow, around the corner from where we were tearing apart and putting together our little shop. During construction we had an open door policy with the neighborhood and let the curious peek in and check out the progress. Jenny would stop by and talk coffee with Ray. She was a self-proclaimed coffee geek, opinionated about coffee, its preparation, and the people who made it and drank it. A tiny woman, she had jet-black pixie hair, huge knockers, and a colorful profanity-laden vocabulary. A high school dropout but a coffee scholar and barista by trade and obsession, she had a keen interest in our opening. She’d been trying to open a shop of her own, so we were potential competition. Everyone else in the neighborhood who stopped in said the same thing: “Oh, man. I’ve always wanted a store like this in Montpelier. Too bad it won’t do well.” Jenny never said this. She knew that success came with anything made beautifully.

  She came to our opening. She stood in line for an hour and ordered an iced Americano from Ray and then gave him step-by-step instructions on how to make it. Then she asked if he needed help. She started the next day.

  For Jenny and Ray, coffee was high art. They riffed on the machine like jazz musicians and pulled magic out of a pretty crap machine. But they were handling the busy load in the front of the house alone and getting on each other’s nerves. We needed to start looking for more employees.

  Bonnie was a regular. She got a latte every day and occasionally bought a devil’s cream pie. She was a transplant from tony Newport, Rhode Island, and every so often let slip a bit of Newport blueblood lockjaw into her banter. Sometimes she’d let out a resounding “Holy fuck-oly.” The minute she started working the counter, she had every customer either eating from her palm or scared witless.

  After Bonnie, Jenny brought us Agnes. Her first day of work, she came through the kitchen doors, gloriously Rubenesque and rosy-cheeked, and said, “Today is the best day ever!”

  I find that kind of unbridled optimism suspect. So does Ray. We’d been knee-deep in plastic cheer in Hollywood; it was never sincere and usually hid something quite sinister.

  Agnes’s unflappable buoyancy and overall goodwill rankled Ray. He was having none of it. He suspected her of chicanery. I’d already fallen in love; by day three Agnes convinced me that she could make any day the best day ever. The girl made ice sculptures and was the only human who could drink me under the table. Every day she’d come in and ask me things like, “Does a cow ‘moo’ in German? And does a dog ‘woof’? If not, what on earth do they say?” Her name means lamb of God, for God’s sake. I even let her hug me.

  For Ray, it took exactly two weeks. I peeked out the window to the shop and found Ray and Agnes involved in what looked like a fit of calisthenics. For a split second, I worried that Ray had broken a dam of rage burning inside dear Agnes. I wouldn’t blame her if she was attacking him. I ran out to break it up.

  They were in tears, laughing. Agnes figured that all Ray needed was a good bout
of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” a little exercise in which you sing along as you touch your head, shoulders, knees, and toes. They were bobbing up and down, gleeful idiots, in the middle of the store. She broke him from his disbelief. Who knew that someone so lovely existed? We didn’t until we met Agnes.

  And then came Adrienne. Pretty, blond, and achingly funny, she’s the girl that every insecure kid hates. She’s also outrageously dyslexic. She’d want to be a movie star, if only she didn’t have to work at it. So she’ll settle for being generally fabulous. We started off calling her Star Child because of her unnatural fixation with the goings-on of young Hollywood, but she misheard it as Star Giant, which we all liked a hell of a lot better. So now that’s her name. If the girls come in to visit with Ray, the boys all come to see Adrienne. She’s lovely and kind and every once in a while she’s feisty. She once told Larry, everyone’s favorite customer, “Larry, if only you were fifty years younger I’d marry you.”

  There were the Sand Sisters. I had always been under the general impression that a child both home schooled and religious is dangerous, at the very least, and certainly humorless and easily offended—until I met Kalika and Meeka, the Sand Sisters. They have older siblings, all of them with relatively run-of-the-mill first names like Stephen and Erika. But a fit of genius struck Mr. and Mrs. Sands, and they gave their two youngest children, two young women who could easily have emerged from the Victorian pages of Jane Austen, names befitting young women of character.

  It took a while to figure them out. Kalika—tiny, sandy blond, with delicate features and crisp speech—started working with us first. Then Meeka joined us, bright blond, tall, and doe-eyed. They both lived at home, Kalika having just graduated from college and Meeka still in college. They couldn’t work Sundays—they went to church. I worried incessantly that they’d walk in the back during one of my many linguistic blue streaks and, deeply and morally offended, quit on the spot.