Matt Lewis - Baked Elements: The Importance of Being Baked in 10 Favorite Ingredients

Baked Elements... is arranged by our favorite ingredients, ten distinct flavor elements from which to build a range of recipes. These are the ingredients that we would take to a desert island or rescue from a burning house. They are the basis of our bakery, our books, and to some degree, our lives... While we cant expect everyones top ten ingredients to match ours, we do hope the recipes turn into new favorites. Enjoy.FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafitos beloved bakery and sweetssold in stores across the countryhave garnered major critical acclaim. Their previous cookbooks have left fans clamoring for more. Here are the best of the best: seventy-five new recipes built around Lewis and Poliafitos ten favorite ingredients.

PEANUT BUTTER: Crunchy Peanut Butter Banana Bread, Oopsy Daisy Cake, Peanut Butter Chocolate Whirligigs

LEMON AND LIME: Sunrise Key Lime Tarts, Lime Tarragon Cookies, Lemon Shaker Pie

CARAMEL: Caramel Coconut Cluster Bars, Alfajores, Turtle Thumbprint Cookies

BOOZE: Lacy Panty Cakes with Whiskey Sauce, Triple Rum Black Pepper Cake, Whiskey Peach Upside-Down Cake

PUMPKIN: Toasted Pumpkin Seed Brittle, Pumpkin Almond Cake with Almond Butter Frosting, Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

MALTED MILK POWDER: Devil Dogs with Malted Buttercream Frosting, Malted Madeleines, Vanilla Bean Malt Cake

CINNAMON: Spicy Brownies, Brown Butter Snickerdoodles, Cinnamon Chocolate Souffls

CHEESE: Orange Almond Ricotta Cheesecake, Cheddar Corn Souffle, Poppy Seed Pound Cake with Brown Butter Glaze

CHOCOLATE: Chocolate Mayonnaise Cupcakes, Candy Bar Cookies, Tunnel of Hazelnut Fudge Cake

BANANA: Banana Whoopie Pies, Chocolate Banana Tart, Honey Banana Poppy Seed Bread

Cakes, cookies, bars, milkshakes, pies, brownies, tarts, and morethese sweets are perfect for everyday cravings, special occasions, late-night celebrations, and weekend get-togethers. Chapters also include infographicsquirky facts and charts on the featured ingredientsand helpful Baked notes that make creating these desserts as easy as pie.

OUR 10 FAVORITE INGREDIENTS

MATT LEWIS & RENATO POLIAFITO
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TINA RUPP

STEWART, TABORI & CHANG NEW YORK

Theoretically speaking, Renato and I should have killed each other by now. We work in extremely cramped quarters, see each other more than most married couples, and jointly run a decently sized (i.e., decently stressed) bakery operation. I like to imagine that we still respect, complement, and work well together because weve found some harmonious balancea spiritual tipping pointbut I suppose it is much less interesting than that. Its probably sheer willpower and our shared love of the same thing: sweets.

Thankfully, we run parallel with each other regarding all things pastry. Chocolate, peanut butter, caramel, and cinnamon play big roles in each of our daily lives, and they are never far from our reach. Also, both of us believe in eating dessert at least once (if not twice) per day, and we both feel that a bad chocolate chip cookie is one of the saddest things in the world.

That is where most of our similarities endin the pastry corner. Our differencesthe things that bring so-called balance into our hectic business livesare just as apparent and just as necessary, and you only need to examine our respective home kitchens to understand our personalities.

My kitchen is orderly chaos. It is clean, but needs a trim. I have six-year-old candy bars in my refrigerator because I keep meaning to replicate them as desserts. I have whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, and bread flour stored in at least seven different bins and plastic containers throughout the kitchen without any rhyme or reason. Surplus cocoa powder is stored in the guest bedroom. Unusual or hard-to-find ingredients are put in unusual and hard-to-find places. Nothing is labeled, and yet I know where everything is. I rarely have more than three savory ingredients in my pantry at any one time, as I am comfortable making a dinner with just chocolate, cheese, and wine. I have too many cake pans, pie plates, and baking sheets, and yet I cant part with any of them. They are like old friends with whom I like to hang out in the kitchen.

Renatos kitchen is a study in obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is operating-room sanitary and hyperorganized. Things are washed as they are used and put back in their exact same place in the exact same way. Everything is labeled (courtesy of a handy label maker) and easily accessed. If you didnt know any better, you would assume by looking at his kitchen that Renato was a stereotypical New Yorkerthat he didnt cook or bake at all, that he was the king of takeoutbut looks can be deceiving. Though his kitchen looks barely used, he is an avid cook. In addition to making many pastries, he is also extremely comfortable with the savorymaking Italian and German and American fare with great aplomb.

Our bakery kitchen, the Baked kitchen, for better or for worse (but mostly for better), has come to resemble a weird hybrid of both of our kitchensthough the bakery kitchen is more efficient, bigger, more gangly, as if on steroids. The detailed organizationthe highly efficient systems and important folders and handbooks and time linesthats a lot of Renato with a healthy dose of fantastic staff mixed in. The odd, semi-eccentric, big-picture ideasthe lets make something with wort (unfermented beer), the lets write a bunch of books under impossible deadlines, the lets create a shelf-stable, all-natural, hard-to-distribute productthats a lot of me tempered by Renato and said staff. Its a big blended bakery. Its a beast, and we feed it. Then we go home and we think about it.

We are unaware of any other way to run a bakery. In fact, our entire baking venture is either earth-shatteringly easy or appallingly narrow: we only make and serve what we like and hope the customer is game. Perhaps we should broaden our menu horizons, experiment with ingredients we normally shun, take a walk on the nouveau sidebut that would seem disingenuous, if not a little dangerous. Our bakery and our books are really just a version of usthe caffeinated, much sweeter version of us.

Self-reflection through the lens of the contents of our fifth-grade lunch boxes is worthy of both analysis and concern. True, the historical data is fuzzy, but it is strictly a function of our individual memories. Had we cataloged and parsed our average grade-school lunches for deeper meaning, certain biometrics could have been distilled, a future of eating habits could have been foretold. In retrospect, our lunch boxes were much more than just vessels for carrying foodthey were mini windows into our souls.

My lunch box (the contents, not the Flintstones decor) was the envy of many school chums: a very substantial peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a candy bar (cookies on Fridays), and either a banana or a bag of pretzels or both. No vegetables. No strange lunch meats like liverwurst. At one point, Mom might have halfheartedly pushed more nutritious mealsthe kind that wouldnt attract the attention of Child Protective Servicesbut she eventually understood and gave in (she herself was quite happy with cake for lunch). I was already on my path, and my path was paved in peanut butter, bananas, and chocolate.