Case Natasha - The coolhaus cookbook: an architectural guide to building delicious ice cream sandwiches and more

To Natashas architect dad, French cooking meant making coq au vin and drinking the extra wine while stirring the pot. Her mom, a cartoon animator, was a Berkeley-bred vegetarian. Health food ruled. Lunch was a brown paper bag with a banana on the bottom, a fruit cup, and a naturalpeanut butter sandwich (no jelly allowed) or tuna with no mayo and frighteningly dark green lettuce. Definitely not tradable commodities in the school lunchroom.

Natashas experience making desserts as a child extended to opening a box of brownie mix, stirring in oil and eggs, placing it in the oven... and forgetting all about it as she trotted off to soccer practice. (Her parents came home to a smoke-filled kitchen.)

Desserts in her household were low-fat ice creams and uncool birthday carrot cakes. She is still grateful for a trip to the East Coast to visit relatives, during which she was introduced to her first full-fat ice creama life-changing experience.

In college, Natashas close friend Justine taught her that decadent desserts werent just bought in elegant pastry shops; they could actually be whipped up at home. Justine thought nothing of making an iced three-layer cake to reward her boyfriend for doing well on a math exam. From then on, butterfat found a permanent place in Natashas consciousness.

Today, not a day goes by when shes not surrounded by incredible flavors like .

Freyas childhood meals were a mishmash of her Filipino and Chinese heritage. She could always count on rice being in the rice cooker. While Freya embraced the cuisine of her heritage, she sometimes wanted fried chicken or pizza. Instead, pigs-blood and offal stew, called dinuguan , or boiled duck fetus, known as balut , were often on the dinner table. Desserts were gelatinous affairs like halo halo , a mix of ice cream, shaved ice, red beans, coconut gelatin cubes, and a plethora of assorted artificial ingredients, and puto , a wiggly rice cake that doesnt taste like much of anything. Or her dads inventions, things like mashed-up avocado with milk, sugar, and creamed corn.

Freya remembers her first salty chocolate chip cookie as a turning point, making her think, Why cant every dessert be like this? In a new quest of mixing the savory and the sweet, she found herself at a young age creating her own ice cream sandwiches by putting a block of Neapolitan ice cream between two slices of Wonder Bread. Today, her savory palate has been the driving force behind ice cream flavors such as the luxurious .