Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  3 tablespoons sugar, plus additional for sprinkling the scones

  2¼ cups all-purpose flour

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  6 tablespoons (¾ stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into bits

  ½ cup dried cranberries

  Preheat the oven to 400°F.

  In a bowl whisk together the cream, egg, lemon, and sugar until well combined.

  In another bowl stir together the flour, salt, and baking powder; blend in the butter with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

  Stir in the cranberries and the cream mixture with a fork until the mixture just forms a sticky but manageable dough.

  Knead the dough gently on a lightly floured surface for 30 seconds, pat it into a ½-inch-thick circle, and cut out rounds with a 1½-inch fluted cutter.

  Gather the scraps, repat the dough, and cut out more rounds. Place the scones on an ungreased baking sheet. Brush with cream and sprinkle with sugar.

  Bake the scones in the middle of the oven for 15 to 18 minutes, or until golden.

  Savory Rock Scones

  TIM CREATED THESE addictive morsels by jerry-rigging an already fabulous sweet Rock Scone recipe to accommodate savory ingredients. The glorious scent of these pastries baking is almost as wonderful as their taste.

  MAKES 12 SCONES

  5 cups all-purpose flour

  ¾ pound (3 sticks) unsalted butter

  ½ cup sugar

  ½ teaspoon cayenne

  1 teaspoon salt

  1½ tablespoons baking powder

  1½ cups nonfat buttermilk

  1 large egg

  1 cup cubed tasso ham

  ½ cup grated Gruyere cheese

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Work the flour, butter, sugar, cayenne, salt, and baking powder with your fingers until the mixture resembles cornmeal and all of the butter is well incorporated.

  Add the buttermilk, egg, tasso, and Gruyere and continue to work the mixture gently with your hands until the dough is uniformly wet and no dry clumps of flour remain. Be careful not to overwork the dough.

  Scoop fistfuls of dough and mound them on an ungreased baking sheet, spacing them a few inches apart. Bake until brown and cooked through, about 25 minutes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Be Nice to Your Mother (Sponge)

  6 a.m.

  S I MIX AND ROLL, periodically stopping by the coffeepot to top off my never-ending cup of joe, I look out the window at the street and Terry’s parking lot just beyond. As it gets lighter, Terry’s SUV turns in next to the Dumpsters we share and he carries in the local papers the deliveryman dumped at his front door. Seconds later our morning barista, Lily, drags herself in to open up the espresso and coffee stations, hair wet from the shower and eyes still puffy with sleep.

  Lily starts layering sounds onto our kitchen beat. The coffee grinder roars for minutes at a time, the espresso machine hissing and humming as she pulls shots, adjusting the espresso grind by tiny increments to compensate for any atmospheric conditions that can make it bitter or sour. The purr of the steam wand creates whirlpools of dense foam in milk as she makes me a morning cappuccino, adding another layer of caffeination to my buzzing system. Ray comes in through the front door a half hour before opening, whistling. The light is coming in bright waves and Tim and I start racing to get everything from the kitchen to the pastry case.

  Tim finishes the eclairs, slicing the crispy choux pastry in half and filling the bottom with fluffy sweet pastry cream. He drenches the top with chocolate glaze and rests each one in a gold-rimmed paper boat fashioned specifically to keep a wobbly éclair stable. Lemon tarts, baked at 5:30 a.m. and now cool, are ready for an austere ring of meringue and then a touch from the torch to brown them. I’ve unmolded the chocolate mousse cakes from their stainless steel rings by gently warming the metal with a heat gun. These four-inch cylindrical towers of deep dark decadence, sitting atop a round sliver of dense flourless chocolate cake, are so high they have to be placed on the very top shelf of the display case or they’ll get decapitated. The raspberry mousse tarts are shockingly pink, but formed into little hearts they are coy beauties, shining demurely with a sweet glaze brushed on top. Sometimes, if I’m feeling fancy, I’ll pipe a chocolate rose at the top and then a slender stalk that reaches to the pointy tip of the heart, adding petite chocolate thorns along the way.

  I make last touches on cakes for the cold case and Tim shuttles from the kitchen to the front, balancing silver platters carefully piled with crispy croissants, turnovers, scones, and sticky buns. I’m right behind with long metal trays lined with parchment paper and arranged with pastries that find a home inside the refrigerated case. Bonnie’s exuberant entrance marks the countdown, fifteen minutes to open. She sets the front of the shop to rights, wiping down the marble tables and filling up the sugar bowls and creamers. She cranks up Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and opens the doors for the waiting regulars.

  When we opened our doors on August 3, 2004, we’d taken months of our lives and all of our savings to transform our tiny shop into a pastry haven. We painted the original wood siding of our turn-of-the-last-century shotgun general store a muted putty, busted out the dingy plate glass, enlarged the windows in the front, and hired a local artisan to painstakingly apply gold leaf lettering by hand to read “Gesine Confectionary” on one window and “Gesine Gourmet” on the other.

  We gutted everything to the studs and rebuilt the innards, painting the new Sheetrocked walls a gray blue, the hundred-year-old tin ceiling an oyster-shell white, and the wood shelving a lacquered black, every paint chosen from original paint samples from colonial New England. We refinished the floors, brought in a new pastry case, and put in an oak counter. We installed muted lighting and hung framed black-and-white photos from family childhood birthday parties. There’s one of Ray’s mom in elementary school, holding up a cake and grinning like she’s going to eat the entire thing. There’s me at five in a checkered party dress with my arms flung around two empty dining room chairs, a paper crown sitting on my pigtailed head. I’m looking grumpy. The table is decked out with plates and a beautiful dark chocolate cake with jazzy white piping on the sides. If it had a caption, it would read, “Let’s get this party started already. I want cake.”

  We bought small bar-height marble tables and brought our own hand-turned Windsor chairs from home and placed them up front. On the right wall next to the large wine cooler sits an imposing sixteenth-century Spanish church pew that my sister had shipped up from an antiques shop in Savannah, Georgia, for my birthday. Owls are carved on either side underneath the armrests. On the top of the tall black display shelves that line the walls, Ray has started a gallery of oddities. The vast majority of our collection is composed of owl tchotchkes our customers find when they’re cleaning out their attics, along with other items that find their way into the shop: a Mexican wrestling mask, a bottle of Donald Trump cologne, and a yellow bucket that says, “Don’t release the bird.”

  It’s all elegant and a bit austere. But it’s also quaint, inviting, and a little strange. A lot like the rest of Montpelier.

  In the back, in the bakery, the floor is linoleum, the work surfaces are metal, the equipment is industrial, and the lighting is fluorescent and terribly unflattering. We have a cramped office at the very back with a desk, a computer, and an ever-rotating heap of inventory that we really need but can’t quite figure out how to organize: packing supplies, labels for our candies, extra boxes for boxed lunches, stray cookbooks. Mainly, we just have to keep it simple, because it’s in the back that it can get crazy, with flour flying everywhere and two bakers in sensible shoes running around with their heads cut off. But it’s also where the beautiful things we make require space in which to be created. And despite the fact that we built all of this to provide a space for the genesis of sweet pastries, at 6 a.m. it’s bread that gets all the attention.

  Every day, we produce forty-eight small loa
ves, both white and wheat. Even though we’re primarily a pastry joint catering to interstitial munchies and not the square meal, like most bakeries, we need to bring in business at all hours. So we started to do lunch, crispy panini, to keep those midday hours profitable. But this also gives us an excuse to make bread every day.

  Contemplate your average grocery store loaf of bread. The wheat is most likely genetically modified and doused with a payload of pesticides. Then it’s processed, stripped of nutrients, and pulverized into oblivion. It’s mixed with preservatives to allow for an abnormally long shelf life. And then it’s cut into slices of fascist uniformity.

  But the great tragedy of today’s bread isn’t so much the radioactive sludge from which it is made. The tragedy is that we’ve lost the sense of community behind bread.

  There was a time when bread was made in a communal oven; when families, using their own particular recipe, would mix, shape, and proof their bread at home and then walk the few miles along country roads, meeting neighboring families along the way on the same journey, and bake their bread in a town oven. Families carved their initials or a family symbol into the dough to tell theirs apart and the many families kibitzed as the oven did its work. Then they walked the long miles back, warm crusty loaves along for the ride, to make dinner and break bread together.

  I’m not one to judge. My all-time favorite food is grilled cheese. And I only make it with not-found-in-nature orange processed cheese and white bread. The kind of bread you can smush into a tight ball, put in your pocket, and save to use at the driving range. I’ll make a few sandwiches and eat them all alone, full of guilt. I berate myself for falling so low: that bread, that cheese, that pound of butter I used to fry those nasty bits into crispy, melted perfection. Then I set the bread aside and let it get moldy.

  But when we make a loaf of bread in our little kitchen, we use beautiful flour and the simplest ingredients. We dote over the starter, our homegrown yeast, and the rising dough, carefully fashioning smooth rounds and waiting patiently until the bread is ready for the oven. And we’ll talk about it, wondering whether we forgot the salt, pondering the possibility of selling the whole loaves to our customers instead of using it all for sandwiches.

  There’s no chance I’ll easily forget that it’s around, or subject it to the indignity of processed cheese food. As a matter of fact, I’ll take pictures of the especially handsome rounds, and sometimes I feel like wrapping a loaf in a bow and taking it on a grand tour of the neighborhood for everyone to see; I’m so proud of it. I want everyone to share in the miracle. My feelings are terribly hurt if I see someone throwing away even a corner of crust from our bread.

  Mom made her own bread. It wasn’t half bad when it came right out of the oven. It was when the loaf cooled and we actually put it to a purpose that it became a disaster. It had all the qualities of pumice with none of the structure. It fell to pieces the second you started slicing it. At the school cafeteria, surrounded by grossed-out kids, I would reveal the horror that was the crumbly macrobiotic sandwich: tofu bologna, tofu simulated cream cheese, and walnuts. Huge crumbs of whole-grain bread, studded with small walnuts held on by a filmy layer of cream cheese on top of a limp slice of faux soy bologna. And it all lay in a crumbly blob at the bottom of the plastic bag.

  I usually tossed my lunch and used my milk money to buy cookies. I did this with regularity and nonchalance. This false security came to bite me in the ass when my mother just happened to stop by during lunch and caught me mid-dunk at the trash bin.

  “What did you throw away?” she asked with her German accent coming on mean and strong.

  “Uh, just trash.” I’m a horrible liar.

  “Take it out.”

  I had to dig deep; the weight of seven whole grains can really cut a swath through Twinkie wrappers. She made me lay out the contents in front of the whole of Woodmont Elementary. They’d seen the horror of my lunches before but only as a parlor trick. A sight gag, if you will. They’d never seen anything from the brown bag consumed.

  “Eat it.”

  Where to start? Do I eat the crumbs on the bottom first or do I nibble at the exposed perimeter of limp faux meat product, gathering courage as I approach the core? My schoolmates were losing their appetites, packing up spongy white breaded ham sandwiches layered with neon mustard, leaving their chewy fruit roll-ups by the wayside as they trickled past me and headed outside for recess. You could see a few kids battling with internal conflict; they wanted to enjoy the show but couldn’t risk Mrs. Bullock turning on them and demanding they partake as well.

  I got through it, gag reflex working overtime, and never approached the lunchroom Dumpster with confidence again.

  But now that I make my own bread, I understand my mother. The loaves I make aren’t as packed with whole grains and dense nutritional fortitude. They’re the lighter, fluffier version. But she made a starter, as I do. She tended to the dough as it was rising. She kneaded with her bare hands, and when the bread was finished baking, she’d always cut it while it was still warm and give us a beautiful steaming slice adorned with a smear of fresh butter. We’d sit at the table, the whole family, and admire the miracle of fresh bread. So what if it lost some it its luster when it cooled; if I’d looked in everyone’s lunch box that day, I’d have been the only kid who was lucky enough to have a mom who baked her kid bread. So to see me carelessly throw away the thing she’d made with so much love—that must have really hurt her. At the very least, it really pissed her off.

  I’m constantly surrounded by all manner of sweets now, making anything that I’d ever dreamt of as a kid. And I make exactly the kind of bread that I want to tear into and share with my friends and neighbors. But I’d do anything for a loaf of bread made with loving nutritional kindness by my mother. She wouldn’t believe me for a second, but I’d choose her crumbly, whole-grain-peppered bread over anything else.

  Focaccia

  FOCACCIA DOUGH is a multipurpose Italian beauty and very simple to master. I use it to make bouncy round loaves for sandwiches. But the same stuff can be stretched and flattened to make traditionally shaped focaccia—dimpled, flat, and sprinkled with rosemary, garlic, and onion. Or roll it flatter and round for a perfect pizza dough. You can measure the dough into small balls for dinner rolls or shape it into a hearty loaf. There are infinite delicious uses and very little work involved.

  Of course, the process could entrance you and lead you down the devotional path of the artisan. But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

  MAKES ONE LARGE FOCACCIA

  One ¼-ounce package active dry yeast (2½ teaspoons)

  5 cups all-purpose flour, plus additional for kneading

  ¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus additional for the bowl and pan

  2½ teaspoons table salt

  1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary

  1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

  Stir together 1⅔ cups lukewarm (105° to 115°F) water and the yeast in the bowl of an electric mixer and let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes.

  Add the flour, ¼ cup of the oil, and table salt and beat with the paddle attachment at medium speed until a dough forms. Replace the paddle with the dough hook and knead at low speed until the dough is soft, smooth, and sticky, 3 to 4 minutes.

  Lightly oil a large bowl. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead in 1 to 2 tablespoons more flour. Knead the dough 1 more minute (it will still be slightly sticky), then transfer to the bowl and turn the dough to coat it with oil. Let rise, covered with plastic wrap, at warm room temperature (about 70°F) until doubled in bulk, 1 to 1½ hours.

  Generously oil a 15 ȕ 10-inch baking pan. Press the dough evenly into the pan and cover it completely with a damp kitchen towel. Let the dough rise in a warm corner of the room until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.

  While the dough is rising, preheat the oven to 425°F.

  Stir together the rosemary and remaining 3 tablespoons oil. Make shallow indentatio
ns all over the dough with your fingertips, then brush with the rosemary oil, letting it pool in the indentations. Sprinkle sea salt evenly over the focaccia and bake in the middle of the oven until golden, 20 to 25 minutes.

  Immediately set a rack over the pan and flip the focaccia onto it, then turn right side up. Serve warm or at room temperature.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Montpeculiar

  6:45 a.m.

  E’RE GOING TO NEED MORE SOY.” Lily pokes her head into the kitchen and gives me the bad news.

  “By saying that, do you mean we’ll need soy in the foreseeable future or that you just went to make a drink and realized that we have no soy at all?”

  “We have no soy at all.”

  In a few short hours, Tim and I have filled our little shop with hundreds of pastries. We don’t stop to congratulate ourselves. We have to keep moving, prepping, baking, rolling until we close so we can do this all over again tomorrow morning. And I have to run a ridiculous last-minute errand into town to get soy. We have ten people on staff: Tim and I are in the kitchen, we have a rotating carnival of dishwashers, and at least two counter people are in the front at all times. Ray, when he’s in town, is the consummate jack-of-all-trades, making the best cappuccinos and chatting up the customers like an old pro. He maintains and fixes all of our heavy equipment and designs labels for the new products we keep churning out of the back. When he’s gone, working in Hollywood, there’s a huge void, not only in my home life but in our store. It also means that I’m on deck as errand boy.

  Ah, the glamour of small-business ownership. It’s filled with so much more than fifteen hours of baking. There’s soymilk. Or the lack of it. Or we’ve run out of a certain size of pastry box or the butter wasn’t delivered or the propane has run out and the ovens aren’t heating. Of all places, the crunchiest and most hippified state in our union, and I can’t get a soy milk vendor to deliver. So just before we open our doors at 7 a.m., I have to journey to our local grocer, a rundown, vinyl-encased mecca to limp produce and jug wine. Strangely, they carry the only organic soy that makes decent lattes, so I’m stuck making this trip a few times a week, shedding layers of flour with each step I take down the dairy aisle.