François Zoë - Zoë Bakes Cakes: Everything You Need to Know to Make Your Favorite Layers, Bundts, Loaves, and More (A Cookbook): A Baking Book

Copyright 2021 by Zo Franois.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

Hardcover ISBN9781984857361

Ebook ISBN9781984857378

Editor: Kelly Snowden | Production editor: Doug Ogan

Print designer: Betsy Stromberg | Print production designer: Mari Gill

Print production manager and print prepress color manager: Jane Chinn

Copyeditor: Dolores York | Proofreader: Amy Bauman | Indexer: Ken DellaPenta

Publicist: Erica Gelbard | Marketer: Andrea Portanova

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contents

pound cakes, quick breads, and bundts

fruit-studded cakesupside down or otherwise

soaked cakes

cake layers, loaves, and sheets

light-as-air cakes

the layered cakes

rolled and fancy cakes

icing, frostings, buttercreams, and ganaches

fillings and flourishes

introduction

My obsession with cake started in an unexpected waywith the humble Twinkie. It was tucked inside a Charlie Brown lunch box, unfortunately not mine, and that little cake opened up a whole new world. A lifelong love affair with all things cake was ignited on my very first day of kindergarten. Perhaps the average kid wouldnt even have blinked at that iconic tube of sponge cake, with its freakishly white and delicious filling squished inside, as if by magic. But, I wasnt average.

I grew up with my parents on a series of communes, which absolutely had its benefits. In 1969, I could toddle sans clothes around the Woodstock Festival with a backdrop of screaming guitars, as if it were any other day; in fact, I did just that. I have visceral memories of sitting in my dads vast garden with the smell of tomato plants vining around me, mixed with dirt, pine trees, and wood smoke. The counterculture to which my parents adhered included a back-to-the-land philosophy on food. We lived in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, on a dirt road that was impassable by anything other than foot for long stretches of the year, due to mud or snow. Geography compelled our self-reliance. So, growing our own food was a necessity, not merely a fashionable trend, and we raised chickens for eggs and meat, a rather nasty-tempered collection of rams and sheep, and a cow for milk and the resulting cream that also became our butter.

My first kitchen memory as a wobbly toddler was standing inside the Big House. This was the only permanent structure on the land and where everyone on the commune gathered for cooking and a respite from the winter. The room was filled with singing and music while sharing the chore of churning cream into butter. That is probably why, to this day, I find music (and butter) essential parts of baking. If you know my Instagram baking tutorials, youre familiar with the soundtracks that often start with Joni Mitchell and bring it all home with the dance beat of Drake by the end of the recipe.

Along with tending the gardens, my dad kept bees. The beeswax was transformed into ornate candles in a makeshift factory we had within a geodesic dome built out of VW car hoods (because it isnt really a commune without a geodesic dome). We sold the candles at the local co-op, along with homemade granola and bread that my Aunt Melissa baked.

There was also sap collected from the maple trees on our eighty-plus acres of land. We brought the sloshing pails to a neighbors sugarhouse, where it was processed into syrup. Honey and maple syrup were the only two sweeteners I ever knew, and I was quite fine with that. Until that Twinkie.

Today, those cylindrical cakes with the mystery creme on the inside are synonymous with junk food; but to a sugar-deprived flower child, they were a revelationa parting of the seas, as it were, and the source of a newly born passion. I must have given my folks an earful about the deception theyd been pulling on me all those years. Carob was the actual lieand decidedly not chocolatedespite all their lip service to the contrary. Grapes were fruit, period. Drying grapes in the sun to shrivel into raisins does not change them into candy. I fought that injustice with all the fervor and dedication those wonderful hippies had instilled in me.

The baking began soon after, tossing ingredients and a handful of hope in a bowl and expecting some sort of alchemy to return as cake. I was eight or nine years old before a miracle occurred by way of a Dutch Baby recipe, courtesy of my friend, and fellow commune-dweller, Sasha. That glorious mix of flour, eggs, and milk puffed to the point of exploding in the oven. We wolfed it down with maple syrup and slices of McIntosh apples from our yard. It was an auspicious beginning.

A parade of knowledge marched into my kitchen after that. First came the Time Life books on French cooking, which still hold space on my stuffed cookbook shelves. Through them, an attempt at a chocolate mousse was a gritty disaster, because I didnt know that adding coffee didnt mean Folgers coffee grounds. Lesson learned: mousse should be velvety, not chewy. The next batch was spot-on. Soon I had baked my way through Lee Baileys Country Kitchen, Baking with Julia, and Martha Stewarts everything; Ina Gartens brownies were on high rotation. Over the years, my affection for sugar only deepened, along with a determination to figure out its transformational powers.

IN PURSUIT OF SUGAR

When I was in college, I launched a cookie company after writing a business plan for a fictitious company as an assignment for my accounting class. I could not have cared less about the profit and loss calculations. In fact, I was never much of a student in the sense of academics. If it hadnt been for home-economics classes in middle school, I would have had very little to wrap my head around in a school building. Growing up as the daughter of wandering hippies, I ended up going to sixteen different schools by the time I graduated from college. Each time I started at a new school, Id reinvent myself, and by the time my folks were on to the next ashram, commune, cult, or concert, I was ready to leave too. I was bored in a school classroom, compared to the journey I was on with my parents.

College was no better, and that business class at the University of Vermont (UVM) had me wishing I could move again. Instead of sitting in class listening to business theory, I immersed myself in an actual business, taking a semester off from UVM to open Zos Cookies. I ran the company out of my boyfriends (now my husband) tiny apartment kitchen. He even built me a beautiful rolling cart to launch my cookie-baking empire on the streets of Burlington, Vermont. The company was successful enough that I didnt lose money, but soon it became evident that more school was probably a wise move.