Christina Tosi transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of three baking books, including my latest, “Snackable Bakes.” Each Saturday, I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Christina Tosi, the founder of Milk Bar and one of the country's most beloved pastry chefs. You might have seen Christina on “Bake Squad,” the competition show she hosts on Netflix, or her episode of the Netflix docuseries “Chef's Table.” I know many of you have watched that more than once. Christina is the author of multiple cookbooks and she also wrote a memoir which came out last year titled “Dessert Can Save The World.” I think we can all agree on that. Christina joins me today to talk about her amazing career, and then we do a deep dive into her birthday layer cake. We cover all the classic Christina Tosi cake elements, cake, soak, frosting, and crumbs, as well as her favorite techniques, tools, and tricks. Stay tuned for my chat with Christina.
What's new at Cherry Bombe? Well, the latest issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine is now available. You can purchase a subscription to Cherry Bombe and have it delivered directly to your door four times a year, or you can pick up a copy from your favorite magazine shop, bookstore, or gourmet shop, places like Kitchen Arts and Letters in Manhattan, Book Larder in Seattle, and Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco. Cherry Bombe Magazine is thick and gorgeous and printed on lush paper. It's filled with recipes, features, and profiles you don't want to miss. Visit cherrybombe.com to subscribe.
Thank you to Plugra Premium European Style Butter and California Prunes for supporting today's show. I've been a fan of Plugra for some time, as anyone who has peeked in my fridge can attest. I was introduced to Plugra by my coworkers at my very first bakery job and I continue to use Plugra today in my work as a professional baker, recipe tester, and cookbook author. Because of what I do for a living, I go through a lot of butter as you can imagine. I especially love that Plugra contains 82% butter fat because the higher butter fat content means less moisture and more fat, and as bakers know fat equals flavor. Plus, it's slow churned, making it more pliable and easy to work with. I use Plugra Premium European Style Unsalted Butter when making either my easy-peasy melted butter pie dough or my traditional cold butter pie dough. I also love the buttery flavor Plugra adds to my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, which also calls for melted butter. Can you tell melted butter is one of my ingredient obsessions these days? However you use it, Plugra Premium European Style Butter is the perfect choice from professional kitchens to your home kitchen. Ask for Plugra at your favorite grocery store or visit plugra.com for a store locator.
Let's check in with today's guest. Christina, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk birthday layer cake with you and so much more.
Christina Tosi:
I'm so excited to be in the same room with you, Jess.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yay. I just adore your dessert style and I wonder if you could describe it for listeners in your own words.
Christina Tosi:
My dessert style is basically just who I am as a person, which is a home baker from the Midwest meets someone crazy enough to move to New York City to become a professionally trained pastry chef that decided somewhere along the way that dessert made the most sense when it was a bridge between the two. I fell in love with food in the aisles of the grocery store, but I also fell in love with food in the really demanding fine dining kitchens of New York City. And so, my love of food and the style that you see at Milk Bar, in Bake Club, and just how I think about food, which is basically all the time, and how and why my relationship with food is what it is.
Jessie Sheehan:
There are so many iconic milk bar treats, compost cookies, layer cakes with unfrosted sides, which we get to talk about, cereal, milk, soft serve, milk bar pie. And I think it's fascinating to hear how all of them came to be. Can you share the story of creating the Milk Bar Pie, which I think began as an under baked gooey butter cake at WD-50? Yeah, yeah?
Christina Tosi:
Girl, you got it. It was always a love for gooey butter cake, which anyone that is not familiar with it, it's a Midwestern dessert. I think it actually originated in St. Louis, but I discovered it as a child somewhere between Ohio and Virginia. And it's basically a box of cake mix, a stick of butter, an egg, yellow cake mix by the way that you mix together. You put most of it in the bottom of a greased 9x13 pan. And then, you save a quarter cup or a third cup, everyone does it a little differently and you mix it with a brick of cream cheese, a bag of confectioner's sugar, maybe a pinch of salt, some vanilla. You bake it and the whole point is that the middle never really, really sets up. So, you get this yellow cake-esque bar cookie, that's a complete dessert in our United States.
Always, for me, it was like, "That's what I want to do for a living," when I was a pastry cook at WD-50, which was a really interesting boundary crossing, almost boundary defying restaurant in the Lower East Side way back when. It's no longer around, but the chef's name is Wylie Dufresne. He has an awesome pizza shop right now in New York. I was just making family meal and I was sort of mining those memories of what are the desserts that I love and what do I just want to pull out for fun, for inspiration?
And I decided to take this idea of gooey butter cake and this idea of a chest pie, which is the pie that you make down South when you don't have enough cherries, for example, to make cherry pie. It's basically pie without a fruit or vegetable filling. And I thought, what if I merged these two ideas and I basically made this gooey, buttery under baked pie, which for me is all I want in life. In most things in my world that I come up with, I go, this is either a good idea or a bad idea. Like, when it makes me uncomfortable that I don't know what it is, that's when I know I've either got something great or something terrible.
If it doesn't make me wonder that, it's not actually interesting to me. You always have to straddle that line. I put it up for a family meal thinking this might just be a really sloppy, gloopy pie, but if you've ever worked in a professional kitchen, really anything that's dessert over baked, under baked, it all gets consumed. You also get an immediate focus group, research group, and the research group said, "This is it," to the extent that I held onto the recipe and used it on the opening menu 15 years ago when I opened Milk Bar with an incredible team.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that so much. Tell us about Bake Club because I know it started during 2020. I know this is like a dumb question, but oh my gosh, I can't believe you have time to do it. And also, please tell people how they can sign up. Because I've gone to your site...
Christina Tosi:
You're so good.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I see it's easy-peasy to do so.
Christina Tosi:
It's so easy. So, when the pandemic hit, I alongside an incredible team run Milk Bar. And so, when the pandemic first hit, we all went into the business principles of how do we do as a business with these new constraints and fears and concerns tactically, operationally? After a week or two of that acknowledging, that was sort of ever changing, the emotion set in that emotionally we do what we do because we love to show up for people and we love to show up for people with the power of dessert. And the thing that we found really quickly was people were at home, they were scared, they were uncertain, and we were all having a hard time figuring out how to show up for each other, but we had all this free time on our hands.
And I tried a few different things on for size, but inevitably, I just went on social media one day and was like, "I think I'm just going to start a baking club. Does anyone want to join a little bit?" Which is something that I love to do when I was a teenager and I was feeling a little directionless or a little uncertain or sort of like I have some free time and I love free time, but I love to leverage my free time with purpose and I was feeling a little purposeless or a lot purposeless.
So, I started a club and its name is Bake Club and it continues to be really interesting to me how many of us want to be a part of a club. A club that does a thing for us in life. Very specifically, we bake. But there's plenty of people that are part of Bake Club that don't bake that just love to be around people that embody the spirit of goodness and hilarity and humanity that is dessert. It's a super positive group of people that love to laugh and love to not take themselves so seriously. You might learn a thing or two on accident along the way, you might get a lot of awesome recipes. You can sign up@milkbarstore.com or christinatosi.com, but if you're an official member of Bake Club, really, it's all that there is in a really great way.
We launch a new recipe every week. I basically just in a very untrained camera person style, selfie style film the video baking with you to teach you whatever it is, and I love to demystify baking. I will trick you into making croissants in two seconds flat. I will give you my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe and what the tenets of that are. I will deep dive, I will give you a dirty dessert secret, that sort of thing. We tell you what ingredients you need the week before. It's every Friday at 2:00 P.M. We send you an email on Sunday night that's just meant to be like a joyful email in your inbox because we all get so much spam or so many other boring emails, and I just think we need that burst of joy that gives you a little low down on a few things that we love in life. And then, we bake.
If you sign up, you get to be a pen pal, so you get to be a digi pen pal, but a physical pen pal, and we literally hand make these membership cards that say that you're an official member of Bake Club. It's very, very, very low-fi beta and we love doing it. Because those are the things that I think we don't want to lose touch with as the world continues to grow and evolve and move at these rapid paces. It's remembering to hold on and celebrate the things that we want to make sure we don't lose along the way.
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll be right back. Today's episode is presented by California Prunes. I'm a California Prunes fan when it comes to smart snacking and baking. First off, California Prunes are good for your gut, your heart, and even your bones. Prunes contain dietary fiber and other nutrients to support good gut health, potassium to support heart health, and vitamin K, copper and antioxidants to support healthy bones. And of course, prunes are a great addition to scones, cakes, and crackers. Anything you are baking that calls for dried fruit, consider California prunes. Prunes work perfectly in recipes with rich and complex flavors like espresso, olives and chilies, and they enhance the flavor of warm spices, toffee, caramel and chocolate. If you love baking swaps and experimenting with natural sweeteners, you can replace some of the sugar in a recipe with California Prune Puree. Prune puree is a cinch to make as it's a blend of prunes and water.
You can find more details on the California Prunes website, californiaprunes.org. While you're there, be sure to check out all the delicious recipes, including the salty snack chocolate fudge with pretzels and California Prunes inspired by the recipe from my cookbook, “Snackable Bakes.” Happy baking and happy snacking.
All right. Now, we're going to do a deep dive into the birthday cake, but the cake has four components. We have our cake soak frosting crumbs, so that's four. All right, so first things first, we'll make our cake layers. We're going to heat our oven to 350 and we're going to have a quarter sheet pan, which is like a 9x13, yes?
Christina Tosi:
Yeah, it's a little smaller than a 9x13, but if you have a 9x13, it'll work perfectly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Could you use, I know some people have jelly roll pans, which is a short size.
Christina Tosi:
Totally.
Jessie Sheehan:
But could you, if you haven't, people call them brownie pans. I call them sheet cake pans. You can use a pan with a high sat.
Christina Tosi:
A hundred percent.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Perfect. And is there a brand of pan that, if you're...
Christina Tosi:
We use, OXO makes a great pan. Great Jones makes a great pan. They both make these quarter sheet pan size things. You can also go on Amazon or wherever you're sort of like in a jiffy needs are, your local kitchen supply store, just the industrial strength pan that they would sell at the most unbranded quarter sheet pan that you can get on Amazon or kitchen supply. We make them when we're making them in the bakery in full sheet pan size, so four times that size. That's what we use. They're built to last. They distribute heat evenly and that's really the most important part. Perfect. Great Jones is cute. OXO is dependable.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect and lovely. So, now, we're going to cream some room temp butter and some shortening. And I have two questions about the shortening. First of all, why? Second of all, brand. Is it Crisco?
Christina Tosi:
Crisco.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. I love Crisco.
Christina Tosi:
I always use Crisco. So, we use shortening and butter. So, this recipe, the birthday cake is not something that was on the original Milk Bar menu. It came about two years later. We knew we were onto something with cake. And so, then, we started digging and mining our nostalgia and the things that we thought could be really interesting in cake. And the one thing that I thought was just true for me, I think it was my birthday coming up and my greatest gift is for everyone to just ignore me on my birthday. Just let me disappear. I'm an introvert.
And my sous chef was like, "Well, yeah, but we're going to make you a cake. So, just like, can you just tell me what flavor?" And I was like, "Okay, sure, but don't tell anyone. I just want a Funfetti box cake and the tub of Funfetti frosting. Okay." And she said, "Okay." And she made it for me. Her birthday's two days later and she was like, "Can you make me the same one for my birthday? That was my birthday cake my whole life." And I said, "Yes." You don't normally get cake when you're the person that makes the cake professionally. And it became this thing behind the scenes at Milk Bar. Everyone was like, "No, but that was my cake." All these professional past chefs telling you the same thing.
So, we were like, "You want to know what? This is crazy. Has anyone ever tried making it from scratch?" Everyone said, "No." So, we basically went on this two-year mission. What we found is that our traditional American style cake, which starts with all butter. Butter is delicious and an all butter cake recipe, but the flavor of butter actually starts to compete with those creamy vanilla notes. So, the shortening replaces the fat of some of the butter we're removing to make way for this brilliant vanilla flavor to come out.
Jessie Sheehan:
Also, I just want to say that whenever my birthday comes, I say to my children who are older now, but I say to them, "Please make me a Duncan Hines or a Betty Crocker chocolate cake with the tub of the white frosting." I'm brand neutral.
Christina Tosi:
It's the only thing I want in life.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's all I want. No, nothing fancy. But anyway, there's some white sugar in here and then there's a little bit of brown sugar. Talk to me about why a little bit of brown.
Christina Tosi:
So, the little bit of brown, we tried a different ratio, more light brown sugar. It ended up tasting too caramelized and again, competing with that really light, dreamy vanilla flavor. But when we took it all the way out, it didn't have the rounding of flavor as well. Light brown sugar also has a little bit of moisture to it. So, it helps again in keeping that cake sponge feel moist and spongy in the right ways, but it's very intentional.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it. I knew it would be.
Christina Tosi:
Two years, two years it took us to figure this out. I promise you we tried it all.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, we're going to cream all of this together in our stand mixer. When we're scraping, because you have a lot of directions to scrape, the stand mixer bowl, which is so important, people don't realize how much collects, flexible spatula and is there brand?
Christina Tosi:
Yeah, I always use a flexible spatula. I have collected so many over the years. For me, it's just about, I have two or three heat, safe, flexible spatulas at all times. I keep a really small one just in case I'm making a small batch or in case Frankie, my little gal, wants to get in the mix, but get rid of them when they start to bend or tear or not do the work. But there's a lot of great ones out there. It's really just about what's in my spatula rotation at the moment.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect.
Christina Tosi:
The spatulas that bring you joy, the color that brings you joy.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, we're going to cream all that together. We're going to scrape our bowl. We're going to reduce the speed stream in buttermilk. I know buttermilk can be weirdly regional.
Christina Tosi:
It is so regional.
Jessie Sheehan:
But is there a brand? Yeah, is there a brand?
Christina Tosi:
I don't have a brand that I love. Sometimes, I will make butter. Sometimes, I find it's hard to find buttermilk, interestingly enough. And sometimes, I will make buttermilk myself or in a pinch because the buttermilk is an important ingredient for the dairy and the acidity that will bring the leaveners to life later on with the dry ingredients. But it's a place where you can hack your own buttermilk as well with milk and a little splash of vinegar. I would prefer not lemon juice in this cake like white vinegar and whole milk is better here. Because again, you want that dreamy vanilla note that's going to come in an extract form to be as pure and unadulterated as possible.
But if you're making a lemon cake, you can totally just use a squeeze of lemon juice or if what you're adding tells the story of the cake, like if you were making a chocolate cake and you did a little bit of sherry vinegar, I wouldn't be mad at that. It's a little moody, it makes sense sort of thing. But every time you add an ingredient to any recipe, if you need to substitute out, really think about what the flavor intentionality is and whether or not it's going to derail that or lock it.
Jessie Sheehan:
So smart. And just for peeps to know, I usually do a cup of whole milk to a tablespoon of whatever that acid is that you want to curdle the milk with.
Christina Tosi:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then, I love this. There's grape seed oil in here. Why grape seed?
Christina Tosi:
Honestly, grape seed is just the biggest jug. Back in the day, when we opened Milk Bar, it was what our food service distributor carried that brought, so to your point on the oil-based cakes, our cakes, all of our cakes are a mixture of solid fat like butter or shortening and liquid fat like oil. In oil land, for me, all of our cakes are the most flavorless colorless oil possible. And we found, we tested a bunch, we tested vegetable oil, canola oil, peanut oil, and we tested the brands that are food service carrier carrying. You're going for a flavorless, colorless oil, whichever one you carry. But that's why we use grape seed oil in ours.
If you're making a pistachio cake, ooh, bring pistachio oil to the party or a pumpkin cake, bring some pumpkin seed oil. Those things make sense, but otherwise it's flavorless and colorless oil. So, it does the thing that you were talking about where it gives you that moisture and that sponge that is just rocking for days.
Jessie Sheehan:
And also, I love this final ingredient now is vanilla. It's clear vanilla and it's preferably McCormick, which I just can't tell you how much I love you for that.
Christina Tosi:
We have searched far and wide for so many different things. If you only have dark vanilla, you're not going to be mad at it, but you're not going to get the bulls, bulls, bullseye. There's a creamy note, there's a creamsicle note. If you think about a dreamsicle, that if you take the orange away and you just keep those really, really, really, I don't, dreamy is not even a way to describe vanilla, but it is. When you taste it, you'll understand it. And McCormick just makes the best one. It just is what it is. I didn't make up the world. It's just true.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. So, now we're going to mix everything together. We don't want to rush because we're mixing, as you say, you're forcing a lot of liquid into an already fatty mixture that doesn't want that liquid. So, just move slowly. Then we're going to reduce the speed at our cake flour. Just wondering, will all-purpose work?
Christina Tosi:
All-purpose will totally work. This is a little bit of a dirty pastry chef secret. So, cake flour has a lower protein content, which basically means it will want to be light and fluffy in all the ways that you imagine your cake to be and won't get dense or glutenous in that sort of tough chewy way that gluten tends to show up in cake. But cake flour, by and large, we use, yes, because of protein content, but because it's like ultra-bleached. And I know that sounds crazy, but that's what the box cake mix of my childhood tastes like. And so, all-purpose works great. Maybe splash little bit more of that clear vanilla extract in so you're not missing what is technically the flavor of bleached flour.
I know that sounds like something you all don't want to know, but it's true when you're trying to pick apart these sort of little micro flavors that make a big difference. So, it's light and it's fluffy, but it does add to the flavor. You don't even have to taste raw flour if you open a bag of all-purpose flour next to, cake flour typically comes in a box, a bag in a box, and you smell it. You'll understand without even tasting it what the exchange is of flavor there. But all-purpose works great.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is there a brand of cake flour?
Christina Tosi:
If I'm baking at home, I usually use Swan because that's what's at the grocery store level. I've made a hundred of these birthday cakes at home with all-purpose flour, just to be really clear. But I just don't want to shortchange you of the detail of the why it's cake flour.
Jessie Sheehan:
Then, we add some baking powder and I wondered about that because usually, I think that we need soda when we have buttermilk. Is that a choice to not use the baking soda?
Christina Tosi:
Yeah, so they're both going to react when they hit acid. We use double acting baking powder, which is pretty much the baking powder that everyone has at home and baking powder reacts, it's double acting, so it's going to react twice once when it hits acid like this buttermilk. And again, when it hits the heat of the oven, which is great. It gets like two turbocharged boosts of height. But so, baking powder does a lot more height building and baking soda gives you more like expansion of chest breath if you're thinking about what your baking soda is doing. Baking powder and baking soda, by the way, also add to flavor. They add to flavor and they help the color and browning of things. You typically, I think would get this and see this more in cookie. If you've ever tried to make a cookie without one of those things, you understand the flavor play.
In cake land, if you've ever tried baking without a leavener, you will understand it in flavor, but you're going to be most remarked on the lack of rise or lift I find in baking soda because we have so much liquid in the cake so that it is spongy and delightful and moist on its own that it doesn't need help in the expansion of chest. It really just wants more of that lift, and knowing that we're about to weigh it down with a soak, a frosting, a crumb, a frosting, and then two more layers, that the sturdiness of that sponge top to bottom is far more important.
Where baking soda, sometimes if there's too much baking soda in your cake, it also could be because you just have too much batter in your pan when the cake starts to bake over the edges. It could be because your baking soda quantity is too high and it's looking for right to left breath as opposed to top to bottom height.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. And now, we're going to add a quarter cup of rainbow sprinkles, mix again just for 45 to 60 seconds or so. Scrape our bowl and then spray our pan with PAM. Are you a PAM?
Christina Tosi:
You could be a PAM spray. I really like Baker's Joy because it has the grandma secret of flour in the spray. If anyone's ever baked with the, you got to go, I think at least two generations deep before aerosol cans were a thing. They would use whatever their fat was. And my family, we also saved butter paper because there's always a slick of fat there that can be used as grease. That's really our Rice Krispies move always. And we use it to pat down the top of our Rice Krispies, but some sort of fat. And then, back in the days, they would also use a little sprinkling of flour to make sure that their release happens from the pan and you don't get whatever, it's your cake, your brownie sticking into the pan. Baker's Joy has the fat with the flour in it. And that's the only baking spray that I found does that.
But I will say regardless of what fat you use, the other move, there is a parchment paper now that comes folded in like little squares that you can buy at the grocery store. But parchment paper we haven't caught up yet, so you might want to buy it online. The grocery store, we, the grocery store lords haven't caught up yet, but I'm a very big proponent of parchment paper. I appreciate that it comes in the tube, but trying to put it on a flat surface, not make a banner with it, but I'm a really big proponent. Every time we bake a cake at Milk Bar, because you're baking this rectangular cake, you want it to be round, we put a little X down of spray on the pan and then we put a piece of parchment paper down that traces the inside area of the pan. We put that piece of parchment paper down. The X is just to hold that parchment in place and then we spray that surface and the edges.
And the value of that is once your cake is baked and you go to release, it releases, and you don't go through the stress of how the heck am I supposed to get this cake out of this pan and then make it into this beautiful cake that can't be hidden behind frosting, sort of thing. So, that is the most important piece of the whole spray pan conversion.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, now, we're going to, once sprayed, we're going to spread our batter in our pan just with an offset spatula.
Christina Tosi:
Offset spatula. If you don't have an offset, you can totally just use your rubber spatula.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Christina Tosi:
The cake is pretty, you don't want to give it a lot of taps, but if you need to just give it a, like on the surface, you can. But also, the second it hits the heat, it will even itself out.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great.
Christina Tosi:
It's very forgiving in that way.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love that you do additional sprinkles on top.
Christina Tosi:
Just on top.
Jessie Sheehan:
Because more sprinkles is always good. Then, we're going to bake for about 30 to 35 minutes. And I love this, to test the cake, we're going to poke the edges with our finger, but I'm used to doing so in the middle. Why are you an edge person rather than a middle person?
Christina Tosi:
I'm an edge person because one, we're baking in this level long tray compared to a cake pan. And once you start to see the cake from baking so much cake overbaking it, underbaking it, everything in between. Once you start to see the edges, those four corner edges of the cake start to caramelize, take on a little bit of color, start to pull back a little bit once they start to set up. And by setup, I mean you're poking it and you're like, oh, that's warm baked cake. Right? That's the feeling of it. It pokes back at you. Even if the center looks a little gooey and you know it's not going to toothpick clean, maybe you add another minute or two, you know your center's going to follow close behind. The other thing that people don't think about because they're looking for that toothpick clean center moment is, "This thing's been sitting in a 325, 350-degree oven for 30 minutes." There's a lot of residual heat that stays in it.
So, once you pull it out of the oven, it's going to continue baking as it cools down. I'm not saying that to freak anyone out. The reason that we don't pull it out when it is toothpick clean in the center is it's such a small surface area on top. We want it to hit perfectly baked and then come down from there, not reach above perfectly baked because we want, again, this really nice moist spongy affair. So, we pulled it out probably what I would say "earlier" than most people because we let that residual heat finish the bake of the center.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that also. And I don't even, clean toothpick be gone. Mine has to be covered in crumbs, not wet crumbs.
Christina Tosi:
Interesting.
Jessie Sheehan:
But I need to see my cake, otherwise, I've over baked it.
Christina Tosi:
Yes. Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, it's probably the same.
Christina Tosi:
Err on the side of, I would dare anyone that does it differently or challenge because you might, what's the worst that's going to happen? You'll learn.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Christina Tosi:
Maybe you underbaked it. But try pulling it out on a minute or two more than you instinctually would and see what happens. For me, I've spent a whole lifetime of asking these silly questions and then understanding the cause and effect. How did I learn about baking powder, baking soda? Because I literally one day was like I put my hands on my hips and was like, who said? Just because Ruth Tollhouse says that this is what goes into my tollhouse cookies. I'm just going to try to take it out. How do I know? What if I double it? Oops. No, definitely. Okay, got it. Understand the boundaries. But for me, that's the kind of learner I am. And so, I challenge everyone to do the same.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. Now we're going to make our soak. And in a video, I heard you describe this as vanilla scented milk, which just is so delish.
Christina Tosi:
It is. You would think I was like a marketing executive. That's what I think milk should taste like. If it doesn't taste like cereal milk, it should just have a whiff of, it's so creamy and dreamy and it's this. And then, you drink it and you're like, "Okay." Milk and I are still working on our relationship.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to whisk together some whole milk, I assume. And then, we add some clear vanilla. We'll put our soak aside and we'll work on our frosting. So, the frosting is room temperature butter, shortening, which we already talked about. And with the same kind of reason, right?
Christina Tosi:
Yep.
Jessie Sheehan:
For the shortening, it's that nostalgic taste.
Christina Tosi:
Yep.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're not going to get it with a straight butter buttercream and a little bit of cream cheese. Is that flavor?
Christina Tosi:
It's all flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. I love the little bit of tang.
Christina Tosi:
So, over the two years, we got everything. We got the cake, we got the soak, we got the crumbs, which we'll talk about in a second. And we could not for the life of us, figure out the frosting. We would get so close to the extent that when you're really relentlessly pursuing something, three quarters of the people were like, "No, it's really good." You know what I mean? Because everyone was just like, "I'm over this."
Jessie Sheehan:
Shut up.
Christina Tosi:
"I'm overdoing this. It's good, and basically, good enough." And a few of us were like, "Nope. Until I can taste it and it feels like I'm spooning of a wad of it with a graham cracker on a late college study night." Until it's right, it's wrong. And cream cheese is one of the unlocks, but I'll let you get into the other ingredients because a few of the rest of them were unlocks as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Oh, I'm sure.
Christina Tosi:
But we looked at the back of the package, we went and got a bunch of tubs. We were doing all this blind taste testing. I closed one of them and I took the tub and I looked at the back of the ingredient list.
Jessie Sheehan:
And it said cream cheese?
Christina Tosi:
It's been sitting there our whole, it's like cream cheese cultures or something.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, but still it's the tang.
Christina Tosi:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, my gosh. So, we're mixing...
Christina Tosi:
These three fats together.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. Two to three minutes, smooth, fluffy. Then, we're adding in glucose. So, my first question is why? And my second is, can we substitute with a little bit of corn syrup?
Christina Tosi:
You can substitute with corn syrup very easily. You could omit outright if you wanted to. Glucose is an invert sugar, so it's a liquid sugar. Think the consistency of a really smooth honey in its thickness and its liquid state, but without the flavor of honey or the acidity of honey. And it's very, very, very low on its sweetness factor. So, it's not really about bringing sweetness to the party, that comes in later. It is about mouth feel. So, we use glucose and professional pastry kitchens largely when we're making ice cream because we want our ice cream to have a really smooth voluptuous mouth feel.
I want this frosting to have that same smooth voluptuous mouth feel. We apply it there. If you do buy glucose, we also use glucose when we're making some of our cookies because we want our cookies to be really fudgy and dense in the center. And that smooth voluptuous mouth feel also translates to that fudgy core center of a cookie.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that.
Christina Tosi:
Just in case, if you go the distance and you get the glucose, you can use it in multiple things.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. And then, we're going to add a little bit of corn syrup, which I assume is playing some of the same role as the glucose, but now it is a sweetness.
Christina Tosi:
Now, it's a little pang of sweetness just because let's get real, the tub of frosting, she's sweet in ways that are delightful and we needed a little bit of that like boom, pow part of sweetness.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to add a little vanilla. We're going to crank our mixer up to medium high, two to three minutes, scrape our bowl. We're going to add our confectioner sugar, our salt. And this is blowing my mind, a little bit of baking powder. Talk to me.
Christina Tosi:
Turn that tub of frosting on its side.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh.
Christina Tosi:
Sodium bicarbonate.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow. Love, love, love. And then...
Christina Tosi:
Just a little, little, little pinch. And then, one more fun thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then, citric acid, same thing, which is sour salt, I guess it's called.
Christina Tosi:
Look at it on the back of the pack.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, I love you.
Christina Tosi:
It's there. These are the things.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love you. I love you.
Christina Tosi:
These are the things. The team was like, "Are we really trying to make a frosting with butter and shortening and cream cheese?" And those of us that were there for it, were like, "We sure are because that's how it's done."
Jessie Sheehan:
This next instruction you have in the recipe is truly why I love you because you say it should look like it came out of a plastic tub at the grocery store. And I'm like, "Yes." All right.
Christina Tosi:
If you're going to go after something, you have to be unapologetic about your pursuit. Right?
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I'm just realizing what an apologetic life I've lived up until now. I mean, never...
Christina Tosi:
It's easy to spologize, but in this space, this is the one place that I never apologize. You know what I mean? I'll say, I'll call it what it is and then go like, "I know I'm really annoying right now. I know I must be driving you crazy," but this is where I go all in. And that's the inspiration once we were trying to get all the way back to. So, if it doesn't get you all the way there, you are not there.
Jessie Sheehan:
All right. Now, we're going to make our crumbs, which you've described as a textural layer, a peekaboo, surprise moment. And also, I've heard it described as a sandy version of the cake itself, just no eggs, no buttermilk. So, we've got white and brown sugars and flour, baking powder, salt and sprinkles. We're paddling. I love the way you described this. We add the oil and the vanilla and you sort of say the oil and vanilla will act as a glue and make those dry ingredients form these clustery crumbs.
Christina Tosi:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then, we're going to bake them and we're going to let the crumbs cool completely. At some point I need an entire podcast where we discuss the invention of crumbs.
Christina Tosi:
Oh, my gosh.
Jessie Sheehan:
But I'm going to move on to the assembly, but I love that. And again, that's what you were talking about before about this another texture to add to these soft-ish ingredients.
Christina Tosi:
Yeah. And the crumb, as you layer it in, as your cake takes on its life, they do all these different things because we top the cake with it as well, but the crumbs that go in between the cake, the ones on top stay sort of crummier and sandier and a bit more toothsome. The ones in between, they start to take on some of the moisture and the fat from the frosting or the cake soak and they start to sort of take on the life of their own. But it's the surround sound theater of this creamy vanilla note. But the crumbs, they're an opportunity for texture but also for flavor in that moment of, it's the wink, wink. It's about the dessert and you when you go to eat the dessert.
Jessie Sheehan:
All right. So, now, we're assembling. We're going to cut out our layers and this is also fascinating and awesome just telling you listeners, it is, before I tell you what it is. But you're going to put a piece of parchment or Silpat mat on your counter. You're going to invert your cake onto it. Now, I had a question. Do we need to run a knife around the edges?
Christina Tosi:
Yeah, run a little knife. I typically use an offset spatula or a bench scraper so that you're not running something sharp along the edges to keep your cake pan in place. But something that's like rubber and sturdy or something that's not sharp on the end and sturdy, that can just separate the cake and the wall of the baking panel.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So, we're going to peel off our parchment or if we use the Silpat on the bottom. Then, we're going to grab our six-inch cake ring and every cake is six inches at Milk Bar.
Christina Tosi:
At Milk Bar, every cake is six inches. We make 10-inch cakes. Those are much bigger formats, much, much bigger. If we're doing, I don't know, a special wedding cake for someone, but the quarter sheet pan will equate to a six-inch cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
I just think that is some kind of crazy genius because, and I can't wait to tell you listeners what we're going to do. But anyway, we're going to stamp out two circles from our sheet cake, which is now lying on our counter, and those will be our top two layers. Then, and I love this also because there isn't a scrap that's left behind. You take your remaining cake scraps and they come together to make the bottom layer of the cake, which is almost like a huge cake truffle or something.
Christina Tosi:
It is. It's also like I love to demystify the pieces of baking that often stress people out where you think, "Oh my gosh. Well, if I'm going to make a layer cake, everything has to be perfect. If I make a layer cake and the cake tears, I can't make the layer cake anymore, because it won't do its thing." And that's so not true in cake architecture. And so, the bottom layer is it's typically like two, almost half of the cake, and then some of the other cake scrap that remains from the two really pretty rounds and you just cobble together a bottom cake layer. It's that simple.
You'll probably have a little bit of cake left over, which could be for Scooby snacks. It could be for a little cake truffle moment, which is how cake truffles were born. Whole other story. But yeah, you want the prettiest round. You got to get one nice round. That's the one on top. That's the one that you can see. That's the one that defines the nice even 90-degree angle where the cake sides come up and become a cake top. It's where your eye goes to. But if you really think about a cake, you're only ever seeing the outer diameter of that six-inch cake. Everything else in between remains a mystery or a secret between you and the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
So, now, you're going to clean your cake ring because it's going to become the mold that you use to build your cake. You'll place it in the center of the parchment or the Silpat lined sheet pan. Now, we're going to grab acetate, which I've actually never worked with, but it's a strip which is about three inches wide and 20 inches long. Does acetate just stick to the sides of the pan or do you need to spray the pan?
Christina Tosi:
Acetate will stick to the edge of the six-inch round. It'll naturally want to curl out. Acetate, whether you cut it or you buy it in a spool naturally wants to curl itself and you just want to make sure it's curling in the direction of the cake, which we sort of look at like Patty Duke hair. You know how Patty Duke hair goes out. You want your acetate to curl under like you've curled your hair in, but it will naturally hug the walls, so no grease needed.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it. And then, we put our cake scraps inside the ring and you instructed to use the back of your hand to tamp the scraps together into, talk to me about back of hand.
Christina Tosi:
The reality is that when you're putting that cake down, those cake scraps down into the first layer, there's not really a tool. An offset spatula, I have pretty big hands, but you can't really get your hand in to either get a spatula. Even the smallest offset spatula is too long for a six-inch cake ring. And what you really need at the end of the day, I suppose you could use the bottom of a glass or a bowl that's small enough to help you get one even layer. But I found, if you try to put your fingertips in, you're getting this really uneven push-pull of surface, so you're going to get it higher and lower surface, which you don't want you on an even surface.
But if you use the back of your hand, you have a much better chance of getting a nice even layer as opposed to finger indentations that give you little peaks and valleys. So, back of hand is really just for a nice even tap or tamp down of those cake scraps. And by the way, because there's so much delicious fat in the cake sponge, the scraps naturally want to hold together. It doesn't require a ton of pressure because there's so much of that liquid oil and shortening together.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to soak our layers. So, we're going to take a pastry brush, but is there a brand?
Christina Tosi:
Oh, you'll love, I don't actually use a pastry brush. I use the least expensive spoon that you can buy at the Big-Box Store, the kitchen supply store. We call it The Bowery here in New York City. Literally the cheapest one, and I want the cheapest one because when I take it and I bend it and I go to bend the actual spoon part from the neck, it will allow me to create this tiny little ladle. And so, I bend it, we all bend it. We don't actually have a single paintbrush at Milk Bar. It's literally just like a ninth pan of a bunch of bent spoons, which to someone that has no clue what we do would not be helpful inside at all. But we basically just channel our inner Jackson Pollock and splash paint this vanilla scented milk across the surface. It's usually about three spoonfuls.
We do about three spoonfuls of our normal dinner spoon size. But what I like to say to people too is if you over bake your cake a little bit and you think, "Oh, this cake's a little dry." Remember, that cake soak is there to help bring your cake, give it a little bit more juice, bring it back to life a little bit more so you can get a little bit more cake soaky there. If you underbaked your cake a tad and you're worried about it, maybe it doesn't need any cake soak. Maybe it just needs one spoonful. That bottom layer will tell you when you've soaked too much because the cake soak will start to come out the bottom of the cake ring and the acetate. So those are sort of your boundaries in the context there.
Jessie Sheehan:
Next, we're going to spread frosting on our cake layer. I love that you have us use the back of a spoon. It's the same thing, and that is, sometimes I'll use an offset if I'm frosting something, but really what I tell people all the time, if you want swirls and swoops in your frosting, use the back of a spoon.
Christina Tosi:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to spread a fifth of the frosting in an even layer over the cake. Then, we're going to sprinkle our crumbs, one third of our crumbs over the frosting, again, using our back of our hand to anchor them. Now we know why. We spread more frosting, which I love because it's this idea that the frosting kind of envelops the crumbs, which is amazing.
Christina Tosi:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Add more acetate, index fingers gently tucking it so that we're going to get height in our pan. I love this note. We're now going to put in the middle layer, but you say, "Check out your two layers."
Christina Tosi:
This is your moment.
Jessie Sheehan:
And use the prettiest one for the top.
Christina Tosi:
That's right. Save the prettiest one for the top. If they're both awesome looking and perfectly even and level, great. Just pick one. But that's kind of your save the best for last moment.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. Now, we're going to do the top layer. We placed the remaining cake layer on top of the frosting of the second cake, cover the top of the cake with remaining frosting. No soak. I love this. You say, "Give it volume and swirls or do it the Milk Bar way and opt for a perfectly flat top."
Christina Tosi:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Which I will always and forever be doing everything the Milk Bar way, just in case the listeners are wondering. We're going to garnish the frosting with some more crumbs. Freezing the cake for a minimum of 12 hours always sounds good.
Christina Tosi:
That is important because you've mastered the structural feat where you're sort of building a cake out of nothing, right? It's almost like this free fall structure. It's sitting in the acetate in this cake ring. It needs to set up. The acetate does the work of the structural collar, like elongating the six-inch ring? But what it also does is we don't frost sides the cake. So, the way acetate works is if you're using it as what it's traditionally used for in chocolate making, you set your sort of bon bon on it, you let your bon bon set, you peel your bon bon off, and you get this really beautiful flat shiny coat.
That's why we're using the acetate as well. And so, you need your layers of cake to set. One, so they don't like Leaning Tower of Pisa over on you when you pull off the acetate. But two, you want the outer fillings to be solid enough that when you pull the acetate off, you get that same beautiful firm, flush, glossy edge to it. Because that's what's going to make people go like, "Oh, what is happening? How did you do that?" And it's not, "I spent 12 hours frosting it." It's like, "I spent 12 hours eating mini marshmallows on a sofa waiting for my cake to set sort of around the acetate." But that's the why of it.
If you speed it up, if you have a strong freezer, go for it. It's really just you want your cake to be frozen solid through in the center and definitely on the edges so that when you remove it's sturdy, it's set and the acetate is ready to remove, so you get that really nice, pretty glossy edge.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then it's three hours, at least three hours before you're ready to serve the cake.
Christina Tosi:
Just to temper it, to let it come to temperature. You don't want it to be, I mean, frozen cake is really good. You just don't get the same, you don't appreciate, you don't have the opportunity to appreciate the moisture of the cake sponge if you eat it frozen, but I'm not mad at a frozen cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm not mad at a frozen cake. I'm not crazy about a cold cake. So, I definitely, if I refrigerated a cake, it has to come to room temp before I eat it.
Christina Tosi:
But I will say that Brass Tacks and they don't know that we crush communicating this when we send cakes in care package or if you bring one to a birthday party, it has the acetate on it always to again, keep the structure. Pull the acetate off when the cake is super-duper cold. If you pull the acetate off when the cake is not super-duper cold, it's going to be a delicious cake, but you don't get that same beautiful clean edge.
Jessie Sheehan:
That makes sense. And you're sort of using your fingers and thumbs to pop the cake out of the cake ring when it's still frozen, peeling off acetate, transferring to a platter or a cake stand, and then defrosting in the fridge for about three hours. Could I defrost it on room temp?
Christina Tosi:
Totally. You totally could.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Okay.
Christina Tosi:
I would say in the summer months, if you're bringing it to a park picnic, just be careful. Not that anyone's staring at a cake for more than an hour at a park, but just be cognizant of what your ambient room temperature is to that defrost. But yeah, it'll defrost in probably an hour and a half, sort of thing. Or if you are like, I want the most beautiful slices of cake, the full cake presentation is not as important. You can absolutely slice the cake frozen. You're going to get the most beautiful picture, perfect slices if you slice a cake frozen and then you can put them out on a platter or little B&B plates and that gives you, and then one, the cake will temper a lot quickly because less surface area to come to temperature. If that's how you want to serve it, and that's your game, go for it. That's how we do it when we're slicing cake. We slice it frozen and let them temper.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love, love, love that. Thank you so much.
Christina Tosi:
Oh my gosh. Thanks for letting me be a pastry dork with you, Jess. Thanks for that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Christina. And I just wanted to say that you are my cherry pie, but you're also my devil dog, my rice crispy treat and maybe even my dairy queen soft serve with like a chocolate dip.
Christina Tosi:
Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I'm honored.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugra Premium European Style Butter and California Prunes for their support. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on your favorite podcast platform, and tell your baking buddies about us. Be sure to check out our other episodes and get tips and tricks for making the most popular baked goods around from birthday cake to biscuits to blondies. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at City Vox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is London Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.