Valastro - Baking with the Cake Boss : 100 Buddys Recipes and Secrets That Make You the Boss of Your Home Kitchen

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Copyright 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC. TLC, Cake Boss, and related logos are trademarks of Discovery Communications, LLC, used under license. All rights reserved. tlc.com

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First Free Press hardcover edition November 2011

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Valastro, Buddy.
Baking with the Cake boss: 100 of Buddy's best recipes and decorating secrets / Buddy Valastro.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Cake. 2. Cake decorating. 3. Carlos Bake Shop (Hoboken, N.J.) I. Cake boss (Television program) II. Title.
TX771.V335 2011 641.8653dc23
2011018216

ISBN 978-1-4391-8352-6 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-2891-3 (ebook)

To my mother, Mary Valastro.

After Daddy passed away, you and I promised each other that we would do whatever it took to keep Carlos Bake Shop flourishing. We strived, together with the entire family, to pull that off, andof coursethe bakery became more successful than ever. In the process, you became more than a mother to me; we became best friends.

I talk a lot about how I inherited a lot of Daddys best traits, but I was fortunate to receive many of yours as wellto put it in baking terms, you guys were the recipe for the man I am today.

And so I dedicate this book to you, straight from the heart.

It all started with a cookie.

Everything I am professionally. All that Im capable of doing in a bakery. Every wedding and theme cake Ive ever conceived and created. It all began with the first thing I was ever taught to make when I started working at my familys bakery: butter cookies. Its been a long time since my first official day on the jobalmost twenty-five yearsand it feels like a long time. When I look back over my life and career, I recall my skills growing at the same slow pace at which a tree grows.

A bakers development doesnt happen overnight. Its a painstaking thing. Even if you have raw talent, you have to nurture it, develop it. You have to patiently back up instinct and intuition with craft and, most of all, practice. Because in baking, practice doesnt just make perfect. Practice also lets you move on to the next level, the next challenge, the next thing to be mastered.

Learning to bake is like learning to speak. You pick up that first word, even if you pronounce it imperfectly, and then pretty soon you learn another, and then another. You might not be able to say every word as clearly as a network anchorman, or put words together into sentences, but even as a kid you know thats where youre headed, to a place where you can string words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into anything you wantan essay, a story, a memoirif you put in the time to get good at each of the component parts.

Its the same with baking. Those butter cookies were like my first word. Theyre not difficult to make, and theyre still one of the first things we assign to baking newbies at Carlos Bake Shop, my familys business on Washington Street in Hoboken, New Jersey: You mix a dough of butter, sugar, almond paste, egg whites, and flour; scrape it into a pastry bag; pipe circles of it onto a parchment paperlined tray; and bake them.

Next to the magnificent theme cakes we produce, those butter cookies might sound like the most idiotproof grunt work you could imagine. But theyre not. The beautiful thing about baking is that it all fits together; just as words lead to sentences, and sentences lead to paragraphs, those cookiesas well as the others I made in my first months on the joblaid the foundation for all the baking and decorating that awaited me, and if youre new to baking, they can do the same thing for you.

Youve probably already made cookies, but I wonder if you have any idea how much youve learned about pastry and cake making from something as simple as mixing and baking a chocolate chip cookie.

If youve made cookies from scratch, then you already have experience with one of the most important things about baking: mixing dough until its just the way its supposed to be. As for the baking itself, youve developed an eye and a nose for doneness, and youve learned a little something about how food behaves after it comes out of the oven, like the effect of carryover heat (the way things continue to cook by their own contained heat as they rest), and that the cookies will harden as they cool.

Those things might not seem like muchI bet youve never even given them much thoughtbut if youve ever made chocolate chip cookies from scratch, then youve already begun to unleash the baker within.

I call this the Karate Kid principle. In the movie The Karate Kidboth the original and the 2010 remakethe young protagonist is forced by his master, Mister Miyagi, to execute a series of seemingly mundane tasks: sanding the floor, painting a house, and waxing a car (in the original) or picking up and putting on a jacket, then taking it off and hanging it up (in the remake). The boy doesnt see the value of these tasksin fact, he thinks the old man is toying with himbut when it comes time to step up and do some real karate, he finds that he knows all he needs to know: the brushstrokes he used to paint taught him the motion for blocking a blow; bending over to pick up the jacket prepared him to duck; and so on. Hes been learning more than he ever realized just by doing those simple little things, over and over.