Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  But mostly they were honest-to-goodness orders. And they kept coming each time I checked my inbox: ten new orders, twenty orders, one hundred orders. It was enough to give me a sense of accomplishment but not too many to be overwhelming. My communal workstation at the Food Venture Center became a genuine production line, golden macaroons gingerly packed in a shiny tin, heat-sealed, and nestled in a shipping box lined with a healthy wad of recycled packing material and festive tissue paper; a shiny owl sticker fastened the tissue before the box got sealed shut and affixed with a shipping label. “Thank you for your order!” It was official. I was in business.

  Today I have to remind myself, while I’m backing out of the driveway and heading downtown in a search for soy or running some other tedious errand, that I’m far more content baking fifteen hours a day and running mundane errands in New England than I ever was making movies in LA. I’m also far from maintaining any kind of “summer folk” distance from Vermont. To the contrary, now I’m local color; I’m the female version of the hot-sauce guy, with my lackadaisical sartorial style and my weathered car. I wave at the early-morning regulars, clutching their Gesine-branded travel mugs, as they push open the front door of the shop. The red door is wearing just at the place where everyone pushes it open and the front steps are grooved from traffic. These things were once shiny and new from our renovations just three years ago but are now, like us, marked by Vermont.

  Starry Starry Nights

  I CAN’T GIVE UP MY LIFEBLOOD, my macaroon recipe. Not for anything. How would I make a living? What would be special about them anymore, if the secrets in proportion and preparation escaped? Secrecy is a stingy peculiarity among bakers. Create a ballyhooed confection and you can be sure the recipe will be well guarded. And be particularly wary if, when prodded for the recipe, the baker gives it up. I can assure you that some key element has been purposely withheld. At a famous teahouse, my sister and I bought the cookbook that promised to reveal the culinary secrets of the establishment. Learning that a movie star was leaving with his tome, the resident baker hightailed it out of the kitchen with pen in hand. Instead of signing the cookbook, he flipped it open to the middle and made a small note in the margin of a particular page. “I left out the salt and changed the ratio of butter,” he confessed sheepishly. True master bakers, surrounded by underlings watching every nuance, will often cancel the last measurement they’ve made on a scale to protect proprietary versions of recipes from their own staff. This is our nature; we have so little that isn’t already exhaustively revealed in thousands of cookbooks. So please forgive us this covetousness, and don’t be offended if your friend Sally refuses to give you the recipe for her famous apple pie. It is your faux pas for asking her in the first place.

  I will, however, faithfully share a cookie recipe that is akin to my signature confection. As a matter of fact, anything I give you here, I’m offering freely and without exclusions. And you’ll be happy to know that this particular cookie has a keen following of its own and shares the exact shape as its chewy, almondy sister.

  Starry Starry Nights are black with chocolate. Dipped in sugar twice before baking, they take on a complex crackle of shiny white sugar offset by veins of ebony. They are profoundly chocolaty, matching a pure ganache truffle for cocoa value ounce for ounce. But they don’t melt and you can freeze them. And, of course, they are baked.

  Starry Starry Nights are as much careful process as they are high-quality ingredients. It’s easy to cut a corner and court disaster. Pay attention: to the chocolate, to the eggs, to the temperature and feel of your ingredients at every stage. Make sure to have extra chocolate on hand to nibble as you work; it calms the impatient baking beast beautifully.

  MAKES ABOUT 80 MINI COOKIES

  2 large eggs

  2.4 ounces (¼ cup plus one tablespoon) sugar, plus additional for dipping

  1 tablespoon honey

  8.2 ounces bittersweet chocolate (I use 2 whole bars plus 2 strips of bittersweet Lindt chocolate which comes in a 3.5 ounce bar and is available in most grocery stores)

  3 tablespoons butter

  2.6 ounces slivered almonds (about 5/8 cup slivered almonds measured before grinding) ground to a fine powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon non-dutch processed cocoa powder

  Note: To get almond flour, grind almonds in a food processor until they become a meal, almost floury, but be careful not to process so long that the almonds become a paste. You’ll need about 5/8 cups almonds for 2.6 ounces of almond flour.

  Combine the eggs, sugar, and honey in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat with the whisk attachment on high speed until the mixture reaches a thick ribbon stage.

  Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl over simmering water. Cool slightly.

  Toss the almond flour, salt, and cocoa in a bowl until well combined. Add to the melted chocolate and mix until fully incorporated.

  Add a quarter of the whipped egg mixture to the chocolate to lighten. Stir until no egg is visible. Gently fold the rest of the egg mixture into the chocolate until well combined, being careful to maintain the aerated quality of the eggs.

  Chill until firm.

  Place a few tablespoons of sugar in a small bowl. Using the smallest cookie scooper available (I use one the size of a melon baller), scoop individual cookies, dip them in the sugar, and place on a parchment-lined sheet pan ½ inch apart. Freeze uncovered until very hard, about an hour.

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Just before baking, dip each cookie in sugar again. Bake 10 minutes, turning after 5 minutes to ensure even baking. Cookies should be slightly cracked but the sugar should not be browned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eat, Drink, and Be Larry

  7 a.m.

  HEN I RETURN FROM THE SOY RUN, I’m on the lookout for Larry’s car. He’s everyone’s favorite regular. If he doesn’t come in by 8 a.m., I get worried. But I spy him through the one-way mirror that separates the kitchen from the store, a sticky bun in a take-out bag and a cappuccino in his personal porcelain mug. He’s making Bonnie laugh. Jim, Claude, and Jeff sit on the antique bench by the wine refrigerator, nursing their morning lattes. Carol’s waiting on her coffee and nibbling on a turnover. She’s my doctor; she’s seen me naked and knows my cholesterol levels. Beth is watching Lily make her latte, standing patiently by the marble table filled with candies. Wave after wave of familiar faces; most people we know by name. Others we name after their favorite pastry or coffee drink.

  If you work with us long enough, you get to know the regulars intimately. Sometimes the relationship deteriorates rapidly, as it often does with Claudette. She demands warm embraces and clings for minutes at a time, whispering to you that she suffers from depression due to the vagaries of her antipsychotic medications and then hands you a bag of fresh dog poop that she’s been clinging to during the entire squeeze. Or Ida, the physical ideal of a “sweet little old lady” who, in reality, is an ornery, racist hellcat. We sic her on the new help to break them in, see how they handle an hour of interrogation and the occasional bigoted aside. “I hate those Japs, them and their cameras!”

  There are the merely strange, like the young woman who insists on loudly complaining about her latest outbreak of forehead herpes, a medical condition she has named Zoroaster. And then there are the simply annoying, the man who approaches the counter midconversation on his cell phone and plants himself at the register with his index finger raised to indicate “Don’t bother me. On a very important call. Will get to you when I’m ready.” Or the guy who takes honey in his coffee every day, and every day approaches the honey dispenser as if it’s a contraption he’s never laid eyes on before. And breaks it. Or those who ask for their pastries cut into eighths. And Bess, who while waiting for her drink and scone has asked a neighboring female customer with very short hair whether she’s undergoing chemotherapy. She’s done this twice.

  There’s the cream pie guy, a crank caller with whom I unwittingly had phone sex
. He called and asked, “Do you make cream pie?”

  “Of course, all kinds.”

  He got very breathy. “What kinds?”

  “Oh, you know, all kinds. Coconut, banana, chocolate.”

  He got testy. “But cream pies. You didn’t say they were cream pies.”

  “Well, yeah. I was just listing the kinds I make. Banana, coconut …”

  “CREAM! You’re not saying that they’re cream pies! What kind of CREAM pies?”

  And I started in again like a moron, “Okay, banana cream, coconut cream, chocolate cream, devil’s cream.”

  My new best friend on the other end got quiet.

  And then he hung up.

  We also cater to the Burl Ives contingency. Montpelier and its environs house an inordinate number of older gents with neatly trimmed white beards. Most of them bespectacled. All of them physically endearing in the nice-old-guy kind of way. And all but a few, leering. I’ll be the first to admit that we have some very comely lasses manning the front counter. But I must draw a line when, from the back of the store, I can actually intuit if a member of the contingency is staring at one of our counterwomen’s asses too intently. My antidote is to run out front and slam something heavy on the counter.

  And then there are the vegans. “Tell Ja-zeen that she really should make vegan things. Because all this butter and dairy … it’s not right and it’s not healthy.

  There’s a damn fine reason that I’m always in the back baking and rarely up front at the counter with the customers. I’d have whipped off my wood-soled clog and chucked it at that nitwit’s head. Because when I hear something like this, someone butchering my name and proselytizing, I’m ready to throw down.

  I’ve got nothing but love for the vegans. Really. Walking such an ardent and thoughtful path is a beautiful thing. My mom, she lived much of her life a dedicated vegan. She even went above and beyond: growing her own organic produce, using only holistic beauty products, collecting water from a natural spring high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in a hundred-pound glass bottle and schlepping it back to the suburbs because tap water was toxic. And still she died of colon cancer. Oh. Before she died but after she was diagnosed, she went on an epic bender. She ate everything: dairy, meat, a bag of frozen bite sized Snickers. Because she was pissed. She’d denied herself for so many years.

  Personally, I believe deeply in the need for the humane treatment of our farm animals. I don’t think there’s any good reason for factory farming. But don’t walk into my shop, a clearly marked pastry establishment built on kindness, dairy, and eggs, and pontificate on the evils of my trade. I might suggest taking a trip to France instead. The French invented the cream and butter—logged benchmarks of pastry: eclairs, napoleons, palmiers. They’d love to listen to your admonishments. Better yet, take a trip to Tibet and protest their exuberant use of yak butter in everything from candles to cooking.

  So you kind people, perhaps you should change your approach from that of arrogance to one of respect. Because all animals, farm and human, deserve as much. Who knows, you may even convert me. But it’s doubtful.

  Some people come in and treat our place like it’s a literary agency/Hollywood studio, dropping off scripts and books for us, assuming that we crank out croissants and films in the back. There are those customers who come in a bit anxious, maybe perspiring strangely. They laugh inappropriately, holding on to an article about the shop, and demand to see me. Specifically, and without fail, they will say, “Can you bring her out.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement. As if the blurb about our shop describing my pastries and mentioning my famous sister gives them a ticket to the Gesine petting zoo. They unfailingly butcher my name in the process, sometimes adding that they are on a “mission from God” in a plea for an audience. For all these folks, we have the blue sticky of doom. It doesn’t need to be blue; whatever color Post-it we have on hand will do. But it always has the same purpose. Whoever’s working the counter sticks it on the glass of the door dividing the kitchen from the shop as a clear warning that I should come out at my own risk.

  By and large, we have positive relations with our customers, and often we come to love them and look forward to their visits. Marita, who covets vanilla teacakes and Starry Starry Night truffle cookies, is as lovely a human being as you’ll ever meet. For her own birthday, she came staggering into the shop with a fifty-pound plaster horned owl lawn ornament she found at an estate sale, a gift for us, just because. It sits high on our lawn, overlooking the path from the house to the barn, greeting me before dawn and at sunset every day. Ann brings us cocktails at close in her vintage shaker during the dog days of summer and the endless baking days of Christmas, lavender martinis to ease a baker’s weary bones. We have a beautiful owl print in the shop from Ann. She fought to the death for it at the notoriously cutthroat Christmas Yankee gift exchange.

  Little gifts, in the way of kindness, come our way daily. Some of them are life-changing reminders of the intimacy and goodness of our trade. We nourish our neighbors with sweets and caffeine and they reciprocate with graciousness and thanks.

  And then there’s Larry. Trim, medium height, late fifties, handsomely hawk-nosed and balding. An average Larry day he enters the shop, not cracking a smile, and gives off a general air of grumpy. If a kid comes in, he’ll hand Bonnie some money and tell her that whatever the kid wants, it’s on him. He’s the lovable curmudgeon you always wished existed but thought you’d see only in the movies. We started getting postcards from Larry a few weeks after we first opened. Little notes of thanks and encouragement. He comes in every day and we still get postcards on the side. He brings daisies and tulips for our birthdays. On the store’s first-year anniversary, he walked around town all day with a perfect rendering of our owl logo painted on his bald spot. He brings Ray choice cuts of meat from the farmer’s market and will slip a pound of haricot verts fresh from the garden into the kitchen when I’m not looking. If you’re new to the shop and Larry’s around, you’ll find yourself with half of whatever he’s eating in your hand, an invitation to try something good, no thanks required. On our store’s third anniversary, he brought me the kitschiest clock in history: an owl, flanked by two baby owls, her chest housing the clock face, her eyes moving back and forth to the rhythm of the seconds ticking away. I immediately mounted her on the wall of my workstation. And the one time Ray and I took a week off and left the store open, we arrived in Italy to find a fax at our hotel from Larry: “Everything’s great. Opened on time. Case is full. You’re in good hands. Now go and relax.” But try to give Larry a hug or even an effusive thank-you and he returns with a gruff rebuke. His life is otherwise full; we aren’t the sole recipients of his generosity. He leaves a snow shovel in the bed of his pickup truck in the wintertime, making paths for strangers where paths need to be made. He has made it a part of his life’s work to dole out kindness, and we are very lucky beneficiaries.

  Years ago, I’d have been hard-pressed to imagine unbridled generosity from my colleagues, let alone acknowledgment and thanks for my work. And forget finding any deep meaning permeating my working life. I had a very glamorous gig, on paper. I was paid well, I traveled to great places first class, I ate at the best restaurants with muckety-mucks. What kind of dummy checks out of a job like that? I was very happily married to a man who managed to be smart, talented, funny, kind, and handsome and we lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills, with two fuzzy dogs who cleverly evaded hungry coyotes. And I drove around in a hybrid. I never had to stop and get gas.

  But it wasn’t really glamorous. That’s the major misconception about Hollywood; that by virtue of working in its confines you’re part of a dazzling cavalcade of joie de vivre and Champagne. But if you’re a working stiff, an executive at a studio or an independent producer, you’re still a “suit.” Just one who has a few more celebrity sightings than most. And if you’re a celebrity chances are, despite your irritatingly good looks, you’re pretty normal. Most days for everyone involved in the entert
ainment industry are just boring. Just spend an hour on a movie set sitting around waiting for a lighting setup that takes half a day and then talk to me about glamour. It doesn’t exist.

  So in this glitz-free atmosphere, I ran my sister’s production company for nine years. We made movies and television shows. She was the world-famous actress who made things happen, and I was her workaday proxy when she couldn’t be in ten places at once. I worked with the studio, I worked with the director and writers, and I made sure everyone was working with each other. If you needed something, you came to me to complain that you weren’t getting it. And I’d get it. If you had an idea or a script, you’d come to me and ask me to read it. If I liked it, there was a chance it would get made or at least read by someone who had the money to get it made.

  One evening I was dining at a massive table at a fabulous New York restaurant. There were eight in our party—a few movie stars, a handful of studio executives, two writer/ directors, and me, all of us squirming in our au courant postindustrial tropical wood seating.

  I was at the very end, closest to the kitchen. It was the rubberneck’s perch usually reserved for a screaming kid’s booster seat. I spent much of the evening rocking back and forth trying to get feeling back in my ass and accidentally locking eyes with a manicured gentleman at another table directly in my sight line.

  Our host ordered family style for the table, a tidy mound of mashed potatoes whipped with a pound of butter and a quart of heavy cream, shiny pork ribs piled high in a burnished copper sauté pan, flash-fried spinach with tissue-thin slivers of truffle and garlic, a whole roasted guinea hen cozily nesting in roasted fingerling potatoes and caramelized hunks of onion. He’d ordered each dish in triplicate, so that no one had to suffer the stretching and “would you please” politeness of passing. It turned out that I had a family meal to myself; no one was sitting across from me to share.