Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  “Goodness and kindness, together as one. Goodness and kindness, together as one. Goodness and kindness, together as one.”

  It just wouldn’t stop. And since I was awake but paralyzed, I had to listen to this nonsense bombarding my brain; it was a new age 2 a.m. car alarm. I have weird things like this happen once in a while. But it’s usually when my arm’s fallen asleep, and I’ll wake Ray in a panic. “Ray, I can’t find my arm! I’ve lost my arm!” And he’ll massage my dead arm into tingling pain.

  I’ll be perfectly honest; I understood the message, whether it was self-generated or celestial programming. I’d been forever struggling with my crossed wiring since childhood. On the one hand, I was born pathologically shy with severe misanthropic tendencies. From day one, I wanted nothing to do with humanity. To explain my antisocial rudeness, my family apologized by constantly repeating, “That’s Gesine, she’s shy. Very, very shy.”

  But along with my general distaste for bipeds, I battled with an overwhelming need to live well, to live righteously. I’d ask my mother, “When will I grow out of this? When will I mature?” I thought that when you got to a certain age you would experience a biologically induced state of enlightenment, where all petty insecurities and distastes would disappear and you’d live a life of generosity and kindness.

  But she told me, quite sadly, “Sina, most people never mature.”

  And boy, was she right. There I was in Los Angeles, a place dedicated to the pursuit of economic happiness and grotesque exposure. Where it’s de rigueur to drop $2,000 on a prestige handbag that’s meant to be utilized for a month and then forgotten in a growing pile of once-chic leather sacks. And the cycle begins again. More money, more animals sacrificed for a four-week spin on the bony arm of a fame-hungry bore. I wasn’t witnessing any cathartic bouts of maturity. I was living at the epicenter of an ugly cesspool of mass consumption. And I was a part of it, because although I complained about it and found it repulsive, I wasn’t changing it. To quote a rare human who evolved into a mature being, Ghandi would have told me, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

  I didn’t want more stuff. I wanted to be more happy. I wanted to be good. I wanted to stop hating people and start understanding. And the only way I knew how to feel like a good and kind person was through baking.

  It took a long while to truly wake up and realize that the job and the life I’d been looking for, the one that was fulfilling and that fed my sugar-laced soul, was pastry. Everyone else knew it before I did.

  Years later, completely out of the closet and living in Vermont as a professional baker, I returned to LA for Christmas. My friend Jonathon took me to a boutique on Rodeo Drive. His offices were around the corner and he popped in regularly to chat up the lovelies. I’d been there before when I still worked in Hollywood. The beautiful shopgirls weren’t very nice the first time, and their replacements were exactly the bony prestige-handbag creatures I’d loathed when I lived there. But I had a gift certificate and I was determined to leave with something Vermont appropriate. They chatted with my charming friend and ignored me when they weren’t giving me the stink eye. I approached the counter, $200 T-shirt in hand, and passed my gift certificate to the six-foot forty-pound blonde at the register. You’d have thought I’d given her a flaming bag of dog poo. And then Jonathon felt the need to make introductions.

  “Girls, this is my friend Gesine. She’s the one who makes the macaroons I brought you for Christmas.”

  Their faces went slack. Uh-oh. What was he thinking, bringing these stick figures food? And then the blonde grinned, a smile so genuine I could see the tow-headed, Play Doh—eating rascal she must have been in kindergarten. As it turns out, they were all very pleased to meet me. And I was pleased to meet their funny and lovely alter egos too. That’s why I bake. Sure, it makes me happy. But through baking, I get to be a modern incarnation of Saint Nikolaus, who releases the lovely children hiding in every guarded adult.

  Back in the wee hours in Vermont when I’m alone in my kitchen, I work full of anticipation. Every pastry has the potential of making someone perfectly happy, of momentarily stripping them of adult worries and baggage. So while the world sleeps, I brew my coffee and wake myself to the reality of my one-woman pastry revolution. With a little caffeine magic ripping through my veins, I’m conjuring, not baking, creating pastry spells for your every ailment. So don’t be offended if I still can’t offer you a hug or even a smile as a gesture of warmth, but please take this little pastry. It embodies my goodness and kindness, together as one tasty treat.

  Espresso Cheesecake

  DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Omi took her young family—my mother and her two sisters, my Tante Christel and Tante Erika—from bomb-ravaged Nürnberg to the safety of the Austrian Alps. And while the countryside was abundant in greenery and nature, coffee and other luxury items were hard to come by. When she could get her hands on them, she used every last bit of her cherished coffee beans, even adding the used grounds to the batter of small cakes so that nothing was wasted.

  In the shop, we dump all of our used grounds into large tubs that local farmers pick up from the side of the bakery and add to their compost. But at the espresso station, there are small heaps of freshly ground beans that get cast by the wayside, excess black powder that’s brushed from the portafilter basket before the espresso is firmly tamped into a neat coffee puck.

  I gather these bits in a small plastic container and save them for espresso cheesecake, much like my Omi did with her precious soggy grounds, loathe to see all the flavorful goodness dumped into the trash. The base recipe for the cheesecake is my mother’s. A feat of reverse engineering that would make Microsoft proud, my mother spent weeks dissecting the components of a particularly famous New York cheesecake until she had reproduced the thing perfectly in her own kitchen. Every cheesecake I make uses this base; it’s a dense and serious thing. Not for the faint of heart or lactose intolerant. And laced with espresso, it’s got a surprising kick for such a heavy and creamy cake.

  MAKES ONE LARGE 8-INCH CHEESECAKE OR EIGHT MINI-SPRINGFORM CHEESECAKES

  For the cookie crust

  2 cups chocolate wafer cookies or Oreos, processed until very fine.

  ½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

  For the Cheese filling

  1¼ pounds cream cheese, softened

  ¾ cup sugar

  ¼ cup fresh espresso grounds (Don’t use soggy, used grounds. Grind fresh beans into a fine powder and add this directly to the batter.)

  3 large eggs plus 1 egg yolk

  1 cup brewed coffee

  1 tablespoon instant espresso added to the coffee

  ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

  1½ tablespoons all-purpose flour

  Baker’s note: If you’ve bought preground espresso, regrind it in a small portable grinder. You want ultrafine bits of espresso—so fine that they appear almost like vanilla bean flecks. You don’t want them to add crunch, just flavor.

  FOR THE CRUST

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Place the cookies in a small bowl, drizzle the butter over them, and stir, making sure the crumbs are evenly coated with butter.

  Place the cookie crumbs in an ungreased 9-inch spring-form pan. With your hands, pat and spread the crumbs evenly over the bottom and about 2 inches up the sides of the pan. Bake in the center of the oven for 5 minutes. Remove and set aside to cool to room temperature.

  Lower the oven temperature to 200°F.

  FOR THE FILLING

  Place the cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and, with the whisk attachment, beat on high until smooth. Add the espresso grounds and mix until incorporated.

  Add the eggs one at a time, beating until each is completely incorporated. Add the egg yolk.

  Add the coffee mixture, vanilla, and flour. Mix until smooth and all ingredients are well incorporated.

  Pour the filling into the cooled crust and bake in the center of the oven for a few h
ours—at least two hours, and maybe as long as four hours. You can check for doneness by giving the pan a little shake. If it wobbles like it’s still very liquid in the center, keep going. This could take hours. But I’m betting you want a cheesecake with a creamy-smooth consistency and no cracks. So just wait. If you give the cheesecake a shimmy and it jiggles just a little in the middle but otherwise seems nice and firm, turn off the oven but leave the cheesecake inside to cool slowly. Then remove the cheesecake from the oven and set aside to cool completely in the pan.

  Unmold the cheesecake and refrigerate, uncovered, for at least 3 hours before serving.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My Kingdom for a Scone

  5 a.m.

  HIS MORNING, in my beaten-up industrial Vermont kitchen, I stretch on tippy toes to reach for the power button of the radio that teeters on top of our towering double-doored fridge, and raucous music joins the low drone of the ovens. I unlock the side door for Tim, my right-hand man in the kitchen; he comes in just at 5 a.m. I have a solid block of time, about an hour, to spread my work over every flat space in the kitchen before he’s due. I make choux paste in a ten-gallon stockpot for éclairs on one burner of the stovetop and on another set a small saucier of cream to boil for pastry cream. On a back burner, a water bath simmers under a metal bowl of chocolate and butter slowly melting into each other. Sometimes I manage to fit a small saucepan with fresh eggs from our store’s den mother and number one pastry saleswoman, Bonnie—breakfast if I can remember to eat. I swing open the door of the little oven in the back and grab two trays filled with small cheesecakes that have been left setting overnight.

  I get all the mixers spinning on the metal countertops, their high whine joining the chorus of the ovens and music. In the middle of this mechanized chorus, I start grinding pistachios for meringue and set the whole kitchen ablast with a percussive storm. If I’ve forgotten to unlock the side door for Tim, his banging won’t break through my wall of sound.

  A small splinter of light starts to break through the side window by the sinks. Tim arrives and we share the small kitchen space. Tim’s built like a boulder, a head shorter than I and strong as an ox. He’s been an instructor at the local culinary school, run a successful catering operation in D. C., and acted as a sous chef in renowned kitchens all across the States for decades, but he has ended up working with me as a baker in the middle of nowhere due to a set of convoluted circumstances possible only in the pastoral vortex that is Vermont.

  We maneuver silently around each other in the hours before the store opens; I scoot out of the way when he needs flour or sugar from the bins under my workstation. He sidesteps when I need a pastry bag or parchment paper, small, barely audible grunts signaling that we just need to grab a little something. I’ve baked the éclair shells in the top oven and the pistachio meringue has just come out of the bottom, the cue that it’s time for Tim to bump up the temperature, start brushing the delicate tops of the croissants with egg wash, and bake them.

  Some pastries, like croissants, Danish, and sticky buns, require advance prep. We set aside blocks of time in the week to make a few days’ worth of each. Croissant dough is an all-day affair, often stretching into two days. Separate elements, a three-pound butter block and the sticky dough, are rolled together, folded like a book, and then allowed to rest. Then rolled out again and folded just so. And then set to rest again. You repeat this a few more times and then refrigerate the tight bundle for hours, or overnight, until it is ready to be rolled out once again and cut into pert triangles for plain and raspberry croissants or into buttery rectangles for chocolate and savory. I do this all by hand, forgoing modern space-hogging machinery that promises to take me out of the equation and poke, prod, and roll my dough into perfect proportions. Why let the machine have all the fun? Touching beautifully made dough, feeling the slight shift in texture from soggy to elastic as you knead, getting a bicep workout from shaping the dough by hand with my weathered French rolling pin, screwing up the measurements just a little so some triangles are longer and some fatter—there are emotional benefits that accumulate the more contact you have with a dough. The hours and days consumed by a single batch of croissant dough, assuming I haven’t made a grievous mistake somewhere along the line, are sublime.

  Then there’s batter on the fly, things we make and bake as we need them: teacakes, Golden Eggs, chocolate hearts, chocolate cakes, and carrot cakes. All the ingredients go in one mixing bowl—add and mix the elements in the right order for the right amount of time, and you’re ready to bake in minutes. And quick breads, like scones and biscuits, are things I’ve always made by hand—flour, leavening, salt, and sugar in a huge bowl. Add a few pounds of butter, cut into small pieces, and massage the butter into the flour with your fingers until it resembles a coarse meal. Add eggs and other wet ingredients and you’ve got scones. No fancy equipment, just your hands and good judgment. Of all the things we bake, it’s the smell of a hot savory scone that stops me in my tracks and entraps me. Knowing that we can mix up a batch in minutes if we’ve been wiped out in front or if I’ve got a craving is a beautiful thing.

  Once the quick stuff is mixed and baking, we roll out puff pastry shells for fruit tarts and cream tarts. At some point, we agreed on a system without ever talking about it. What we do and when we do it in the twilight hours of the early morning evolved naturally. I never scheduled a meeting to discuss it. We don’t have a memo filed away outlining our morning baking protocol.

  The morning bake isn’t so much a routine as a meditation. I’m making the same things as yesterday but it’s not monotonous. It’s a chance to make things better, or to transform the same old into something new. I find myself thinking about the people I love. And how I’ve loved the same few people for most of my life but, like baking the identical things every morning, those relationships never get boring. Often I think about my dad.

  I was a mama’s girl; Mom had my undivided devotion. So during her lifetime, my father and I were never close.

  Except when it came to food. Talking about food, especially anticipating a future meal, was the height of vulgarity for my mother. But Dad and I could talk companionably for hours about dinner at breakfast and about breakfast at lunch. The circumstances in which we actually looked forward to eating were limited; my mother maintained strict dietary control at all times. We’d have to be on vacation and far, far away from an operational oven. So when the opportunity presented itself, we would nurse a meal by talking about if for days beforehand.

  In the summer of 1982, when I was twelve, we dropped my sister off at college in North Carolina. And then Mom announced she’d landed a job at the Chattanooga Opera in Tennessee. She was leaving me alone with Dad for weeks.

  I locked myself in my room and read. I was perfectly ready to go without food for a few weeks. I’d never seen Dad cook and didn’t expect him to start, so there was a good likelihood that only Mom’s leftovers were on deck. Reheating additive-free gruel spawns fiendish flavors and textures. I’d have none of it.

  My plan was scrapped when one morning a wonderful smell pulled me out of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

  I closed my book and waited. The aroma kept coming, small popping sounds announcing waves of deep-fried goodness seeping in under my door. I shuffled down the hall and poked my head into the kitchen. Dad was at the stove, effortlessly flipping a couple of paper-thin breaded steaks in a crackling frying pan. He moved with an economy of motion and grace that astounded me. I’d assumed he never cooked because he couldn’t and wouldn’t. But here he was. Making chicken-fried steak. He’d made eggs, too.

  He was a relaxed cook but meticulous, cleaning as he went, taking pains to organize the kitchen for optimum efficiency. And when he cooked, I asked him questions. About what he was making and where he learned. Slow-cooked hominy grits with a generous hunk of melting butter vibrating with the soul of the Deep South led to stories of Birmingham, penny candy, fluffy biscuits drenched in gravy, five-cent matinees with my aunts Luddy
, Tippy, and Sis, and driving barefoot without a steering wheel through the neighborhood. We were uncharacteristically comfortable with each other those few weeks, bonded by my mother’s absence and a love of forbidden foods.

  We slipped back into our workaday silence when Mom returned. But we’d discovered a way to communicate, and once in a while we’d find ourselves chatting companionably over our mutual admiration for ultra-high-butterfat ice cream or Star Trek or cars, and we’d enjoy each other’s company.

  In the quiet hours before we open, I think about my father. As I mix butter, flour, and sugar, I’m relaxed and accepting. I can see all those parts of my mother, my father, my grandmother, and my sister, all mixed up to make me. Since we’ve both lost the woman we loved and since I’ve become a baker, we’re closer. We’re made of some of the same ingredients, some that are unappealing but others that we admire. And we’ll always share an appreciation for good food, like biscuits with gravy and sweet scones.

  Cream Scones

  SCONES AND BISCUITS are by far the easiest breakfast pastries to master. You don’t need any heavy equipment, there’s no tricky yeast involved, and you can fudge with the innards. They’re also delicious and heartwarming. Scones are something of a biscuit but with more subtlety and charm. They have a crumbly, slightly sweet allure that invites compulsive eating.

  MAKES 8 SCONES

  ½ cup heavy cream, plus additional for brushing the scones

  1 large egg

  1 teaspoon lemon extract