Buddy Valastro - The Essential Cake Boss: Recipes & Techniques You Absolutely Have to Know to Bake Like the Boss

I t 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 Kid both 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.

Its the same with baking: You do small tasks like mixing cookie dough, or piping an clair full of cream, or rolling out rugelach. Its assembly line work, or at least thats how it seems. But when it comes time to do more intricate baking and decorating, you realize you already know a lot of whats required. If you do enough baking, then you dont even have to think about it because your senses take over: Your fingers know what dough should feel like when you work it; your eyes and nose develop a sixth sense for doneness; and your brain makes adjustments based on the end result so you can correct your course the next time to make it even better.

Once you get all those tasks down to a T, and you move on to the next ones, thats when you have your Karate Kid moment. All of those cookie-making skills come into play when you decide to tackle pastry; the mixing, rolling, shaping, and baking have become second nature, so you can save your mental energy for whats new: assembly and decorating. And by the time you get to cake making and decorating, and discover that youve already got the tools to do that... well, its a truly mystical moment in a bakers life when we realize that we possess the skills necessary to make our tools and ingredients do whatever we want them to, and that were capable of more than we ever thought possible. I hope that this book will help you attain such a moment in your own baking life.

Im living proof of what Im talking about. In my early days at Carlos Bake Shop, I was confined to simple baking tasks such as making cookies and what we call finishing work, which means slicing and piping pastries full of cream, or topping them with maraschino cherries or strawberry halves. Those jobs didnt seem like much at the time, just your basic dues-paying labor. But eventually, I got so good at these rudimentary tasks that I didnt even have to think about them. By making cookies, I learned how to mix, picked up some simple piping techniques, and honed my eye for doneness, learning to discern the fine lines between hot, done, and burned, which were different for each cookie. By making pastry, I learned a greater variety of skills, developed greater finesse with dough, and began to develop what we call the Hand of the Bag, the oneness with a pastry bag that you need to be able to decorate cakes. And cakes were the next step in my education.

Because repetition leads to mastery, my favorite times at the bakery were the holidays, when wed bang out 150 pans of clairs and 150 of cream puffs in a single day. I used to look forward to those crunch times, because when each one was over, my skills had risen to a new level and I was ready to move on to the next thing. January didnt bring just the new year; on the heels of the December madness at Carlos, it also brought me new challenges in the kitchen.