Noelle Blizzard 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 cookbook author, and my fourth book is coming out this fall. Each Saturday I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Noelle Blizzard. Noelle is the cake artist behind New June, a micro bakery and cake studio in Philadelphia. Noelle worked in marketing for over a decade before she pivoted to baking during the pandemic. Since opening her business in 2021, she's become known for her beautiful vintage style of cakes which incorporate the Lambeth piping technique. If you don't know what Lambeth is, don't worry. You've no doubt seen the Lambeth style and Noelle's colorful cakes all over Instagram and in publications like T Magazine. Noelle joins me to share all about her frosting style, how it's changed, her cake tricks and tips, and more. I had the pleasure of seeing and tasting one of Noelle's epic cakes in Philadelphia, and I am still dreaming about it. So stay tuned for our chat.
Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. As some of you know, I've been a big fan of Plugra for some time now and was introduced to it at my very first bakery job when I was just a newbie baker. Fast-forward to today, I'm a professional baker, cookbook author, and recipe developer, and I continue to rely on Plugra for all my baking needs. My fridge is always stocked with Plugra sticks and solids. I especially love that Plugra contains 82% butter fat. The higher butter fat content means less moisture and more fat. And as bakers know, fat equals flavor. Plugra butter is also slow churned, making it more pliable and easy to work with. I do a lot of baking this time of year for work and for myself and my family. Comfy bakes like my pistachio chocolate anytime buns and cinnamon sugar buttermilk doughnut holes, and I always reach for Plugra unsalted butter. I've also been making a lot of yeasted breads lately, and I love the buttery flavor Plugra adds to my dough. 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 and recipes.
Let's check in with today's guest. Noelle, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk vintage style sheet cakes with you and so much more.
Noelle Blizzard:
I am so, so, so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
Jessie Sheehan:
Of course. So you definitely grew up around food. Your Italian grandparents had a deli. Your grandfather was a chef in Las Vegas who actually served Frank Sinatra table side, which I love.
Noelle Blizzard:
He says that, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
He says that. Does that mean you may not believe it?
Noelle Blizzard:
He says a lot of things. We tell everyone everything, but we also say, who knows?
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. I love that. And your mom is an avid baker.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
But I wondered were you always baking? And more importantly, were you always decorating?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, I would say I was an avid baker and cooked a lot at home. I definitely learned everything I knew about baking from my mom. She baked so much as a kid, everything from your basic Toll House cookie, but then she also did these really elaborate holiday cookie boxes each year, tarts for Easter, cakes for your birthday. I don't remember really ever buying a sweet outside of the home.
She could make everything. It also wasn't fancy. We weren't fancy decorating. We weren't putting flowers on cakes. We didn't have cake decorating technique. We also didn't like layer cakes. Cakes were bump cakes and desserts were family classics and Italian leaning, because my papa is Italian. And then I cooked a lot at home as I got older because I just knew what I was doing. But no, no intense passion at home making cakes and making desserts all the time.
Jessie Sheehan:
So in June of 2021, you founded and opened New June Bakery, which is described as a micro bakery and also an online cake studio. It seemed like originally you gravitated towards decorating cakes with fresh flowers and more swooshy frosting, and I do need you to define swooshy for this rustic organic look. How did you use flowers? I saw some images where you're pressing them into cake, but I know people often put stems on top.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Did you ever do flowers on sheet cakes? Tell us about New June's flower stage.
Noelle Blizzard:
It was sort of a perfect confluence of having worked at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, had so much exposure to gardening and florists and flowers and floral art. But then at the same time, teaching yourself to frost and decorate cakes. The thing that I, or honestly bakery, that I immediately gravitated towards and was like, "I think that I could figure this out. I think that I could do this too," it was so approachable, and that was Claire Ptak with Violet Cakes in London.
And she had a few tutorials online and they didn't require perfect frosting. They didn't require a lot of equipment. You could do it with an inverted spatula alone. It was like winging it, and it felt like the most approachable thing for me to teach myself from the start. And I still made so many mistakes. It's not actually that easy at all. I hope that this isn't making it sound like it's that easy, but it's where I started. I didn't have any other professional cake decorating skills.
I had never piped before, even on a cupcake. And so decorating with flowers, I also opened the business and started doing a lot of this work in the spring and summer. So even in Philadelphia, I had awesome access to flowers and greenery and seasonal fruit to make decorating really easy and approachable and seasonal. And what you put on top of the cake would also reflect what the cake flavor was. And I just had a lot of fun with it.
The pivot happened when the colder season arrived. And being in Philadelphia, I don't have a lot of access to fresh, locally grown flowers at that point. So you struggle to source organic things that are also food safe for a cake to look really good and as special as they did for the other six months of the year. So I had to eventually do a pivot and figure out other things.
Jessie Sheehan:
What was Claire doing on her cakes that you responded to? Was it her use of flowers or it was her use of the swooshy frosting?
Noelle Blizzard:
Definitely both. She uses and I was using an inverted spatula to frost the outside of the cake first.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I was going to ask you this later, sorry to interrupt, but when you say inverted, are we talking about an offset spatula?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. At first I was like, oh my gosh, what is an inverted spatula? And how come I've never heard of it? Okay, that's what I thought.
Noelle Blizzard:
I say this to other people, I think I rarely am corrected. And I'll say it to employees too and they're like... I feel like I do get looks, like that's not what that is.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, that's hilarious.
Noelle Blizzard:
Okay, so offset spatula. You use just the angle of that to frost the outside of the cake. And sometimes you even make a back and forth movement, almost like an H. You're forming a side and another side moving the spatula back and forth in between to create this subtle wave almost on the side of the cake. And then she does the same thing on top, rotating the cake, holding the offset spatula in line with the top, holding the point of it to the center of the cake and drawing it out so that it creates this circular, really delicate ribbon.
I mean, I just liked the look of it. But then eventually I got to a place where I was doing a lot of palette painted cake decorating techniques, and I loved that it felt so natural, like ripples of water, like wind. The cake looking so imperfect, but also having this as if it was a flower, these perfect parts of nature being a part of it. And it looked amazing when you started painting petals or adding flowers on top.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now your style is much more of this Victorian style with sort of garlands and ruffles. What led you to this more vintage Victorian aesthetic? I know you said it was partly the weather. I wondered if you saw it online because it's such a big thing, at least right now it seems to me, with bakers on social media, if you read about it in books. Talk to us about how that happened in addition to the weather.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. So I think, to be honest, I was always aware of this style. I'm not the first person to do vintage cake decorating, and I thought it was a little not my style at first. I pushed it off, and I was really leaning into those fresh flowers, pressed flower looks. And I was like, this is a category I'm not interested in. And I do remember all of a sudden making the switch and being like, I remember that I told myself I didn't like this before, and I'm not really sure what happened.
But besides the weather, growing and scaling a business, the concern I started to have honestly was around quality control. I couldn't always be sure that someone would pick up a gorgeous looking cake with fresh flowers and that it would look that way in an hour or eight hours, and would they handle it correctly in the car, and would it sit out at room temp or in the middle of the summer too long?
And by the time you're celebrating and taking photos, the flowers have totally wilted and it doesn't look amazing. So the more requests that I got for vintage style piped borders, things that used buttercream to design and more color in place of flowers, I realized I could do quality control. That was the first thing in my mind was quality control. You're paying a lot for a cake. And then quality control turned into total creative mind exploding. There's so much I can do with this.
Jessie Sheehan:
I've heard the style referred to as over piping, which I guess is almost like creating depth via overlapping scrolls and garlands and piped borders, shells, scallops, pearls. I've also heard it described as Lambeth style piping, which is I guess from the UK in the '30s. How would you describe it?
Noelle Blizzard:
Definitely leaning Lambeth, Marie Antoinette. Marie Antoinette meets Wilton, meets vintage Wilton Cake, catalog cakes. Yes, there's those two sides. The special thing about our cakes is that it's not one vintage style that is strictly Marie Antoinette and Lambeth and Wilton. There's become this whole insane spectrum in between. But yeah, I think that that's how I would categorize it.
Jessie Sheehan:
How would you describe Marie Antoinette versus-
Noelle Blizzard:
The Lambeth.
Jessie Sheehan:
-versus Victorian, let's say, or maybe Victorian is Marie Antoinette?
Noelle Blizzard:
I think the two things to compare maybe is this Wilton Americanized version versus Marie Antoinette Lambeth piping. With Lambeth Victorian piping, I think you would see less piped rosettes and garden elements, more extremely intricate fine piping details. The Wilton catalog is chock-full of vines and chairs and pillars and buttercream flowers. It's funky. It's really colorful. It's a little wacky. It's really awesome.
Jessie Sheehan:
That is so interesting. I've never thought about it that way, or even new to think about it that way. I'd love you to walk us through the process for making and decorating a sheet cake. We'll do more of an emphasis on the decorating. I know that you love to decorate sheet cakes and I just straight up love sheet cakes, but why are they special for decorating?
Is it that they have the best canvas because it's like this big flat surface? And are they better than decorating a layer cake? I mean, I know these are all your children and you don't want to say you like one more than the other.
Noelle Blizzard:
It's a really fun question to think about. I guess the first thing I would want to mention is that I stumbled into decorating sheet cakes in a vintage style totally by accident. We do a lot of pop-up events in Philadelphia where we sell our sheet cakes by the slice. And I realized that I didn't want to bring with me a table display of separate celebration cakes so that I could properly market what you buy here as a slice and then what you would buy as a composed cake.
I realized that I should just do all this decorating onto the sheet cakes. And the first time I did it, I mean, my mind exploded. I couldn't believe I'd waited so long, and then I started having so much fun with them. I've noticed in the online baking community, the struggle for a lot of people in doing a sheet cake is like, I don't have orders for sheet cakes. This is a lot of investment to make a really big cake and then decorate it in a vintage style.
I was fortunate that I was doing a lot of pop-ups and making a lot of sheet cakes so I could just keep doing it over and over and over again and having a lot of fun doing it. But now I've realized they can come in all shapes and sizes. So yes, I do half sheet cakes at a pop-up, but we do quarter, nine by 13. You can do an eight-inch square. You can do as small as a six-inch square.
I see a lot of those on Pinterest, ones that look like little jewel box, tissue box cakes. So I just think they look different. They're square and rectangular. They're not what you would expect from a traditional celebration cake. Working with those angles seems like a lot of fun to me. And to what you were saying, they're a huge expansive surface. You just get to repeat all the piping rows. They're just filled with creativity to me.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you've described your cakes as a combination of your love for seasonal desserts and pastries, although today it's not a super seasonal one that we're going to talk about, but that doesn't mean it's not true, and a whimsical, nearly too beautiful to eat cake, which I just loved. But interestingly enough, you are sweet adverse and therefore you take pains to ensure that the components of a cake, including the frosting, are going to run savory-ish.
I don't want anyone to get nervous and think it's dinner, but it's savory-ish. So I thought it might be fun for you to tell us about how you tweak each component of your classic vanilla sprinkle cake with cookies and mascarpone cream and tahini caramel filling and vanilla beans with buttercream, how you tweak that to ensure it's not cloyingly sweet.
And I wonder, is the fear of it being too sweet even intensified or emphasized because your cakes now have a lot of frosting on them, so you even have to be more afraid of that, or because you work so hard to make sure your frosting isn't too sweet, that's actually not the motivation between the less sweet cake components?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. The fact to me, the fact about a vintage cake is unless you're a huge lover of frosting, which there's a lot of people that could eat a bowl of frosting, but it's not everyone, you're probably just not eating all of the slice. When you get a slice of a vintage cake and there's a ton of vintage piping on your corner of the slice, you might just not eat it. It's just there. So there's a little bit of potential waste. But to me, it does not affect how I build the inside design of the flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
With this particular cake, there is a salted tahini caramel filling, and sometimes caramel can be a little too sweet, and so you give it a savory kick with tahini and a generous amount of flaky Kosher salt. And that is a theme with you, salt, which I love. That is a theme of mine as well, even being a frosting lover. And I also love that you love Plugra butter, because I love Plugra as well. And you love Soom tahini.
Noelle Blizzard:
They're local.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I didn't even know that. Oh, I love Soom, and women-owned. Yes?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes, they are.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. So you knew you wanted caramel, but you needed a way to make it a tiny bit more savory, less sweet, so we're getting that burnt sugar rather than that sweet sugar flavor. And now you're getting that with some dimension from tahini and salt.
Noelle Blizzard:
It's almost like it's not caramel, honestly. Once you add the tahini, it's like this different version of tahini almost. I would not classify this as caramel other than the obvious texture and that it is obviously caramel, but the flavor is so tahini. It's not sweet. It's super nutty. The saltiness is there.
Jessie Sheehan:
So that's one of our fillings along with a mascarpone whipped cream. The cake itself, I wasn't able to see. It didn't pop out at me what makes it not as sweet, but I'm assuming it's because it just probably doesn't have as much sugar as another cake.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, it definitely doesn't have as much sugar to other recipes I've done. I don't know if it's the pure increased amount of high-quality butter and sour cream and buttermilk that also are at play there. We also always use vanilla beans, so there's vanilla extract, but then there are extremely flavorful flecks of vanilla bean in all of our vanilla cakes as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I've read that you see that as a savory component. You see the bean as helping to mitigate sweetness and balance. We also use the reverse creaming method with this cake. Can you briefly tell us what the reverse creaming method is, and then tell us why you like it here?
Noelle Blizzard:
Sure. So reverse creaming method, you're obviously doing things in reverse into your mixing bowl. Instead of putting butter like you normally would, you're actually putting all of your dry ingredients, including the sugar into your bowl. So flour, baking powder, salt, and the granulated sugar, and mixing it with a whisk to smooth everything out and get it combined. And then you're taking room temperature butter cubed and adding that to the mixture a little bit of a time.
It's very much like biscuit making. And honestly, I think the end product is a little bit similar to that too. It's still like a super fluffy what you would expect out of a cake, but it's so fluffy. When it comes out of the oven, it reminds me more of the way you can see visible holes and pockets when you make muffins or not biscuits specifically, but more of a muffin quality that I think is achieved through this technique.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to bake the cakes and then we are going to cool them and level them with a... Is it pronounced Agbay?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Cake leveler. Tell us what an Agbay Cake Leveler is.
Noelle Blizzard:
This thing is not necessarily cheap. I think that it's like maybe $150, it might be less, but I've made a lot of friends on the internet. And when I was starting my business, leveling cakes drove me completely insane. And getting a super sharp level and cutting into a cake and it looking so professional and perfect was a goal of mine, and I learned of this leveler. And I think all they make is this leveler, and it's just a super sharp serrated H shaped leveler, a lot like the cheap ones that you can find on Amazon. But this is a sturdy leveler and it's very sharp.
Jessie Sheehan:
Should I picture you dragging it across the top of the cake?
Noelle Blizzard:
You can picture it more like a cutting motion across the cake. So envision that it's leveled on the table and it's on feet. And then I'm taking it. I'm holding it.
Jessie Sheehan:
The leveler is on feet.
Noelle Blizzard:
The leveler has feet. Yes. And you can adjust the feet.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then you slide the cake under the leveler?
Noelle Blizzard:
You keep your cake here.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Noelle Blizzard:
Okay, and then you're going to saw it across.
Jessie Sheehan:
You saw it even though it's on its feet.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, you're not lifting it up. You're just like gently sawing to guide it through.
Jessie Sheehan:
Fascinating.
Noelle Blizzard:
It cuts through like butter. You can be so fast when you have a team that needs to do this work quickly. The main thing that I ended up loving about it is that, sure, leveling a six-inch cake or eight inch cake, that's not so hard, but trimming a sheet cake is a whole other thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
And just so people understand, when we say sheet cake here, we're not meaning a nine by 13. We're meaning an 18 by 13 half sheet pan. Wow. Wow, I love that. And let's say we were making nine by 13 inch cakes here. I liked this note. You would take two nine by 13s, and then you would cut each one into two rectangles, and then you would have four rectangles, which would become a four layer sheet cake for you. I love that.
Noelle Blizzard:
I think it's an easy hack for people at home. Most of us have a brownie pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. When we remove this cake from the oven, we're going to let it come to room temperature, and then we're going to freeze it because that's going to make decorating, et cetera, much easier.
Noelle Blizzard:
So much easier.
Jessie Sheehan:
The other component I wanted to mention is the mascarpone whipped cream with Oreo cookies, which will go inside of this cake. I thought this was so interesting and obvious, but sometimes I need to hear obvious things. Traditionally, cookies and cream filling usually involves folding cookies into a buttercream, let's say, like Swiss or American. But you use this mascarpone-based whipped cream because as you say, it's light and flavorful and lean, cloud-like.
Noelle Blizzard:
Totally, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Which I appreciate. You also add a little bit of gelatin to this, and I'm assuming you add the gelatin because whipped cream can be a little loose. And if you add the gelatin, you're getting sort of almost like a mousse consistency from the whipped cream.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah. When I first was going about developing the recipe and using this technique, my number one fear honestly is that I'm making professional cakes and selling them, and I need the cake to be super stable for decorating and to last when you take it home and keep it in your refrigerator.
If it's not set with gelatin, I feel like crazy things could happen inside that cake. And then we can make it with gelatin and it will last over a week in the fridge because everything is just nice and set and contained. And when you scoop it, it's like scooping ice cream. It's delicious. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
You also add some vanilla bean paste because of the savory element that it brings. And then I also thought this was interesting just for those of us that love cookies and cream kinds of situations, that when you're actually adding the Oreos to your whipped cream, you're eyeballing it. You're just more looking for the color for those crushed Oreos, the little fine bits to color that whipped cream brownish, and then you know you're good to go.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, it's like then I know that this is no longer just whipped cream. It's for sure we call it cookie whip.
Jessie Sheehan:
Cookie whip. Yum. I think I would eat that just plain. Next is the vanilla bean Swiss meringue buttercream. And as you say, you use just enough butter and sugar to egg white ratio so that it's stable, but not too sweet. And then you use three times the amount of salt to mask any overpowering sweetness, which I just love, love, love. I also feel like Swiss meringue buttercream anyway leans less sweet definitely than American.
And then you're adding a little bit of vanilla bean paste and more salt if necessary. I liked this tip because obviously you need your frosting to be bubble free. So you say that after you've made the buttercream, you can swap out the whisk attachment for a paddle attachment and mix for like 10 minutes longer on medium or?
Noelle Blizzard:
On low.
Jessie Sheehan:
On low, just to make sure all of those bubbles are gone.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, both stages of finishing it, so doing that final stir, when the whisk attachment is on, we literally say in the kitchen, we forget about it. We let it go for 10 minutes or more, then swap the attachment and do it again. And it's those videos you see online where you're moving a spatula through and you cannot believe how completely smooth and bubble-free and cloud-like ganache looking your buttercream can become.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow. And that's true for all buttercreams or just Swiss meringue?
Noelle Blizzard:
I don't know. It's just we only work with... Well, French too. But yeah, it doesn't seem like using a whisk attachment on low would do it, but it does.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Whisk first, then paddle.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah. But when we're even just whipping things up for cake decorating, like reusing our buttercream, literally just the whisk attachment. We have a lot of hacks. One in particular is that to use a double boiler, get the frosting that you're reheating to decorate. Put it in a bowl, put it over the double boiler. Start to melt it. You're just going to see a puddle of melted buttercream at the bottom, and then set it back in your mixing bowl on low with the whisk attachment.
And it turns from what honestly is crazy, what happens to Swiss buttercream when it sits at room temp or in your fridge, you wouldn't believe the change in texture. It looks totally unedible, and then it turns in 10 minutes or less right back into that perfect texture.
Jessie Sheehan:
That is amazing. Could you take it straight out of the fridge and do that, or do you need to bring it to room temp first?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. Crazy things can happen if you go right from fridge, like separation of water, and it'll become butter form again.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yup, so bring it to room temp.
Noelle Blizzard:
Bring it to room temp.
Jessie Sheehan:
But then warm it until you see liquid on the bottom. Fascinating. Love that. All right, now we're going to assemble. So we're going to remove those cakes from the freezer. We're going to pipe a frosting border around all sides of the cake, and then fill with scoops of cookie whip as well as some of our tahini caramel, smooth, very gently and level the top with we're going to call it inverted because you like to call it inverted, but we mean offset, peeps.
Then you're going to pipe your tahini on top of that and top with an additional layer, and then repeat. So that's how we fill our layers. And you remind us that the last cake layer, the fourth one, should be flipped over so the flat side is up. Remind us why we flip.
Noelle Blizzard:
Number one for crumb coating. So it's not such a hot mess when you go to coat the outside of the cake. But then also when you cut into the cake, everything looks uniform. Your fleshy side that's absorbing the insides of the cake, that's what you'll see completely from layer to layer inside.
Jessie Sheehan:
That makes sense. I never thought about it that way, but the other layers are already covered in frosting. So why would the top layer be any different?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to do something cool, which I've never heard of, which is we're going to lock the filling in. So we're going to pipe frosting around the seams, the outside of that cake, right where you can see in between each layer. And then we're going to smooth that with our spatula. Now we're going to crumb coat. This is all crumb coating, but now we're going to frost the cakes.
We've done the middle and we've done the seams. Now we're going to frost the cake's surfaces, spreading the frosting and using a bench scraper to scrape until everything is smooth, and then stick it in the fridge for about 30 minutes. Now we're going to frost the cake. So in a medium-sized bowl, do you like to use metal bowls or glass bowls?
Noelle Blizzard:
We use metal bowls.
Jessie Sheehan:
Metal bowls just from a restaurant supply?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to color our frosting. So your favorite brand is this Australian based one called Colour Mill.
Noelle Blizzard:
Colour Mill.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell us about that. Is that gel? Is that liquid? What should we picture? Where do we get it?
Noelle Blizzard:
It's oil based. It is not completely clean food coloring, but their whole thing is that it is filled with less. So you can read online with their ingredients are, and they're really transparent, but the thing about them is it incorporates amazingly into Swiss buttercream, but they carry a million shades, probably 50 plus shades.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is that unusual? I just don't know the color world, the food coloring world.
Noelle Blizzard:
It's the fact that they are modern shades. If you get AmeriColor... And we use other brands of gel food coloring like AmeriColor, especially to get super, super dark, deep shades like your evergreen, your red, your black. You need a tried and true basic gel, but Colour Mill for lighter stuff, for pastels, if you want to achieve really unique looking browns and pink and taupe and sage, sea mist. They have the whole rainbow spectrum that makes figuring out color really easy.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. So we're going to put a one-half inch opening in our piping bag. This was a little confusing, so I'm hoping you can help me understand. We're going to pipe in continuous lines all over the cake working quickly and efficiently. We'll talk in a second why we have to work quickly and efficiently. But talk to me about continuous lines. That confused me. What should I picture?
Noelle Blizzard:
So you're holding your piping bag horizontal against the cake, and then you're going to turn the stand while piping out. So it's like you're making basically circles, like circle, circle, circle, circle on the sides. So circle all the way from the top.
Jessie Sheehan:
I got it. I got it. So it's literally horizontal.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perpendicular to the side of the cake, the piping bag is, and then you're turning your table. We've made this nine by 13 inch sheet cake, but it's four layers and it's nine by six inches, six and a half inches at this point. I get it. I get it.
Noelle Blizzard:
So on a sheet cake, actually for sheet cake specifically, I would just start in one quadrant, start in one side of your rectangle, and just do a line, bottom line, next line, and go line, line, line all the way up to the top until you cover the edge. And of course, a lot of people just scoop up frosting out of a bowl and apply it to the side. But this gives you perfectly consistent application of frosting from top to side, and then smoothing it out is a breeze.
You take a scraper. You smooth over once, twice. You're done. There's no fussing patching holes. It's very fast. And then you know that your frosting isn't starting to set and the temperature isn't changing and you're not doing all this fussing.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're working quickly and efficiently because Swiss meringue buttercream is temperature sensitive. Could a novice decorator just use American butter? I know it flavor wise wouldn't be what you would want, but it would be easier to use perhaps because it's not as sensitive.
Noelle Blizzard:
You can, and the reason I know for sure is when we do a lot of vegan cakes, we do have a vegan Swiss buttercream that we can do. But more often than not, we're using an American style vegan buttercream, and we've done vintage cake designs with it. So you absolutely can. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we've smoothed our cake with our scraper. And is there a brand of bench scraper that you love?
Noelle Blizzard:
I wish I knew the brand. My preference is acrylic. My team prefers different things. I think they like metal better. I use acrylic and I just buy variety packs of acrylic off of Amazon, and then use the one or two out of it that are actually flat and suitable.
Jessie Sheehan:
And are those acrylic ones? I have what I guess is I call it a flexible bench scraper. I have one that I use for scooping out dough.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, not that. These are stiff.
Jessie Sheehan:
These are stiff.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. The super flexible ones that you would use for that purpose, but then also to decorate a dome cake, they are really helpful for getting super smooth finishes in spots. But overall I like something hard, totally level that's going to give me a perfectly smooth and even finish.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great. So now we're going to move on to the decorating. We've crumb coated, but then we've actually frosted, like given the cake its color or whatever that will poke out in spots even after we decorate it. And for decorating, we're going to need bench scrapers, some tips, some bags. You've said when you're designing, you are plotting perfect color palettes and textures for truly unique cake designs. And I wondered, are there favorite colors of yours or favorite designs of yours?
Noelle Blizzard:
Favorite colors, I think one of my favorite combinations is a super bright cake base, macaroni orange or hot pink, and then piping on top of it in lighter colors. Even evergreen base with pinks on top.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, so pretty. Oh my God, I love that.
Noelle Blizzard:
That has to be a go-to.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Is there a favorite design? And you try not to repeat designs, or it doesn't really work that way, right?
Noelle Blizzard:
Well, it's like maybe if it was just me making cakes for fun and creativity, I probably wouldn't repeat as much as I do, but I make cakes to sell and I also have to train employees to make them. People love a design and they see that and they want it as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
I had written that. Customers want to see... They want what they saw. They're not like, "Please make me something different." They're like, "Make me that."
Noelle Blizzard:
I mean, we have a list of what is definitely most requested. We also launched an online shop this year, and you can sort by best-selling and see for yourself the eight cakes that people cannot get enough of and keep ordering.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I love that. So first things first, you get yourself fully set up, which is essentially like a mise en place situation. But before you start to execute a design, you're going to get your piping bags lined up and filled and set out your tips. And you have a food coloring plan. Your frosting is at room temp in the bowl. It's smooth. It has no air bubbles. When you prepare your piping bags, you're going to place a large Ateco tip directly into your plastic piping bag. So why no coupler? And maybe tell people what a coupler is in case they don't know.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. A coupler is a plastic piece with one cylindrical base and then a ring that attaches to the base that holds the tip onto it. You wind it on to secure the tip. So we use the small couplers when we're using the standard small Ateco tips. And that's because I might have maybe two colors for my vintage cake, but I'm going to use five piping tips. So I need to be able to exchange them often.
When we're making a vintage cake and using the large ones, we're not decorating cupcakes, we're decorating two single borders, we only need one large tip and we're only using one color. To clean and attach both a coupler and the tip seems silly to me. So we just drop the large tip right into the plastic bag and keep going.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm burying the lead here, but your tip of choice is an Ateco tip?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes, definitely.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then the bags, is there a brand of bags?
Noelle Blizzard:
I like Ateco too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Ateco brand. And I know that piping bags can come in different sizes. Do you buy one size?
Noelle Blizzard:
No, we buy a bunch. So we buy mainly 18, 20, and 22. They make smaller ones that when we are doing cakes with a lot of colors that don't require as much piping in the bag, or if you want to have a smaller bag handy because you're going to be doing a lot of writing like the charm cake, amazing charm cake. So she probably needs smaller bags.
Jessie Sheehan:
She does. She has tiny tips and tiny bags. So we're going to cut off the tip of our plastic bag. We're going to put our Ateco tip in without the coupler. And then we're also going to prepare additional Ateco plastic tips with couplers. And you just explained why. This is because we're going to be using different colors and the couplers make sense. We're going to have our piping bags, several piping bags if we're using more than one color. Do you make your own colors, or does Colour Mill make so many that you don't even have to make your own colors?
Noelle Blizzard:
No, we totally blend them. I mean, sometimes we'll use things straight up, but sometimes we will mix also.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to fill the bags halfway to two-thirds of the way full with our buttercream. This was interesting. So we're going to use a plastic bench scraper or cake scraper to press and smooth the frosting in the bag into a thin layer. And then you say, we're going to press in a wave-like motion from the tip end to the bag top, pushing out the air bubbles. Explain to me a wave-like motion.
Noelle Blizzard:
It really is pushing. Ultimately, it's because you're repeating the pushing.
Jessie Sheehan:
Like you flattened it out in the bag.
Noelle Blizzard:
You're going like this, this, this, this all the way up the bag.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you've flattened the frosting in the bag, and then you're using the bench scraper to make tiny little pressing down motions all the way.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah. It's a hard technique to describe like this. But at the end of the day, if you're thinking in your mind, I want to push the air bubbles from the bottom to the top, I bet you figured it out.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yeah. I'm picturing my toothpaste and trying to get it to the top.
Noelle Blizzard:
And if you don't do this, you will foil yourself. You're in for trouble.
Jessie Sheehan:
Because you really can't have bubbles.
Noelle Blizzard:
No. I mean, they'll pop up in the middle of a perfect shell. And if you're doing fine piping, like piping with a number one or even smaller tip one to three, an air bubble will break completely. Like you'll be piping a loop and it will just fall and shatter. Don't do that.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you say that if you have never piped on a cake before, it is a great idea to practice piping rows of buttercream on a piece of parchment paper, for instance, and also go to YouTube university.
Noelle Blizzard:
Go to YouTube.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you have a lot of favorite tips that you have shared, and I know one of them that you love is this Korea 363, which is an open star tip, which you love for swirly rows. Can you tell us a couple of the names of other tips that you're particularly fond of?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes, they're all numbered. That one in particular, it's really funny now that I have a team and we all have our random tip that we love so much. It seems really silly. So we have two favorite larger tips, and that's like an 844 and an 865. One is a open French star tip and one is closed. So one's going to create a more frilly shell and one a very sharp, rigid shell. We also use a lot of smaller open star tips like the 32. All of the 13 to 16 are great for more finer detailed shells, but also piping rosettes. We do a lot of piped rosette.
Jessie Sheehan:
And just a question about tips, do the numbers describe the size? So the smaller the number...
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes, exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Interesting.
Noelle Blizzard:
I've never lined them all up to understand why they're organized and sold in the order that they are. I would be very interested to find out. But yes, so a certain spectrum probably of six or more tips could be 13 to 16, give or take, in that area, and it's just a tip going from small to large in its opening.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is there a certain number of colors that you tend to use per cake?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. I mean, we really have to standardize things because I have to price things out. Our standard cake will have about three colors plus white. Something more than that is going to be an increased price amount, but that's the sweet spot. If you are coming to us and you want to order a really fabulous cake, you should use more color. It's really fun, and it's a technique that we've honestly had to master and have mastered knowing how to layer a lot of color into a design.
Jessie Sheehan:
And also I imagine that the price is not only the cost of making the different colored frostings, but then also dealing with all those bags.
Noelle Blizzard:
It's labor. Totally, honestly, the price is mainly that it takes so much more time to mix extra color, prepare all of the bags basically. You wouldn't believe.
Jessie Sheehan:
You said three plus white. When is there ever white or sometimes people want you to pipe in white?
Noelle Blizzard:
We do a lot of piping in white.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, like a white cake? But usually that original coat of frosting that we did in stripes after we did our crumb coat, that's usually a color.
Noelle Blizzard:
It could be any. Sure, this is a celebration cake, but there's all kinds of celebrations and we do a ton of weddings. Not to mention sometimes we have a really beautiful cake on our Instagram. It's an all white cake, and then it has red and white, like bright, bright red and white, buttercream flowers with evergreen. These colors pop on the base of an all white cake. So we use white all the time.
Jessie Sheehan:
And that's so easy because you don't add anything to the...
Noelle Blizzard:
I know. Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. I feel like I want an all white cake, great.
Jessie Sheehan:
But then is there vanilla bean seeds in there that you see?
Noelle Blizzard:
No. If someone specifically were to request that I want you to use vanilla bean, I want that to be in the exterior frosting, and maybe that's a part of the look you're going for if it's very cottage core sort of, but no. When we decorate cakes, we use not vanilla bean, just vanilla white frosting, and then color that.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, so the recipe for the Swiss meringue buttercream that we talked about has vanilla bean in it.
Noelle Blizzard:
It does. If you're going to go and color the cake, you're not going to pick up on that much.
Jessie Sheehan:
Got you. But if you know the person wants white, you're going to change course.
Noelle Blizzard:
The thing is, in our kitchen, this is different if you're at home, you should just make this as the recipe instructs and use this for every stage of this. In the kitchen though, we make massive batches of Swiss buttercream multiple times a week in a 20 quart mixer, and some is getting used at the beginning of the week to assemble cakes. And then at the end of the week, it's getting used to decorate cakes, and so there's no vanilla bean in the finish.
Jessie Sheehan:
I wondered, let's say we're talking a sheet cake, where on the canvas, as it were, do you start?
Noelle Blizzard:
Everyone definitely has their own approach to it, but we always start with borders, and sometimes there's a ruffle at the bottom of your border. So before you were to use that large Ateco tip on the top and bottom, sometimes you're using your smaller bag. You could use a 104, which is teardrop shaped, and you can make sort of scallopy ruffles with that, or a classic ruffle that we use is the 68 and 69 and lifting your piping bag up and down to form this ruffle.
Jessie Sheehan:
And the ruffle is on the bottom of the cake where the...
Noelle Blizzard:
It can be bottom and top.
Jessie Sheehan:
Would you do both to start?
Noelle Blizzard:
Normally we do.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you would do maybe once all the way around the bottom of the cake, once around the rec, and then go to town with whatever you're going to fill it in start.
Noelle Blizzard:
Then we start with the large shells on top of it. And so now we've set our borders, and then we would go in and decorate the sides of the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
It sounds like there are, but are there ever words or messages that people want? Does it run the gamut, some people do, some people don't? Or does everybody want you to write something? And if you have to write something, do you start with that?
Noelle Blizzard:
No, we don't. So I would say 70% of orders probably want writing on the cake. We don't start with it because we're not perfect. The cakes look pretty perfect, but the way that we make our border is not always exactly right. And you wouldn't believe it, if you're off by the fraction of an amount on where you place the left side of the border versus the right side of the cake, but you've already put your writing and now the writing doesn't look center.
So we just wait until the end, and we have enough experience now with writing that the fear in our mind of writing it wrong and then having to get it off smoothly and not messing up the texture and not messing up the rest of the design is not as much a fear in our mind, so we just save it until the end.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is the writing on top of some piped frosting, or do you leave the center of the cake...
Noelle Blizzard:
Untouched.
Jessie Sheehan:
Got you.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Got you.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yes. We do these classic buttercream sounds like what we're talking about right now, but we also do ones where we put pressed flowers on with a vintage style cake. And we'll tell people, if you want this to look like the design on our website, this full complete design with these pressed flowers all over, where you can really see the pressed flowers and enjoy them as a part of the design, please don't ask for writing. Because it's just...
Jessie Sheehan:
It's too much.
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, we can't do it. It doesn't look good combined. And then if we only do writing, you're losing out on this really beautiful aspect of the design. And you can give a card and sing Happy Birthday instead.
Jessie Sheehan:
You have a great list of ways to hide mistakes, which I loved. And I also want to hear about how you fix a frosting mistake. These are great for hiding a mistake, like you recommend stemmed maraschino cherries. You would like to get them at Target, or one-eighth of an inch ribbons, so a really skinny ribbon from Joanne's or Amazon, fresh edible flowers, Whole Foods or a farmer's market, dried food-safe pressed flowers from Amazon and Etsy, edible gold leaf.
But how do you take off... I'm so not a decorator, so I don't even know the language, but let's say you make a border and then you realize that looks not good. Do you scrape it off? Do you chill the cake and then scrape it off? Do you scrape it off when it's still room temp?
Noelle Blizzard:
If you catch it right away, you could just use your offset spatula to lift those shells off and just redo it. My tip is to, if you notice it, just redo it. Don't wait until you've completely finished the border and done the bottom and done some on the side and you're like, man, I wish I had gone back. Just redo it. It won't take that much time, and it'll save you from possibly having to scrape everything off in 20 minutes instead.
Jessie Sheehan:
Got you.
Noelle Blizzard:
Do it fresh in that case. But if your whole cake has started to warm up as you're decorating and you make a pretty big boo-boo, I do suggest putting it in the fridge because then popping it, it just pops off at that point, using an offset spatula.
Jessie Sheehan:
And through this process, are you having to manipulate or baby your frosting? Like, oh, it got a little too warm. I'm going to put it in the fridge briefly, or, oh, it got too stiff.
Noelle Blizzard:
I mean, we're experienced in decorating a cake usually, not a sheet cake, but a standard six eight, that's 30 minutes of decorating. So not much is going to happen in that time. But the most common thing that can happen, if it's really warm, your frosting will warm up and it'll start just melting out of the bag. And in that case, maybe tee up your bags if you're in a particularly warm environment in your home in the middle of the summer.
Maybe leave some in the fridge for a teeny bit and pull it out as you go, or don't prep all your bags. Work one color at a time. Maybe make multiple bags of one color so that your hand isn't heating up your entire batch of frosting. You can take a break and move between bags. You're not overheating. If it's cold, the thing that will happen is your frosting will set and become bubbly, and the texture will completely change and it won't pipe out in a nice, really smooth, silky look.
Our hack in the kitchen because we're in a commercial kitchen and it's very cold, sometimes we use a space heater. I'll keep a space heater on my table or on the floor directed lightly near the piping bags so that they're staying normal temperature while I decorate the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Or you could bring in your hairdryer.
Noelle Blizzard:
There you go.
Jessie Sheehan:
When you fill a piping bag, do you like to stick it in a plastic pint container? Do you hold it in your hand? I've seen if you were getting takeout food, put it on the counter, put your bag in or put it in a glass, and then fill it. Or are you guys so experienced you just hold it in your hand and fill it?
Noelle Blizzard:
Yeah, I guess I would do that if it's a really big bag and I'm trying to put a ton of frosting in it. Especially for that initial technique that I was talking about where there is no coupler, it's just cutting a hole in the bag to put frosting on the cake. In that case, I might use a deli container to fill it so that I can get as much frosting in as possible and do it as quickly as possible. But other than that, we're just holding it by hand. And you're not putting more than a cup, cup and a half of frosting into this bag anyway.
Jessie Sheehan:
At a time. And then are you refilling as you need?
Noelle Blizzard:
Well, if you're using more than one color, you're probably not refilling. You're just working from back to back.
Jessie Sheehan:
But if you're doing that initial... You would think it's more than a cup of frosting to frost a... I don't know why I find it so hard and you're refrosting and you're opening up the bag and it's sticky.
Noelle Blizzard:
This is why it's an art and a skill to own and what people are ultimately paying for.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Noelle.
Noelle Blizzard:
Thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I just want say that you are my cherry pie.
Noelle Blizzard:
Thank you so much.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugra Premium European-Style Butter for supporting today's show. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And tell your pals about us. She's y Cherry Pie is a production of the Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.