Brown - CakeLove: how to bake cakes from scratch

Warren Brown wants you to bake your cake and eat it too. And he wants you to conquer your fear of flour and learn to love every step of cake bakingincluding, of course, the step in which you present your made-from-scratch masterpiece to bedazzled, hungry-eyed family and friends. (Not to mention the moment when you yourself get to sample a slice of that lovingly crafted creation.)

For Brown, love and baking are inseparable. After all, he abandoned an unrewarding career in law to do the workbaking cakes!that he finds truly satisfying. Every page of CakeLove communicates that satisfaction, as well as Browns can-do approach to the art of baking. As he asserts, baking cakes isnt a cakewalk, but its not rocket science, eitherand getting it right isnt nearly as hard as you think.

Pound cakes, butter cakes, sponge cakes, cupcakes. Glazes, frostings, fillings, meringues. Brown provides all the basics on ingredients, equipment, and techniques, as well as recipes for more than fifty cakes that range from the classic (Chocolate Butter Cake) to the adventurous (Sassy, a pound cake made with mango puree and cayenne pepper). The informative step-by-step shots make you want to run to the kitchen and start baking, and the scrumptious color photos of completed cakes look good enough to sink your teeth into.

How to Bake Cakes from Scratch

Warren Brown

photographs by Rene Comet

Stewart, Tabori & Chang
New York

Published in 2008 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang
An imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Text copyright 2008 by Warren Brown
Photographs copyright 2008 by Rene Comet

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Warren, 1970

CakeLove : how to bake cakes from scratch / Warren Brown.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-58479-662-6

1. Cake. 2. CakeLove (Bakery) I. Title. II. Title: How to bake cakes from scratch. III. Title: Cake love.

TX771.B8785 2008
641.8653--dc22

2007037543

Editors: Christine Gardner and Jennifer Levesque

Designers: Matthew Bouloutian and Vivian Ghazarian

Production Manager: Tina Cameron

Photo Assistant: Kathryn Norwood

Prop Styling: Audrey Weppler

Props: Sur La Table

115 West 18th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.abramsbooks.com

To my parents Beatrice and Leon

Thank you for the immense support, opportunity, and love you have given to me.

With love always,

Warren

LCD Vanilla Pound Cake with Whipped Cream and Sugared Strawberries

I can cook but I cant bake. That summed up my know-how in the kitchen until I embarked on a New Years resolution in 1999 to learn how to bake. Until then, I had a complete fear of flour. The baking experience I did have was limited to sweet potato pies baked in store-bought pie shells and boxed-mix pancakes or cornbread. Dont get me wrongtheres nothing wrong with that. Whether its from scratch or from a box, baking anything at home is better than nothing at all. But when I began baking from scratch I was amazed to see that getting it right wasnt as hard as I thought it would be, and the taste was unbeatable.

Every time someone learns I stopped practicing law to open a bakery, they want to know, Why cake? What is it about cake thats so compelling? Well, simply put, it touched me.

Late one Friday nighttwo years before I opened CakeLoveI was agonizing over how to make a cake look special for one of the senior managers in my office. It was a layered vanilla and almond butter cake with candied navel orange segments and lightly dried orange rind in the buttercream. I took some extra orange segments and put them on the top of the cake in a star-shaped pattern.

To my surprise I was overwhelmed with emotion and memories. The pattern of the orange segments was identical to one I used to draw a lot with oil pastels and colored chalk years before. I also had flashbacks of track practice in sixth grade, biting into cold navel orange segments after running five miles, the farthest I had ever run in my life. There were also thoughts of deceased friends to whom I pray whenever I feel alone. I was exhausted and overwhelmed, and in an instant I lost it and began sobbing over this cake. My past, present, and future suddenly converged and I could see my entire life more clearly than ever beforeall because of a cake. My own doubts over whether I should continue baking just disappeared. Cake was it.

As I prepared to open my bakery, baking took on a new role in my life. I felt a mission not just to bake well, but to understand it inside and out. I knew I needed to take the guesswork out of baking from scratch so that every batch matched the one before it. I got to work and pored over as many sources as I could find and baked every type of cake I could imagine eating. I brought my creations to friends, family, and coworkers. Over time I realized that baking is not just careful measuring and excellent ingredients, its love too.

Love and baking go hand in hand. Bakers like to create treats they know the recipients will enjoy. They think about whom theyre baking for and choose recipes accordingly. And, of course, baking takes time. If I hear about someone rushing through a recipe I think to myself, Wheres the love? Love is the care that can be tasted long after a cake is out of the oven. Youre just not baking if you dont add love.

But there is work behind the love of baking cakes from scratch, and here is where we dive in. Baking cake isnt a cakewalk, but its not rocket science either. When you start, just read the recipedont get ahead of yourself, and have fun. Even if you have had bad luck in the kitchen remember that just about everyone loves dessert, so even flops go over well.

This book is a tour of how and why I bake from scratch. Im self-taught and enjoy blending traditional and unconventional techniques. I enjoy bringing together different schools of thought when I bakeit makes my time in the kitchen an adventure instead of a chore. Some of the steps I call for might seem odd or extreme, but I do them to get the most out of each ingredient. This is how I bake at home and its how we bake at CakeLove.

I have refrained from making too many suggestions regarding what flavors to pair together because thats the fun of baking. Mix and match the components from the different chapters to make your own creative combinations. The photographs showcase some of the classic flavors that we make at CakeLove, but this is by no means the limit to what you can create. Have fun and experiment. Baking and assembling cakes might take a little getting used to, but thats totally normal. Just have fun and let the rest take care of itself.

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