Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  I should be grateful, because this is the only time I get a peek at the outside world. I tear off my flour-coated apron and pull on my tatty black puffer jacket. My pants have taken on what the apron didn’t cover, so the bottom ten inches of my pants down to my shoes have a layer of white while everything else is relatively flour free. There might be some on my face. Big deal. I wash my hands quickly; it takes too long to get every bit of dough out of my nails so I settle for looking slightly ghoulish.

  I pile into my mud-encrusted Subaru and swing out onto Elm Street toward downtown, past the latter-day hippies living in colorful, patchouli-scented communal disarray in ramshackle colonial mansions dotting our neighborhood. As I get closer to State and Main, I pass Pam’s soup shop, That’s Life Soup. Pam used to be a regular. She’d come in daily, wrapped in her feather-stuffed puffer jacket, her knee-high black rubber muck boots paired with a diaphanous skirt, her gray-streaked hair hastily snatched up in a tie and stray pieces dancing around her rosy cheeks. She’d get a mocha and stay for a spell. Then she started to deliver stockpots full of soup, worried that we weren’t catching a break to eat—Shaker Chicken Soup, creamy and soulful; spicy Vietnamese Pho, a steamy firecracker broth tamed by pliant rice noodles. Soup to Pam is like pastry to me. She is consumed by a passion for all things broth, and her devotion is rewarded with beautifully rendered savory elixirs. Bolstered by our success and her own talent, she opened a shop down the road and we’ve barely seen her since. Occasionally we’ll run into each other in the wee hours of the morning in the produce aisle, rummaging for decent last-minute ingredients.

  Artie’s Thai restaurant, the Royal Orchid, is just across from Pam’s. Artie adds some much-needed international glamour to our quaint street. He runs something of an exchange program, flying his countrymen and women from Thailand for stints at his place, conveniently leaving out descriptions of our six-month snowbound winter and talking up the American dream. And we benefit from their otherworldly skills in the kitchen. But despite our shared oppressive workload, we all seem to find time to pop in to each other’s establishments to complain about taxes and lack of sleep.

  I slow down at the hippie café, minding the patchy-bearded string beans propping themselves against the bricks. There’s no telling when they’ll rouse themselves from their weed coma and dart into oncoming traffic in search of a drum circle. I make sure to avoid eye contact with “mean Santa,” an appealingly white-bearded gentleman dressed in folksy garb who stops unexpectedly midstride to lustily rant about the sin and evil breathing inside every woman. Come spring, I keep my eyes peeled for the naked guys. Now and again some local young folk saunter down the streets in their birthday finest in celebration of spring’s awakening, taking full-frontal advantage of our liberal laws regarding public nudity. (State law allows for public nudity, just not in state parks. Window-shopping au naturel is fine, but the law stipulates that you may not draw undue attention to your genitalia while doing so.)

  Ray and I moved here unaware of the deeply ingrained oddness of the place and with some otherwise very misguided expectations. Mainly we imagined having a relaxing, simpler life, one where we didn’t have to work all the time.

  Initially, we hadn’t intended to move permanently at all. Before I was terminally unhappy in LA, we toyed with the idea of getting a Northeast vacation refuge, a small cottage in a precious town brimming with quirky townsfolk. We’d pop in for short visits to Woodstock and Stowe, maintaining the charmed distance of summer folk. Staying just long enough to get to know the citizens on a first-name basis and take in a few anecdotes to bring back to civilization, stories of woodsy eccentrics and quaint mom-and-pop shops.

  But on an innocent getaway to Hanover, New Hampshire, to catch the homecoming football game at Ray’s alma mater, Dartmouth, something peculiar happened when we took in the sights of neighboring Vermont. Just as we crossed the state line from New Hampshire to Vermont, just as we drove over the upper Connecticut River on the Led-yard Bridge and headed into Norwich, Vermont, I subconsciously began to pull up stakes everywhere else and started planting them in the Green Mountains. Every spring, since I was a kid, the women of our household sniffed the air, trying to catch a fleeting scent that carried reminders and memories of Germany. The air was infused with that fresh scent in Vermont; I didn’t have to chase after it.

  Each town welcomed us with a whitewashed church spire, waving from above the treetops, and opened into a town square complete with a comely town hall and a turn-of-the-century general store with a pump-before-you-pay gas station circa 1950. There were no billboards needling us from the roadside to come and visit the industrial grease shack that was just 5 miles, 1 mile, 500 yards, 100 yards THIS EXIT!!! Small towns kindly introduced themselves and then courteously disappeared from view as we drove along the thick pine-lined roads. I’d found home.

  We chose Montpelier, Vermont. We packed up everything we owned and shipped it across the country. There was a culinary school in town; for once I wanted to go to school because I was passionate about the subject, even if I’d be as old as the teachers. I was self-taught in every baking technique I knew of, but I figured I could always learn a trick or two at school.

  When we first moved in 2004, we ventured far outside the ten-mile radius of what was to become our little shop. We were enjoying a very relaxing life in Vermont, just as we’d planned. We ate well and frequently, we slept in, and we spent hours curled up in leather chairs at the foot of our roaring wood-burning fireplace, reading and sketching. I even baked a bit and sent out care packages to family and friends with my latest sweet inventions. Mostly macaroons; they tended to be everyone’s favorite. And Ray painted and sketched.

  The macaroons I made—French almond macaroons to be exact—were the kind of treat that got everyone saying, “Hey, you should go into business with these.” Why macaroons? Because they reminded me of my mom.

  She adored marzipan and its cousin, the mandelhoernchen. Mandelhoernchen are the pastry equivalent of a baked pound of almond paste but with a few added textural components. A crisp outer skin, browned in the oven and covered with toasted sliced almonds but still dense, moist, and fragrantly almond inside. It’s shaped into a horn, to mimic the majestic antlers of the alpine billy goat, the ends usually but not always dipped in dark chocolate.

  I scoured the Internet and every one of my cookbooks for recipes. Among the millions of things that torment you when someone you love dies is not being able to ask them how they made something. Or where they hid a recipe. I couldn’t find mandelhoernchen but I kept coming across macaron. The original macaroon, with almond. No coconut. Invented by Italian monks and later adopted by French nuns who baked the confections for pocket money while they were on the run during the French Revolution. It had the general ingredients of a mandelhoernchen, it was linked to divinity, and it had the power to save people from the guillotine. Who was I not to try it?

  It was mighty tasty. I worked on the recipe until it was übertasty. It’s not as showy as the shiny, chocolate-dipped horn; it’s pretty much the Ethel Merman of pastry. Doesn’t look like much, but damn it’s good.

  Sandy was a big fan of my humble and dainty macaroons. She was also getting restless with my quiet life. She had reluctantly agreed that my leaving the production company made sense, since I was spending most of my time talking about what I was going to bake next instead of coming up with ideas for the next great summer blockbuster. She also conceded that LA, a town where legislation will one day be enacted to ban carbohydrates, was a wise thing as well. But she is a woman of constant motion and invention, and she viewed my relative dormancy as a waste of productivity. She called one day to in the early spring of 2004 to inform me that my sedentary life would soon end and my baking life would take on a trajectory that I couldn’t control.

  “Do you mind if I mention your macaroons in an interview I’m doing for In Style?”

  That past Christmas, I had handmade my old company’s holiday gift, mixing, scooping, and ba
king thousands of macaroons in my cramped Vermont kitchen. Laying out finished macaroons, row after endless row, on our maple dining room table. Packing a hundred tins, boxing everything up for shipping, and then watching the FedEx guy slog his way up our snowy driveway and up the granite stairs to our house. He had to make this trip again and again, balancing shipping boxes filled with almondy Christmas joy up and down snow-sodden stairs and then artfully executing a slow, controlled slide down the driveway. Damn, it felt good to have produced all of those wonderful treats and then watch them leave.

  So why not mention them in a national magazine with a readership in the millions? Was I delusional? Ignorant and unprepared? Cocky and stupid enough to think I could do it? Absolutely. I had told everyone in LA that I was leaving to become a baker; it might be wise to actually start the transformation and get off my ass. But I hadn’t yet focused on the specific direction my life as a baker would take. I could be a corporate megaproducer à la Mrs. Fields, or I could keep it small and diverse, à la the fantasy of Chocolat. If I was going to make a career out of this, I’d have to ponder these things.

  There were differences of opinion regarding the name of our new business. I thought we should call it Helga’s, after my mother. My friend, Marc, in a tip of his hat to my sick humor and lack of interpersonal skills, lobbied hard for me to call my shop “Master Baker! Eat It and Beat It!” But Ray thought we should name it Gesine, memorable if only because it was impossible to pronounce. It was a name no one else would have or want, except for me because it was, for better or worse, my own name. And that made it easy to trademark and effortless to secure the domain name on the Web.

  The logo was easy. Along with being nicknamed Eule, my mother wore a gold owl amulet her whole life, and now I wear it as my own totem. Nothing would be more representative of what I was doing than my mother and her wise owl. Ray drew our mascot in a night.

  But I couldn’t bake out of our house. Health codes prohibit commercial baking enterprises from operating out of homes with animals. We had three. So we looked for a small place to do the baking. There aren’t a lot of options when the store frontage is packed into ten blocks. There was an abandoned restaurant in the basement of an office building; it had been submerged in the flood of 1992. Every store in town has a picture of canoes paddling up the middle of State Street. I didn’t want to invest thousands of dollars in an empty space just to have it suffer the fate of another flood. But Ray remembered something, a little shop tucked away from the town center, sitting at the edge of a branch of the Winooski River in a neighborhood called the Meadow. The single plate glass window of the ancient general store was covered with plywood. Once we’d chipped through the ice holding the front door fast, we entered a frozen den of rat poop, burst pipes, and rot. But we saw something in the eighteenth-century original tin ceiling and the small patch of weathered barn plank floors that had survived the years. And in the back, if we replaced the wood covering the cracked back windows, we’d have a view of the river. We could even clean out the back patch of lawn that had become the neighborhood’s tinsel-strewn Christmas tree graveyard and build a deck.

  So we dug into our savings and bought the ugly little building at the edge of town. Then we tore out its insides until they were reduced to floor joists and dirt. We hired local carpenters, Skip and Bob, to rebuild her to her former understated glory, original tin ceiling and all.

  While the little shop was under construction, we decided to utilize the services of the Vermont Food Venture Center, an organization dedicated to helping small-time food entrepreneurs get off their feet by providing a facility to make their products and guidance in formulating them for a mass market. I was going to be a big-time entrepreneurial baker lady.

  I packed up all of my gear and ingredients in neat rows in the back of my shiny new Subaru. I broke out my pressed chef’s jacket and knife-pleated chef’s pants, and took my new clogs out of the box for their first professional test drive; I’d bought them for school but macaroons sidetracked my pastry education. I pulled my hair back neatly yet attractively and applied just a touch of makeup. I was ready to drive to Fairfax, Vermont, a scenic cow-filled hour-long drive from Montpelier.

  But unlike an LA commute, there was no time stopped in traffic. I spent the entire hour in motion, driving through beautiful farmland and suddenly dropping down into hills distorted by frost heaves, skidding through mud trenches on the back roads. My meticulously packed wares slid willy-nilly in the back of the car, mixers, scales, and a box of random tools mingling freely with my ski paraphernalia and a forgotten gardening spade.

  The Venture Center is half of the town of Fairfax, the putty-colored paint on its ancient wood siding peeling off in sheets. There’s no address and very few windows, a door floating in the center of the building and then a more inviting entrance off to the side, with a porch shielding it from the elements and a side driveway for delivery trucks.

  I parked in back and scrambled up the hill leading to the side door, my sparkly new baker’s clogs slipping off my feet, the gluey mud sucking the wooden heels and holding them tight. I crab-walked the rest of the way. I bumped open the door with my hip, holding tight to my mud-spattered equipment, and met with a wall of stewed stench: bubbling tomatillos, hot peppers, onions, and tomatoes. My eyes teared up viciously, my tasteful mascara application sliding off my lashes and streaming down my cheeks. A tinny Grateful Dead number was just ending and the music segued seamlessly into an equally vile Phish tune. I caught sight of a hairnetted, tie-dyed young man, eyes fiery from prolonged exposure to stewing hot sauce or cannabis. I was guessing both.

  “Hey! I’m here to see Bryan?”

  “Dude, yeah, you’re the cookie lady! He’s just up the stairs. You have an accident on the way or something?”

  I ran up the stairs as fast as I could to get away from the overwhelming stench of smoldering hot sauce. I pushed open the rickety hollow-core door and was relieved to find the room stink free and Bryan reassuringly middle-aged, khakied, and sober.

  We went through my game plan, which was none. I only knew what I was making, how I made it, and that I’d have to know how to make lots of it, all at once, the minute the magazine hit the shelves.

  “What’s the shelf life of your product?”

  “Um, I don’t know. They usually get eaten right away.”

  “What’s the nutritional breakdown of the product, for your label?”

  “Um, I don’t have one.”

  “How are you intending to package the product for safe delivery?” “No clue.”

  “What’s your production schedule? How do you plan to store your ingredients, finished product, packaging materials? Are you registered to do business in the state of Vermont? And do you realize you’ll have to wear a hairnet while baking here?”

  Bryan gave me some tips, including the number of a woman who was a professional nutritionist and would breakdown my recipe for a government-approved label. He also gave me the number of a woman who’d had similar exposure in a magazine and had survived being slammed with an unforeseen number of orders.

  Most days I was the only baker in the entire facility. I’d switch on the radio, start up the ovens, and begin making the dough. Every so often, there’d be a group making pies for a frozen apple pie company, hauling around barrels full of butter to the mixer and then pressing out rounds of dough, one by one, in a pie press, always weighing each piece of dough carefully and then subjecting the round blob to the blunt force trauma of a pie-plate-shaped weight that came slamming down and forced the stuff into shape. I never got sick of watching it. There were also the fudge ladies from Saratoga. They schlepped their equipment five hours across state lines to make vats of hot fudge. They bottled, labeled, and boxed for two to three days straight and when they were done, they’d be stocked with inventory for a couple of months. Midway through the process, punch drunk on cocoa fumes, they’d start tearing around the neighboring kitchens and insisting that anything being made in the vicinity w
ould benefit from a dunk in fudge. As the day wore down, the elder of the two fudge sisters, springy gray hair popping out from under her gauzy white hairnet, made a circuit around the compound. Stopping to chat with any young man who might be stuck working after hours, she’d invite him back to her Volvo for a beer, a smoke, and, of course, a free jar of hot fudge.

  And then came the night that the magazine hit the stands. I sat in bed with my computer on my lap and hit the Refresh button every few minutes to see if I’d gotten any email orders. This kind of obsessive behavior wasn’t doing me any good, so I tried very hard to get invested in an earnest infomercial about adult acne products. But the beauty of the Internet allowed me to buy the product in minutes and get back to my maniacal clicking. No orders. Nothing. I was convinced that the buildup had been for nothing and I was sitting with a backload of product, packaging materials, and shipping boxes and, by now, a newly renovated storefront that would remain empty for generations to come. I slept fitfully, my scooping hand throbbing, our checkbook depleted, and my baking pride wounded.

  When I woke, I immediately flipped open my laptop. My finger hovered over the Enter button. Then I tapped lightly, almost daring it not to respond. The screen popped up and my inbox had a few visitors. Almost a hundred. And they were mostly orders. Many were general inquiries, like “would you get me an autographed picture of your sister” or “can you get my script to your sister” or “will you get your sister to go out with me.”