Confections of a Closet Master Baker Read online

  Use heavy cream. The higher the fat content, the happier you’ll be. And of course Oreos.

  MAKES ONE LARGE 8-INCH CAKE

  For the crust

  ½ package (18 ounces) Oreos, crushed

  ½ pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted, plus more for the pan (or use nonstick spray)

  For the filling

  2 cups heavy cream

  1 tablespoon vanilla extract

  2 tablespoons sugar

  2 tablespoons unflavored gelatine

  1 cup whole milk

  1 pound chocolate, finely chopped (see headnote)

  For the meringue topping

  10 egg whites

  2 cups sugar

  FOR THE CRUST

  Lightly coat an 8-inch springform pan with butter or nonstick cooking spray.

  Pulverize the Oreos in a food processor until very fine.

  Place the Oreos in a bowl, add half the butter, and mix with a spoon. You don’t want the finished product to be wet; you simply want it to hold together when you pinch a bit between your fingers. So go slowly. Often you’ll find that you’ll need differing amounts of butter to cookie depending on the humidity, so pour and incorporate slowly.

  Transfer the butter-cookie mix to the pan and pat the crumbs so they coat the bottom and the sides of the pan evenly. The sides can be left a little jagged; they don’t have to be uniform but they should be well coated with crumbs. Set the crust aside.

  FOR THE FILLING

  In a heavy saucepan, bring the heavy cream, vanilla, and the sugar to a low boil. Meanwhile, in a shallow bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the milk and let it sit until it looks completely damp and starts to bloom. To make sure it doesn’t clump, sprinkle the gelatin very evenly over the milk, give a quick stir, and give it enough time to soak up moisture from the milk so it looks uniformly wet.

  Take the cream off the heat once it reaches a boil and pour in the milk-gelatin mixture. Stir with a whisk to incorporate the gelatin, then immediately add the chocolate. Stir so the hot liquid completely covers the chocolate. Let this sit for a few minutes, then whisk the chocolate, making sure that it is completely melted and combined with the liquid.

  Holding a sieve over the crust, pour the chocolate mixture into the sieve so that any unmelted clumps of gelatin are left behind and only smooth chocolate goodness is in your crust. Carefully transfer to the refrigerator and leave until set, uncovered, preferably overnight.

  FOR THE MERINGUE TOPPING

  You can use powdered meringue for the topping, but I always use fresh egg whites. At a professional bakery, we use pasteurized egg whites. Pasteurization kills the nasty bacteria. Some grocery stores carry pasteurized egg whites, but make sure you read the label. Some aren’t meant for meringue. Eggology is a brand that works really well.

  Place the egg whites and the sugar in a mixing bowl and set it over simmering water. Whisk until the sugar is completely melted and the temperature reaches 160°F. You can use a candy thermometer or a laser thermometer, which is a lot faster and more fun. Whisk briskly and constantly; you’re not trying to beat the whites stiff at this point but you do want to make sure they don’t start to curdle and turn into scrambled eggs. So it’s a little dance, with the thermometer and the whisking, but you’ll get it.

  Once you’ve reached temperature and the sugar is melted, quickly transfer the mixing bowl to the mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and start it up on high right away. Just sit and wait. You’re making Swiss meringue. (If you add some room-temperature butter to the meringue—a little over a pound—you’ll have buttercream. But don’t add butter for this. Just be patient.)

  Beat until the egg whites are bright white and stiff. By stiff, I mean stiff. If you take the whisk attachment out of the meringue, you’ll get a peak that will stay. If it starts to peak and then settles back down into the white abyss, keep whipping. You can use this very boring time to fit a pastry bag with a fun tip. Star tips or rose tips. Just find a big tip to make pointy little peaks all along the surface of the chocolate filling once it has set.

  Once you’ve achieved perfect peakdom, fill your pastry bag with meringue and pipe away on top of the smooth surface of the now firm chocolate filling. Or skip the pastry bag, dump a bunch of meringue on top, and just swirl it around to look like a storm-ravaged ocean. It’s hard to make meringue look bad, so don’t be too precious.

  Now spark up your kitchen torch and brown the meringue just a little. It’s true that you can brown meringue under a broiler, but not here. You’ll just melt the chocolate filling that took you hours to set and you’ll be really pissed off. So either buy a torch, leave the meringue naked and bright white, or just whip some heavy cream and use that instead of meringue. If you use the torch, make sure your kitchen towels, this book, and any loose parchment paper are well out of the way. If the meringue catches on fire, blow it out and then continue, holding the torch just a little farther away. Brown it, don’t burn it. And then eat it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Crunchy Clouds

  8:30 a.m.

  E HAVE TWO MORNING RUSHES. At 7 a.m. the industrious civil servants are already lined up outside when we open; then between 8:30 and 10 a.m. we get a slow migration of young families. But that’s only after weary parents have wrestled their toddlers into shoes and strapped them into strollers. There’s nothing like a shot of espresso and adult conversation with a counterperson after a long morning of baby hijinks.

  Ray and I don’t have kids and I can’t imagine fitting any in at this point. I’ll be honest; I’ve got none of that baby lust that consumes some people. Babies: pudgy cheeks, tiny fingers, gassy grins, and fat feet; they all look the same to me. Puppies, on the other hand—give me a puppy and I’m putty.

  But baking sweets invites contact with children, so whether I ever intended to have little ones in my life, I do now, and dammit if I don’t get along with them better than the adult customers. They always know what they want, how they want it, and when they want it. None of this namby-pamby ordering, “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think I want? Am I in a chocolate or strawberry mood?” I’m not a mind reader, and I don’t have the time or desire to analyze your deep-seated food phobias and commitment issues. Kids, on the other hand, don’t waste my time. It’s a chocolate chunk cookie or it’s nothing. Do not offer them the mango mousses or coconut-pineapple vol au vents when they said chocolate.

  To wit, my young friend Sunny likes three things, in this order: chocolate, strawberries, and white crunchy clouds. I told her that I could make crunchy clouds pink if she liked. Pink is her all-time favorite hue. But she’s a kid, so she knows what she likes and how she likes it.

  “No, I like ‘em white. Like the clouds.”

  “This is good,” I think to myself. Good that she doesn’t require artificial colors to make crunchy clouds (meringues to us mortals) more interesting. Also good for my hands, because I walk around with my palms festooned in radioactive blues, pinks, and greens whenever I use dye.

  And now that I’m starting to connect more with kids, I’m getting uptight about what they eat. I don’t mind if they’re ingesting sugar once in a while. I think it really does more harm than good to place severe restrictions on kids’ diets, as evidenced by my criminal Oreo spree. Moderation, education, and a healthy dose of respect for what you’re chewing makes for healthier children, not an all-out ban on sweets.

  But because I’m starting to care about the little rats, I have a not necessarily hard-and-fast rule: I don’t use artificial dye. I’m a pusher of sugar, butter, and high-octane caffeine, so I’m reticent to add to my already plush lineup of comestible sins. And I’m reasonably confident that the average customer knows what they’re in for when they suck down a croissant (about a pound of butter) or an éclair (butter, cream, more cream, and sugar); even the kids can figure it out. But dyes are tricky little bastards. They show up in the most unexpected places, especially in children’s products. Many are already banned in Europe. My mother
, smart woman that she was, banned them from our lives completely when I was young. She didn’t understand why you had to inject something not found in nature that added nothing to the taste. But it was this ban that led me to stare longingly at the Colemans’ glorious collection of jewel-toned cereals for hours at a time. Trix and Lucky Charms, how you spoke to me from that pantry shelf.

  Ultimately my mom was always right. (Except for that time she refused to pull over, insisting it was impossible that I had to pee again. I really did.) I’ve read that many artificial dyes are connected to hyperactivity in kids. And the stuff is in everything—almost every packaged food, soaps, toothpastes, shampoos, sodas, macaroni and cheese. I have a harder time thinking of things that don’t have artificial dye than things that do.

  So I try to do my part, using fruit purees to add a splash of color when someone wants their pastry colorful and fruity. But, like I said, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. It’s pretty hard to make a field of vibrant edible Gerber daisies without a smidge of that colorful toxic juice. Sure, I could use the natural dyes made from vegetable extracts. But I’m not sure that a kid would love biting into a Borscht cupcake whose beautiful fuchsia frosting was tinted with beet extract. So I pick my battles.

  If I’m making crunchy clouds for kids, I make them strawberry flavored and they’re naturally pink from the fruit. Or if I use raspberry, they take on a mauvey hue. Mango turns them a warm tropical orange, while blackberry is deep purple. Crunchy clouds floating in a warm pastel haze, brimming with fruity goodness.

  But that just addresses dye; there’s also fat and sugar to consider. Kids are consuming vats of the stuff and becoming increasingly obese. I’ve been accused of aiding and abetting our nation’s crash weight-gain diet because of the tools of my trade. I’m a baker. I spin out croissants bathed in butter. Cakes awash in whipped heavy cream. Delicate mousses just dirty with pounds of chocolate. But here’s the deal. I’m not fat. No one who works for me is fat. And my customers, they aren’t fat. Not even close. Okay, a few, but I’m not taking credit. We live in Ben & Jerry’s country. I’ll shift the blame to them. And sure, some things get away from us and wander into “supersize” territory, sticky buns for one. No matter what we do, they always come out the size of banquet plates. But hey, sticky buns were originally a German immigrant creation. I blame the Old World for that one.

  And cakes. I can’t figure out why, when you put me in charge of three layers of cake, filling, and an outer layer of buttercream, I end up with a behemoth. Every damn time.

  A few years ago, my cousin Barbara took her husband Hermann and her seven-year-old son Maxi to Disneyland. They’d been making a small tour of the eastern United States. They stopped by D.C., where they visited our transplanted German aunt Erika. They spent a few days catching the sights in New York. And they ended it all at the happiest place on earth.

  That winter, I went to visit them in Germany. We sat around the dining table, lingering over wine and a little cheese.

  Maxi asked, “Hey, you wanna see our pictures from Disneyland?”

  I didn’t.

  I grew up in America. Cinderella’s castle, steamy asphalt, heat-stroked teenagers stuffed into plush costumes. I’ve seen it.

  “Yeah. Why not.” I’m polite. And the kid wanted an excuse to stay up a while longer.

  I’ll hand it to them; the composition of the shots was unusual. Instead of Maxi standing front and center with the sights framed behind him, he was always standing off in the great beyond. Grinning like a maniac. Hmmm. Strange what they wasted their camera’s memory on.

  After the fifth nearly identical photo of Maxi in the nether-distance near no discernible site of note, I saw what they saw, the spectacle they felt compelled to record. Fat people. Not just fat people, but grade-A American ground round fat people. Monumental asses. Cathedral-sized guts. They’d come to the Magic Kingdom and spent their day documenting America’s tragic gelatinous descent into grotesque obesity. And to dress it all up with a bow, every last wobbling family wore matching T-shirts. The Germans have nothing to compare to our cavalcade of flab, and they even eat dessert.

  On the whole, I don’t feel responsible for America’s morbid fatness. As a matter of fact, I believe that small shops like mine, where we use local ingredients and bake in small, thoughtful batches, are the key to getting us back on track. I’m not offering anything artificial or potentially radioactive, like the stuff that allows industrial, shrink-wrapped piles of sucrose to loiter on grocery shelves for millennia. What we do is so personal to everyone who walks in the shop that there’s no disconnect between the pastry and the person. I refuse to look at my work, at my confections, as products, units to be pumped out with increasing rapidity and economy. That’s the stuff that’s making our kids fat, the value sacks of partially hydrogenated evil.

  My German family, they eat pastries most every day. They stop by their local confectioner midafternoon. Or they bake a tart, brew a fresh pot of coffee, and sit down at 3 p.m. to relax and indulge just a little. It’s not that they’ve forgone treats for the sake of svelte; they just buy and enjoy their treats thoughtfully. That’s what I see here, at our shop. One of our regulars, Claude, gets a scone every day. He’s lost over fifty pounds since we opened. I’ve noticed the same kind of conscious consumption at the dwindling small pastry shops around the States. When kids have the experience of choosing something from a pastry case and knowing that the little tart they’re going to take home was baked today, just a few steps from where they’re standing, they’ll savor that small treat, instead of thoughtlessly devouring the entire contents of an economy-sized Acme brand bag of cookies.

  Just last week I was driving home and passed two kids on the side of the road, selling lemonade. I made a U-turn and hopped out. They poured me a glass, I paid them a dollar, and I complimented their tart, not-too-sweet homemade nectar. Their mom popped out of the house and said, “Hey? Are you Gesine?” I was wearing a store shirt.

  “Yeah!”

  And then she addressed her kids, “Hey guys, do you know who this is? This is the owl lady. She’s the baker!”

  I couldn’t have been more pleased, because they looked absolutely tickled by the news that they were meeting the owl baker lady. And they were svelte little buggers, lanky active kids who got treats at my shop. I’ve added them to my growing collection of kids I like and I’m looking out for.

  Raspberry Meringues

  YOU CAN’T GET AWAY from the sugar in a meringue. People keep asking if I can make them sugar free because that would make the ultimate diet dessert. Sadly, artificial sweeteners can’t provide the chemical compounds that the real stuff does, so they don’t hold the structure that meringue requires. The sugar’s there to stay because you can’t change the ratio of egg white to sugar without ruining the whole thing. But I like to tell myself while I’m scarfing twenty of these puppies that they’re fat free. And unlike, say, most marshmallows and cotton candy, meringues have egg white. So that’s protein—a fat-free protein. And then I get a sugar headache.

  MAKES 15 MERINGUES

  5 large egg whites, at room temperature

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar

  ¼ cup raspberry puree (I use Boiron. Many high-end groceries carry these purees in the freezer section.)

  1 cup sugar

  Preheat the oven to 225°F. Place the egg whites, salt, cream of tartar, and about half of the puree in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Beat on high until soft peaks form. Gradually add the sugar in a steady stream and continue to beat until the meringue is stiff and glossy. This can take awhile, especially when it’s humid. So be patient. If the color isn’t quite as you’d like it, slowly add more puree, but make sure the extra liquid doesn’t damage the stiffness of the egg whites.

  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place the meringue in a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip and pipe rose-shaped dollops, about ¼ cup each, on the parchment. Ba
ke until dry, 1 to 1½ hours.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Monster on the Wall

  9 a.m.

  ALIKA, OUR AFTERNOON BARISTA, sticks her head in the kitchen. “There’s someone named Amy here to pick up a cake?”

  “What cake? What kind of cake? Where’s the order? I don’t know anything about a cake for Amy.”

  The behemoth wall calendar is nailed just above the phone and the punch clock. There are hundreds of order slips plastered all around, just barely clinging to the calendar with scraps of tape. Each date only has a few inches of real estate, so we have to stick orders on top of each other, creating ominous fans of accountability. As the week wears on, the stacks get progressively sinister until we hit Saturday and the buggers swarm that coveted two-inch square marking Saturday’s space. On holidays, we dump the “tape and pray” scheme altogether and break out a three-ring binder to wrangle all the orders.

  But today’s an average Tuesday and we’re in the hands of the monster on the wall. And it appears that, as it will once in a while, a scrap of paper with young Sammy’s birthday cake order—the one Amy is now here to pick up—has unglued itself from its brothers and sisters and gone into hiding in the radiator or is stuck to the underbelly of the workstation. Or maybe someone completely forgot to put the order up, and that likely villain is yours truly. It’s been unanimously agreed that I shouldn’t be allowed to answer the phone, not only because I’m in possession of barely rudimentary phone etiquette (“Hurry up and just tell me what you want! Chocolate or vanilla, it’s not that hard!”), but also because I can’t bring myself to post an order once I’ve taken it. I leave it in the little booklet instead of posting it on the calendar, forgetting it the second I’ve hung up the phone and hear the oven buzzer screaming in the background or realize the whipped cream is just about to spin itself into butter. Or sometimes I’m sure I’ll remember. And I do, in a fashion. Like the time I arrived at a wedding with the five-tiered colossus a day early. Or the fifty-pound baby shower cake, complete with pregnant belly and breasts. I got the flavor right but the event wrong. It was supposed to be for an eighty-ninth birthday celebration. So I spent a very frazzled ten minutes performing an emergency C-section and double mastectomy on poor Great Aunt Tula’s strawberry dream cake.