Confections of a Closet Master Baker

by Gesine Bullock-Prado

  Around this time, Tim slipped and broke his collarbone. Tim wasn’t just helping me bake. He was doubling as our dishwasher. We actually had a dishwasher. She was lovely. Just a little developmentally challenged. She was in a program whose aim was to give her independence, and we wanted to help. So a few hours before she came in, Tim did the dishes, leaving a handful behind. She came in for a few hours, washed about ten things, and left. Tim and I would carry the dirty dishes we’d been hiding to the sink and he finished the rest. So now I was the dishwasher too. I was not sleeping.

  Between the baking, the dishwashing, and the Shetland-sized puppy that used me as a mattress, I was a mess. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so depressing if we were making money at the shop. But we weren’t. The snow and the economy kept everyone at home. Our entire town saw a 20 percent decrease in business. Everyone talked about shutting their doors. And I missed Ray, but considering the financial pit we were in, he’d have to keep working on films to pay the mortgage.

  We’re finally digging out of the financial disaster from that winter, but a tax bill could still arrive and erase every cent we have, just when we thought we could actually pay our vendors. Maybe ourselves. Or my favorite mixer gets fried. The water heater explodes. A customer trips outside the shop and breaks her arm. A cherry pie is gummy. Someone finds a washer in a pastry. It’s time for Ray and Gesine’s monthly conversation entitled “How much longer can we do this?”

  The potential lawsuit, this is something my aunt, Tante Erika, brought up first thing. She’s an extraordinary baker. I still ask her to send me Christmas cookies when I’m knee-deep in holiday baking. But when I told her I was opening a pastry shop, something that I thought would appeal to her immeasurably, her initial reaction was to bring up the potential danger I might inflict. A hair. Salmonella. Random body part.

  I’d witnessed class-action lawsuits in the making firsthand at the Vermont Venture Center. Large-scale pie makers found a bolt in their pie dough. It came from the ten-ton rotary mixer hidden in the back room behind the walk-in cooler. They found the bolt before they’d filled the pie, packaged it, or sold it, so crisis averted. Until they realized that there was a washer missing as well. And upon closer inspection of the equipment, they noticed a few other bits that weren’t accounted for and may or may not have been party to this metal exodus. Or they could have escaped in an earlier batch of dough that had already been shipped and was just biding its time in a supermarket freezer until Grandma takes it home, bites right into it, and shatters her jaw.

  I remember thinking quite clearly, this won’t happen to me. I’m in control of everything, every ingredient, every piece of equipment. I’m a small-scale operator and anal-retentive. I’m better, smarter, more together, less stoned; I’ve got higher standards. I’ll get my own space with shiny new equipment and I’ll do it perfectly.

  But a customer did find a washer in an otherwise beautifully executed vacherin one day. We’d been open almost two years and I already had a string of minor disasters behind me. But this was dangerous. And I discovered that no matter how perfectly I think everything is going, equipment doesn’t always give you a heads-up when it’s about to implode.

  I could have killed someone. Our customer brought in the washer and reassured us that no one choked. No teeth were broken. But there it was nonetheless.

  Just keeping standards unbearably high, baking like you really mean it every single day, is exhausting. I’m sick of making macaroons. I won’t make them everyday. I just won’t. You can’t make me. There are days that I dread making Danish. The day-long process of making the dough, making the fillings, rolling the dough with painful precision, and measuring and cutting and then starting all over again. And I loathe carrot cake. For a year, Tim couldn’t make carrot cake without adding a tear of despair to the batter. Cakes fell for no apparent reason at random intervals. We endured an entire year of sheet pan after sheet pan of cratered cakes. And then Tim slipped on that fresh patch of ice outside while getting blueberries, and was out for six weeks. I inherited the accursed carrot cakes. One day I figured it out, the mysterious reason behind the sudden failure of what once was a perfect recipe: we weren’t putting in enough carrot. After years of peeling, cutting, grating, and then rechopping batch after batch of carrots, we’d gotten progressively lazier and started using less and less carrot until we’d reached a point where the cake protested. “Screw you guys! I’m not working with you until you give me back my carrots.”

  You add to these small annoyances lack of sleep, taxes, vendor bills, health inspector visits, and wild card employees, and my dream bakery turns into a shop of horrors.

  The week after Carol called to gently complain about her gummy pie, I made everything myself. Hundreds of little pies, some with ruby red cherries and hand-braided lattice crusts, double-crusted caramel apple with a sprinkling of shiny sanding sugar, and wild blueberry with buttery sweet crumbles. When the cherries boiled, I added the perfect amount of cornstarch slurry to stiffen the juices and keep it from being runny. When I folded the butter into the pie dough, I knew when I’d finished my last turn that the crusts would be at their ultimate flakiness. I filled the case with my pies and I set aside a cherry to give to Carol, to apologize for the week before and to prove that I was true to my culinary word and reputation.

  Lily poked her head back into the kitchen. “The pies look particularly beautiful today. And Carol said it was the best cherry pie ever.”

  That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. What’s bittersweet is that I want to hear it everyday; I want to be creating nonstop brilliance. Small and large misfortunes keep it from being a constant reality. But I’ll keep trying because the beauty of a well-made pie is as close to magic as hearing my name pronounced with the perfect sigh on the last syllable.

  Cherry Filling

  YOU CAN USE THIS cherry filling for everything from pie and turnovers to Danish. It’s simple and filled with summer’s promise. Use sour cherries; they’re just better. And frozen cherries are perfect. I’ve added sugar to ensure you don’t make ugly pucker faces while you’re eating. While you’re at it, use another fruit. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries—they all work. And it won’t be gummy. Honest.

  1 cup sugar

  3 tablespoons cornstarch

  ¾ teaspoon salt

  5 cups whole pitted sour cherries or dark sweet cherries (about 2 pounds whole unpitted cherries)

  1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice (if using sour cherries) or 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (if using dark sweet cherries)

  Butter, optional

  Whisk the sugar, cornstarch, and salt in a medium bowl to blend. Stir in the cherries and lemon juice.

  Add your filling to a pie crust as you would apples to the apple pie recipe or a square of puff pastry that you’ll fold into a triangle for a turnover. But before you cover the cherries with dough and bake, dot them with a few bits of butter for an extra hit of yummy. Bake at 350°F and enjoy.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Doing Lunch, the Vermont Way

  11 a.m.

  UNCH IS BUSY AND NOISY. We start service at 11 a.m. and keep churning out sandwiches until 3 p.m. But the bulk of our orders come first thing; Vermonters being a conservative dining bunch, they take all their meals early. Tim mans the panini grill and completes pastry odds and ends during lulls. I finish up special cake orders for pickup in the afternoon and start elements for multidimensional pastries that I’ll have in the case tomorrow. Opera cakes, alternating layers of moist almond cake, mocha buttercream, chocolate ganache, and marzipan; chocolate pavé slices, five thin layers of spongy soufflé cake sandwiching rich and fluffy chocolate pastry cream, covered with chocolate glaze and decorated with white dots of confectioners’ sugar; and Mozart kugel cakes, small domed almond cakes filled with a chocolate truffle and set atop a round of pistachio meringue, covered with pistachio paste, and then doused with a thin layer of chocolate and sprinkled with bright green bits of ground pistachio. These are work-intensive
little cakes and they leave the building almost instantly once they hit the pastry case; I feel as if I never made them. But there is an incomparable satisfaction in arranging each meticulously made element so the flavors are balanced and the cake itself is a work of art. This is what I do for lunch these days. Nibbling on pistachios along the way, sneaking into the back office for a few minutes to eat a bowl of yogurt and noodle around on the Internet.

  Lunch used to be onerous for me. In Hollywood you “do” lunch, you don’t eat it. There’s no savoring or lingering. Instead it’s an hour devoted to kissing someone’s ass or someone kissing yours. There’s little to no eye contact. Your luncheon partner, while keeping up a steady stream of superlatives regarding your latest project and touting his own, keeps his sights on the entrance to check out who’s coming in next.

  I once had a lunch meeting on Sunset Boulevard. I gave the hostess the name of my dining companion, who’d made the reservation, and she sat me at a table with an aging tanning booth veteran with spectacularly white teeth and a brow that had been recently pulled surgically tight. He moved his man-purse so I could sit. He looked confused. I probably did too, since the agent I was supposed to be having lunch with sounded a bit younger on the phone. And agents usually don’t carry man-purses or lunch in leisure suits. No matter. I introduced myself and he jumped right in. My dining companion had a bevy of projects to pitch. My God they were rank, but he just kept on peppering me with crap idea after crap idea, hoping something stuck. He kept it up with verve, his delivery straight from the old school. No apologies and plenty of sparkle. Then the hostess approached our table and very apologetically said, “I’m so sorry, Ms. Bullock. I sat you at the wrong table.”

  Without missing a beat, my new friend whipped out a business card from his man-bag and bid me adieu. “Call me! We’ll do lunch for real next time!”

  Seated at the right table with the appropriately fresh-faced agent, he jittered like an inbred lapdog and noodled with his BlackBerry under the table. But his sales pitch was identical to the one I’d just heard at the wrong table. An endless stream of crap film ideas, except that the seventy-year-old plastic surgery victim gave it a little more oomph. This is what I could expect from lunch for the rest of my life: a wimpy salad, tap water, and the same bad pitch. And I couldn’t be sure that when it was my turn to sell an idea, it was any better. I couldn’t tell any more. Quite honestly I didn’t care.

  And then I had a lunch meeting the day after one of my worst nights. It was a lunchtime pitch at a studio with another producer I’d worked with and liked well enough. She was a big fish and she was smart. She was tough to talk to on the phone, though. She was always inhaling something, tobacco or weed, so conversations were punctuated with an asthmatic inhalation and luxuriant exhalation, taking up precious minutes I could be spending looking up cake recipes on the Internet. In person, she was a muscled crumb of a woman, a pinch over five feet. She favored brief skirts, allowing her toned legs free rein to contort. Mostly she pretzeled herself into a lotus position, skirt bunching up around her hips, panties exposed to the world. She was agile enough to torture herself into position and still keep hold of a lit cigarette.

  We met a writer; he was pitching an idea. He suffered from a slight nervous palsy and dropped a few pages from his densely packed story outline. We had lunch brought in and we wrestled with the little plastic tubs of salad dressing while we chatted. Pitches always start with cocktail conversation. A little weather, some gossip, a lament on the ever-increasing traffic, and then a slight dissertation on the need for fuel conservation and a switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Our writer cut off the small talk and jumped straight into his pitch, ignoring his egg salad sandwich. He stumbled into his introduction, stopped and started a few times getting into the rhythm of his story. I tried to chew quietly, afraid any sudden noise would spook him and screw up his concentration.

  He gave us a brief synopsis of a heartfelt and politically salient tale and segued into a story that had influenced his opus. It was here that he lost track of his agitation and fell into his natural cadence for storytelling.

  “I married a first-generation Chinese American. Her mother lived with us but didn’t speak a word of English, so we cobbled together a primitive sign language. A lot of pointing, a little pushing, and vigorous nods. But it was in the kitchen that communication became effortless. She and I cooked together. She taught me generations’ worth of her family’s recipes, sharing with me a deep history and creating a true kinship. There was eloquent meaning in her gestures that I perfectly understood; we had no need for imperfect translators. We understood each other beautifully in the kitchen. She taught me how little I knew about what we consume and how artless and distant food can be in America. We had our closest moment one day while making dumplings.”

  It’s rare to get insight into a colleague’s life, especially a genuine glimpse devoid of name-dropping and ego stroking. It’s a singular experience to witness even a calculated unveiling of vulnerability, so this guy’s humble tale of cross-cultural familial intimacy and his realization that he had a lot to learn from a little old Chinese lady he had heretofore probably looked upon as a cute stereotype was beguiling. That is, until the pretzel-bent producer yelled, “OH MY GOD! I LOVE DUMPLINGS! There’s this fabulous place downtown, you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  And she nattered on and on, interrupting a lovely story well told by a man who clearly had difficulty speaking naturally in public. I marveled at the disconnection and self-absorption that had just suffocated the room, this woman compulsively indulging in every urge to talk about herself, the writer scrambling to get his thoughts together, and looking for the right moment to jump back in. And me, just watching it all play out, not trying to help him, not trying to shut her up, guilelessly rubbernecking at the train wreck in front of me and feeling ashamed at my utter lack of interest in steering this pitch back on course. It wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened after ten years in Hollywood, not by a long shot, but it was one of the last things. It was the proverbial straw and I was the camel.

  Afterward, walking between the soundstages on the studio lot, dodging golf carts in high heels, I fished my car keys from my bag and folded my legs into my fuel-efficient clown car. I sat with my forehead pressed against the steering wheel, descending into lunacy as I endlessly repeated, “I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place.”

  I had started out in the business with so much enthusiasm and hope. But each year most of my promising projects never made it out of development hell, and a slew of other producers’ regurgitated schlock made it to the big screen instead. Each year, I wrestled with the knowledge that no matter how well I did my job, no one looked at me as anything but “her sister” with nothing to offer but a fancy job title born of nepotism and access to a movie star. Each year, I stared down a pile of unpalatable scripts and sadly resigned myself to spending the better part of my waking hours reading them. But all of these things only contributed to a slow build of ennui that, sadly, I could live with; nothing really jarred me into quitting. Not until a project I actually cared about got made.

  “Gesine, what are you doing here? I’d never have noticed if you didn’t come.”

  That’s what did it. That’s why I quit, that one dickish, dismissive greeting. It didn’t even make sense. But what it was was mean. And it was uttered by a man I’d spent months helping get to this very place, the party to celebrate the start of his project. A project that for months no one wanted. And the damn party I’d helped plan, for God’s sake.

  I’d set up meeting after meeting with studios, shilled the idea to anyone who would listen, helped organize showcases, filled the seats with high-powered suits, and then finally, in a last-ditch effort, my Hollywood Hail Mary, made a groveling call to a friend in a very high place begging for an introduction to the one person who could make it happen. And that one call led to a fortuitous creative confluence that resulted in a “go”
project. And now that this guy had a career and a soon-to-be household name, he thought it was okay to treat one of the little people who did the idiot grunt work like a subhuman. So what was I doing there?

  A day later, still smarting from that comment, I was in my car on a studio lot muttering to myself like a crazy woman. I stopped long enough to call Ray.

  “I’ve had it. I want out of this douchebaggery.”

  I do care about cake. There really aren’t any new ideas in baking; it’s the same confectionary plot again and again, perhaps in different combinations. But everything I bake is a story worth retelling. Working through lunch, the air thick with almonds and chocolate, I tend to the elements of my layer cakes, the acts that make up the whole, never losing sight of what they will become but taking joy in the deliciousness of each individual part. Buttercream, ganache, almond cake, marzipan; layering each element in perfect symmetry, so when I slice the long cake into individual pieces with a scalding hot knife, each layer is distinct and uniform. I carefully transfer the slices to the pastry tray and put any stray bits of cake on a plate for the crew to nibble, evidence of a lunchtime well spent.

  Opera Cake

  OPERA CAKE IS TRADITIONALLY made with layers of almond sponge cake. In its natural state, almond sponge is, yes, spongy, but also a bit dry. Common practice is to soak the sponge with simple syrup; in this application, simple syrup laced with strong coffee. I think this is utter horseshit. Why not use a moist almond cake to start? Usually the saving grace of opera slices is the filling and the thin layer of almond paste that covers the very top of the cake. But the layers of sponge cake are very thin and with the soaked-cake approach, they become so sodden with simple syrup that there’s no possibility of peeling them off efficiently enough to just get down and dirty with the good stuff, the filling.