Rose's Heavenly Cakes (2 page)

Lilian Brady, Rochelle Palermo, Matthew Boyer, Anthony Wright, invaluable proofreaders

Liz Duffy, food stylist, for her meticulous and creative artistry

Jan Fort and Jeanine Kalesis, food stylist assistants

Roy Finamore, imaginative prop stylist, wise consultant, and old friend

Christine DiComo, assistant editor

Rebecca Scherm, editorial assistant

Christina Solazzo, editorial assistant

Todd Fries, senior marketing manager

Gypsy Lovett, associate publicity director

Carrie Bachman, publicist

Brent Savage, photo lab technician

Marilyn Flaig, indexer

Special gratitude goes to Norman Perry and Monica Netupsky of Chapter 5, my business managers, who are always there for me and consistently come up with brilliantly creative marketing and other ideas for my work.

I am forever grateful to Tim Bennet, for the life-changing opportunity to work on a Gold Medal Flour—sponsored blog (
www.realbakingwithrose.com
).

Julia Child, ever my guiding light.

Maria D. Guarnaschelli, editor of
The Cake Bible
and six more of my books, who taught me so much about publishing.

My dear friends David Shamah and Angelica Pulvirenti and, more recently, Woody Wolston and Zach Townsend, who kept me enlightened and were entertaining company during the arduous process of book creation.

Over the past two years, my many bloggers have made a major contribution to keeping my work life from being solitary. I am also indebted to them for letting me know what information they appreciate and what they need to know to bake successfully. And, of course, my gratitude and heart go out to those bloggers who help me answer others' questions—too many to list, but special thanks goes to Hector Wong, who wins the prize for the most postings and who tirelessly offers his great technological skills to edit some of my appearances and put them on the Internet for all to enjoy.

Undying gratitude to my friends at Gold Medal Flour, especially Anton Vincent, David Eisen, Christina Zwicky, and Jason Walters, for all the support they have given me from the blog to the online demo for this book, and for producing the best flour for my cakes. Special thanks to their technical experts Tim Huff and Bill Weekely for providing invaluable information about flour, yeast, and leavening, and for answers to all manner of baking questions. Thank you Travis Smith, Susie Gardner, and Rachael Ashe of Hop studios, my beloved blog masters who designed the blog and the forums and ensure that it all runs smoothly.

Huge thanks to Rob Ruotolo, my longtime friend and indispensable computer consultant, without whom my books would never get written. To Bruce Frank, who created an amazing Excel chart enabling me to proof and ensure the accuracy of the many numbers on the recipe charts, and to Marc Cohen of
www.spokencomputing.com
, who generously trained me in speech recognition software when my fingers grew tired from typing 180 words a minute for so many years. Special thanks to Jesus Renta, computer wizard, for always being there for computer crises.

Much gratitude to Hotel Bar, Organic Valley, and Vermont Butter for supplying me with the best butter for all the recipe testing, and Gretchen Goehrend of India Tree for unearthing the most delicious sugars. Special love and appreciation for the late Albert Uster, for being such a good friend to me and to all bakers. Unending thanks to Brian Maynard and Justin Newby of KitchenAid, and Mary Rodgers and Rachel Litner of Cuisinart, for tirelessly helping to keep my mixers and processors up to speed.

Speaking of equipment, I will always remember my friend the late Rich Hecomovich of Nordic Ware for all that he has done for the baking industry in the design of the Bundt-style pans, even persuading the company to create the Stadium Pan at my request. Thank you, Mike Quinlan, for filling some mighty big shoes.

Thank you, Nancy Siler and my friends at Wilton, for always being so responsive to bakers' needs for specialty pans and cake decorating equipment; Doug Parrish of Parrish Decorating Supplies, especially for his invaluable loose-bottom cake pans; the dear Dalquists of Sweet Celebrations, formerly of Maid of Scandinavia, for all they have contributed to the baking industry; and the wonderful Giovannucci family of Fante. Thanks to Ruthanne and Ron Field of Chicago Metallic and my friends at J.B. Prince and La Cuisine for making it possible for the home baker to have access to high-quality commercial equipment and specialty pans from France. Blessings to Josh Kesselman of My Weigh for producing high-quality, affordable scales and Randy Kaas of POURfect Bowl for his super accurate measuring spoons and cups.

Special thanks to my dear friends Robert and Nicole Laub of Harold's Kitchen for helping me produce and market my line of specialty baking equipment, especially the silicone cake strip of my dreams.

I'd like to make special mention of the recipes contributed by friends and colleagues: Lillan Hayward, mother of Woody's t'ai chi master, Ray, for her terrific idea to combine peanut buttercream with spice cake; Karen Hatfield, chef—co-owner of Hatfield's in Los Angeles, for her exquisitely breathtaking recipe Caramelized Pineapple Pudding Cakes; my forever friend Elisenda Pallàs, for procuring and translating the Pinch Cake when I was a guest lecturer at the Escola d'Hostaleria i Serveis Sant Narcís in Girona; and chefs and co-owners of the Border Grill, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, aka the Two Hot Tamales, who are treasured friends and colleagues and also two of the most generous people in the food community, for their "to-live-for" Tres Leches. Special thanks to colleague and dear friend Reiko Akehi for taking me to Osaka to visit pastry chef Sugino-san, and former student and dear friend Yoko Sakuma for translating his recipe for the extraordinary lacquer glaze. Thank you to Zach Townsend for his tireless efforts to perfect it for the applications in this book.

Thank you to my good friend Kenneth Sossa of Silver Towers, who has tasted close to every cake in this book and has given me his honest and thoughtful evaluation.

Blessings to my dear friend Diane Boate, aka the Cake Lady of San Francisco, for offering so many inspired suggestions.

Appreciation to the Menegus family of Hope, New Jersey, for their truly free-range eggs and friendship.

Special love to my nephew Alexander Levy, who, as a little boy, teased me for rhapsodizing about everything that tasted wonderful by calling it
heavenly
and thus inspiring the name of this book.

Also special love to his father, my brother, Michael, whom I can always count on for his wise council and support.

And to our father, Robert Levy, who, at the age of ninety-five, is still actively rooting for me and giving sage advice.

To my sister-cousin Betina Margolis, who so generously gave me her mother's Wedgwood china, one plate of which is pictured in the Baby Lemon Cheesecakes recipe. Infinite appreciation always goes to my husband Elliott who gives me one hundred percent support in all my endeavors.

Words are not enough to acknowledge the major contribution Kate Coldrick has made for bakers around the world in her work of transforming unbleached flour to improve the quality of cake baking in countries where bleached flour is unavailable.

Profound gratitude to Nach Waxman, of Kitchen Arts & Letters, for always being there with the most insightful comments, providing a perfect home for all my books.

Finally, and most of all, I would like to thank my guardian angel, Woody Wolston, for the more than three hundred tests he has performed on the recipes in this book. During his five-year association with me, he has involved himself enthusiastically and joyfully in every aspect of the creation of this book. When Woody Wolston is not testing recipes or baking cakes for his friends, he's more often than not playing broomball or practicing t'ai chi. The lucky broomballers and t'ai chi group have gotten to taste most of the cakes in this book, and I've been lucky enough to get invaluable feedback from them. When I congratulated Scott Peacock at the 2007 James Beard Foundation cookbook awards for his award-winning
The Gift of Southern Cooking,
which he wrote in loving professional collaboration with Edna Lewis, I confided in him that I hoped someday to have a "Scott Peacock" in my life. I have been slow to realize that my wish had already come true.

Introduction

A generation has passed since I wrote
The Cake Bible.
In recent years, it has been a great pleasure to hear people tell me they grew up with birthday cakes from my book or that they built careers on my recipes. But the greatest happiness has been, and continues to be, the connection to the universe of bakers that my books have provided and the knowledge that my work has touched other people's lives in a positive way.

People often expressed surprise when I told them I was working on a new cake book, saying, "I thought you'd already 'done' cakes." I respond now with a quote from Michael Batterberry, publisher of
Food Arts
magazine, who in his opening address of the International Association of Culinary Professionals meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2000 extolled the virtues of creativity by referring to it as "a bottomless well of inspiration." This is my mantra.

The Cake Bible,
with its basic recipes and explanations of how cake baking works, gave me a reliable foundation from which to create new recipes. But I also must credit my brilliant, innovative friend and honorary son, David Shamah, who over the years has been pushing me, despite my initial and long resistance, to try new frontiers in cakes, such as cakes made with oil. These cakes have turned out to be some of the most exciting cakes I've included in this book.

Julia Child once shared with me her observation that writing cookbooks is very lonely. This was mostly true for me until the universe presented Woody Wolston, who asked me to be his
sifu,
or baking master. Gradually, as I learned to trust him (long distance from Minnesota to New York), I opened my world to him, and a fantastic partnership and friendship emerged. (It was much to my husband's credit that he was happy for me to have found such an asset to my work.) Woody wholeheartedly tested every recipe in this book numerous times, and by teaching him to help me, I learned so much more about what people needed to know. Woody sent me hundreds of photographs of different stages of each recipe, and we've had at least as many e-mail and phone conversations. His contributions have extended this book well beyond the parameters of my own vision. This book has become "our" book, and his presence in it was significant to making it the best that it could be.

I am also very grateful to Zach Townsend, whose expertise with chocolate proved invaluable. In addition to testing many of the chocolate recipes, even e-mailing me motion pictures to illustrate the consistency of sauces, he contributed
Zach's La Bomba
, one of my most treasured cakes.

Things change over twenty years. The standard cake pan that used to be 9 by 1½ inches is now 2 inches high. This change made it necessary for me to rework several favorite
Cake Bible
recipes. Now, my taste embraces less buttercream and less fancy décor, prompting me to make these cakes more approachable and delicious. I also, more than ever, value simplicity over complexity—truly achievable only with top-quality ingredients and equipment. New technology and the availability of ingredients and equipment to the consumer have made simplicity possible. In addition, chocolate has changed. No longer is it enough to recommend my favorite brands; now it is essential that I specify the percentages of cacao that different chocolates contain.

Writing
The Bread Bible
taught me how appealing it is to let a bread, and now a cake, sometimes be its beautiful, unadorned self. I no longer routinely disguise a cake with frosting. Making bread, more than any other baking experience, also revealed more about flour and the profound differences among the various varieties. This knowledge made it possible for me to create entirely new cake recipes.

Today, my goal in baking is to translate the chemical into the practical—taking my understanding of how ingredients in a cake batter work to reach my idea of the ultimate taste and texture style. I adore the logic of science, but also the wild creativity provided by the empirical hands-on method. It is this blending of approaches that helps me to draw closer to my ideal. A most gratifying affirmation came when my friend Jesus Renta's daughter Jennifer ate a piece of one of my cakes and afterward said, "The flavors are still dancing in my mouth!"