She’s My Cherry Pie: Natasha Pickowicz Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, a 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 with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today, I'm talking all things layer cakes with pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz. Natasha's debut book will be out Tuesday, April 11th, and it's called More Than Cake: 100 Recipes Built For Pleasure And Community. It's the perfect title as Natasha has spent so much of her career both baking cakes and building community. Many of you, in fact, know Natasha from the bake sales she organized in New York City benefiting Planned Parenthood. Stay tuned for Natasha's secrets for building a modern layer cake. We'll be talking sponge cake, soaks, textured fillings, and the importance of time in allowing your flavors to meld together. Natasha has a very unique approach and I know you're going to enjoy learning more.
The Cherry Bombe Jubilee conference is right around the corner, folks, so I hope you've gotten your tickets. I'll be there, Natasha will be there, and she'll be signing copies of her new book. For those of you new to Jubilee, it's the largest gathering of women in and around the world of food and drink in the U.S. It's taking place Saturday, April 15th at Center415 in Manhattan. Come network, try beautiful food and drink, and hear from some incredible speakers. You can learn more and snag your tickets at cherrybombe.com. Jubilee tickets sell out every year, so don't delay.
Today's show is presented by Le Creuset and California Prunes. Here's a word about Le Creuset. For nearly a century, Le Creuset has been creating joy in the kitchen and beyond as the first in colorful cookware, the finest in quality and design, and the favorite of generations of cooks and bakers. Here on She's My Cherry Pie, there's a reason I always ask our guests about the tools and equipment they rely on. You can have the best ingredients around and be one of the world's top culinary talent, but you also need cookware and bakeware you can depend on. Professionally, I've relied on Le Creuset for years when I'm developing recipes, testing new treats for my cookbooks, or making something precise like caramel. And personally, I use my Le Creuset pieces all the time when cooking for myself or my family. If you need a special gift for any upcoming college graduations or weddings, you can't go wrong with a classic Le Creuset Dutch Oven, which you can use for almost everything. You can make individual molten chocolate cakes or berry crumbles in them or even use them for your mise en place. Head over to lecreuset.com to browse their gorgeous colors, find other gift ideas, and snag some recipes.
Let's chat with today's guest. Natasha, so happy to have you here on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk layer cakes, your incredible new cookbook and more with you.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh my gosh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Jessie.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yay! I think it's fair to say that you are nothing if not a baker with a sense of mission and you have written in your gorgeous new book, which we will get to shortly, I promise, that guiding your baking is a chance to explore its relationship with social justice, which I just thought was so eloquently and cleanly put and I wondered if you'd unpack it for us.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I think a lot of people will ask me for advice or strategies of what they can do in their own communities and neighborhoods for different causes they believe in or values that they hold. For me, it's different for everyone because it's this process of looking inward. It's what skillset do I have? What tools can I use to achieve a certain kind of goal?
For me, when I was looking inward, I was like, “Well, I know how to bake.” I love pastry, and I saw how pastries could have this effect of bringing people together and creating these joyful moments. I have background in producing events and community organizing, whether it's organizing a music concert or programming a talk. And so it felt really natural for me and my social nature to want to create really dynamic, fun kind of party moment to capture the joy that we feel and what it means to support your community.
What I'm trying to do in my book is, yes, it's a set of recipes that I believe in and think are great, but to take it almost one step beyond that, it's like “How can we use these recipes in these kinds of scenarios for these kinds of missions? What are the strategies that we can sort of unravel around these kinds of recipes?”
Jessie Sheehan:
I wanted to talk a little bit about your approach to baking. I read in your book that you don't approach baking like a trained pastry chef does. I, of course, love that being not a trained pastry chef myself. Tell me about that.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, I mean, well first of all, I didn't go to culinary school and I think that was a question that I would get a lot from young people who are kind of interested in a pastry career and were weighing their options around culinary school, and I would always sort of be like, “I didn't go to culinary school.” I really believe in cultivating mentorships with people that you admire and self-learning and being curious and learning at work. That was the journey that worked for me or that ended up being my journey, but that was almost more because financially I couldn't even afford to go to culinary school and so already that barrier was in place.
But I think because of that, I always approached developing desserts, writing menus for restaurants without the conception or idea of what a dessert should have or should look like. And I think when you go to some fine dining restaurants, it's like perfect cannelle, a gel a powder or something. It has to have all these different things for it to be complete. And I was sort of less concerned or into that idea and more focused on smaller expressions of how I thought things could be delicious.
And so, I think that what I first saw as maybe a roadblock to becoming good at something like becoming a chef, I think actually being on the outside of that actually helped me develop my own voice and what have become signature flourishes for me today. I literally had to just figure it all out on my own through insane trial and error and so much failure and so many mistakes. And I think in that process, like the recipe, the dish, the menu becomes stronger and better for it. That was really what I was trying to accomplish through my recipe writing.
Jessie Sheehan:
You wrote in the book again that early on professionally you felt like a bit of an outsider or inferior to your professionally trained colleagues. And I was hoping you could talk about this first of all, to make the rest of us feel better who have inferiority complexes, particularly since you are a three times James Beard Award finalist. So the idea of you having that kind of complex or inferiority, I think makes the rest of us or definitely makes me feel better about my own. So can you tell us about that?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh, I love to talk about all my insecurities forever. I mean, I think a lot of that comes internally through my own psyche, like the own things I struggle with personally that I project into situations in my world, like anybody honestly. I think also a lot of that is that the restaurant industry, in my experience, has systemically built into the way that it exists for people like me to feel like that because other people can profit off of the fact that I feel insecure or grateful to be paid $11 an hour or to be paid $45,000 a year to be working 70 hours a week or whatever. I think that was something that I really struggled with was untangling, am I worthless? Do I deserve to be here, or is that just the way that the sort of system and the institutions are erected around me to make me feel this way? Coming out of that and not working in restaurants anymore and being like, "Wow, I have to trust my own instincts."
And palate is very terrifying at first because I think if you work within an institution, yes, you may have imposter syndrome, but it's almost like you can rely on the institution by association when the institution wins. It's like you're a part of that winning feeling. And so breaking out of that is a very complicated thing because I was like, “Well, how do I win on my own? How do I succeed on my own? How do I know if anything I'm doing is good?” If there's not some man in charge that's telling me that I did a good job and that was a really hard thing for me to untangle and make peace with and move on, and I think still struggle with, especially now that I have this book coming out, I'm looking for that validation. I'm hoping that people respond to it.
Jessie Sheehan:
So I'm dying to get into your book, but before I do, I think a lot of people know about them, but can you tell us a little bit about your Planned Parenthood bake sales and just your work in bake sales in general?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, I mean, I have been producing bake sales since 2017. I'm not even sure how many that is. So the first three ones that I produced when I was the pastry chef at Altro Paradiso were for the Planned Parenthood of Greater New York. And then obviously with the pandemic and everything, the production around these sort of large, crowded events was obviously put on pause. And then I started doing that again and bringing that back in last year. And so, I had a really big outdoor sale at the Cherry Lane Theater that was kind of hosted with my best friend Alison Leiby, who's a comedian. And she had just written this unbelievable show about her experiences with abortion and is so funny and moving and important, and so it made sense to team up with her. The big sale was literally weeks after the news of the Roe v. Wade ruling was going to be overturned.
And so it just felt so imperative that we were creating a moment for people to come together right away because I think a lot of people were feeling super scared and freaked out, and a lot of people were also looking towards New York for being like, "Okay, this is a state that provides abortion services, so what do I need to know about what's going on here?" And so we partnered up with the Brigid Alliance who actually work with in tandem with nonprofits like Planned Parenthood to get people in states where they can't get those services to places where they can, like a Planned Parenthood in New York City.
Jessie Sheehan:
Finally, we can talk about More Than Cake, which is the title of your new dessert bible. The recipes in the book are inspired, I think, by your love of art and music and literature and your Chinese and California heritage and family. The photographs are so beautiful. Talk a little bit about the process because I feel like I'm following you via Instagram... You shot some of it here, but then you went to San Diego maybe and shot some of it and is it all over the place because of COVID or just personal choice or?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Great question. The thing is, without having written a cookbook before, I have no idea what was typical or how people do it. And also I will say that when I signed my book contract, I think I barely had any understanding that the cookbook author is responsible for producing financing and directing the photo shoot. I was like, "Oh, okay. Never done that before." So there was a massive learning curve, but I think a lot of that process was really easy and fun for me because the team that I worked with was so professional, so dynamic, so incredibly efficient, like absolute joy to work with on the artist inside as well as on the creative photo side.
So Nicole, Harriet, and Michael Graydon shot the book, and actually that came about through the bake sale, funnily enough because I don't think anyone knows this, but before COVID, I was planning on having another bake sale at Altro spring of 2020. This was literally the end of February. So weeks away from this nationwide global shutdown, they were in New York for work. And every year for the bake sale, I would always have photographers document the event because I believe in archives and I like having the records of things and having photographs of the event was so meaningful.
And so they had agreed to shoot the bake sale, and I was so excited about working with them because I was a huge fan of their work that I saw in cookbooks and print everything. And we had shot all of these photos and then none of them ever got used for anything because the bake sale obviously never happened, but I was able to be like, I'm so sad we didn't work together, but I did sell this book and could we work together if I hire you to shoot this book?
And I was so blown away that they said yes because they're like the best of the best, and it all worked out and I was able to use the photos from the bake sale that didn't happen in my proposal to be like, “These are the people I want to work with.” Anyway, it was very much a process of working with my agent to understand how to budget a photo shoot, what to allot from my book advance to pay for it on a very limited budget. I'm not a rich person, and I very quickly realized I couldn't afford to shoot the book in a studio in New York. Something that felt tricky for me ended up being the best possible thing because my parents were supposed to go to Taiwan the fall that we shot the book, they offered the house for me to write the book in, so not for the photo shoot, but then I was like, well, what if we shot the book at my parents' house for free?
Everyone stays in the house. And it was like camp. Honestly, it was so fun. We did two shoots in San Diego, so we shot in the fall in September, and then we shot the following spring in March, and we all lived in a house together with my parents' cat Hummus in my childhood bedroom. We shot in my mom's studio, and I think in beautiful California weather in September, I had every ingredient available to me, so I got all the beautiful fruit, the still life tart in the book. That was what I got at the market. It was the figs and berries and stone fruit, and it was outrageous.
I think also on a deeper symbolic level for me being able to shoot the book in the house that I grew up in, I think the book is full of really personal flourishes like that for me, where we're not in a studio that we have to populate with props. Emily Eisen, who did all of the props in a lot of the creative direction for all the photos, she would just hand me something that she found in the kitchen and she'd be like, "This is cool. Let's use this." And I'm like, "Oh, I haven't thought about that object critically ever. I love this." I learned so much. It's crazy.
Jessie Sheehan:
That sounds amazing. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Thank you to California Prunes for sponsoring this episode of She's My Cherry Pie. It's a funny coincidence that California Prunes is our sponsor because I love prunes. Last year, my doctor told me I should eat six a day for healthy bones and I've been hooked ever since. Prunes are also good for your heart and your gut, and they're loaded with nutrients like vitamin K, dietary fiber, potassium and antioxidants. And moreover, they're delicious. They're 100% my go-to smart snack. Snacking aside, I didn't realize how versatile California Prunes are for cooking and baking, but it makes perfect sense. They're sweet but complex with a rich, jammy flavor that compliments so many ingredients from chocolate to cheese. You can use chopped California Prunes and baked goods like muffins and scones the same way you would any other dried fruit. California Prunes are a lush and healthy addition to any of these treats. You can also make prune purée, which is prunes and water blended together, and swap that into certain recipes in place of eggs or oil, or to reduce the amount of sugar. For more on prune purée and great recipes that include prunes, head over to californiaprunes.org.
I want to tell you about Cherry Bombe magazine. It's a gorgeous, quarterly print magazine that's all about women in and around the world of food, drink, and hospitality. Enjoy lush photos and illustrations, thoughtful stories and essays, and great recipes all printed on beautiful paper. Each issue is printed in Rhode Island by a family-owned printer known for their work with world-famous artists and photographers. Cherry Bombe just launched subscriptions, so head to cherrybombe.com to start your subscription today.
Now, back to our guest. Okay, I promised modern layer cakes. Mention an entire chapter in the book, love, and you love modern layer cakes. And can you tell us how you would describe what a modern layer cake is?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I mean, I can only really describe what a modern layer cake means to me and what my preference is. And so there's a whole chapter devoted to single layer cakes, your coffee cakes, your olive oil cakes, your carrot cakes. These cakes that sort of have a crumb that are packed with flavor and different textures and can stand on their own. So with this chapter, I wanted to think more about cake as just one element equally at play with other things.
For me, the dream layer cake is thin layers of cake alternating with kind of creamy, moussey fillings. It's not too sweet. The cakes themselves are almost a little bit neutral in flavor. There's no butter cakes in any of my layer cake recipes because I personally like the super absorbent sponge cakes you see in Korean layer cakes or Chinese bakeries where maybe they're not leavened with anything except eggs. So maybe they have more of an eggier flavor, but they're very absorbent and can take flavorful soaks.
So, instead of maybe an American-style layer cake would be a two-inch thick round of cake that has butter in it. That's not soaked. That maybe is separated by frosting. Those are delicious, but that's not the kind of cake that I'm making here. The genesis for the whole approach for me was how I started making tiramisu, which again is a very moist dessert where you soaking the cake with a layer of flavor. There's kind of a rich mascarpone mousse in there somewhere. There's cocoa powder, whatever. It's boozy. I love a boozy cake.
So, I was really inspired by how I could translate how I was making tiramisu into layer cakes. And so the way that I really like to do it is a chiffon or Genoise sponge that is really no thicker than a centimeter. And it seems fiddly, but I don't like dividing cakes in half crosswise and never get the layers even. So for me, my workaround is every single cake in this chapter is baked into a half sheet baking tray. An 18 by 13 half sheet size of sponge cake can yield you three rounds that are eight inches wide that you can use. Trace them out like it's a piece of construction paper and use to layer into a delicious cake.
Layer cakes, from me, are all about building layers of flavor through these opposing textures and different flavors. If you have something like a vanilla sponge, you can infuse it with extra flavor, whether it's alcohol like Mezcal or something rich and fatty like coconut milk, or maybe it's a simple syrup that you're adding strawberries to, whatever. You kind of are building flavor inside of the cake through syrups, and then you're adding textural elements, whether it's a sticky jam, a creamy mousse. It seems complicated and fussy, but when you start to just think of it as just building blocks, projects that you kind of check off your list, to me, it feels like, oh, okay, it's not as crazy as I thought.
Jessie Sheehan:
I agree. And reading it, just so you know, that's how it comes across. You don't feel overwhelmed by it. You kind of get like, “Oh, that's why I did this, or that's why I did that.” And what I love about the chapter is your victorious layer cake triumphs, so five kind of recipes with all of the components there, but then you also have lists of all of your components. So I thought we'd go through them just so people understand what the components are. And then we're going to talk specifically about the passion fruit, coconut and tequila layer cake.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh, amazing.
Jessie Sheehan:
So the layers, I love this. They need to be real thin, as you just mentioned. I love that you're not going into butter cakes. They're either oil-based, I think, or in the case of the vanilla sponge and the cake, we're going to talk about no fat at all except egg yolks, which I love.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Totally. And part of my strategy is make the cake. You can throw it in the freezer if you want and it will be delicious as it thaws. But I found in testing that butter based cakes, when they get cold, even just in a refrigerator or frozen, that that's when they really dry out because the butter, of course, gets solid again.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love this, which I think some of us do anyways sometimes, but your cakes in this book, you put a soak on these layers, and we're going to talk a lot about the tequila and coconut one, but can you talk a little bit about the maple vanilla one?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh, yeah. I mean, so for me, I'm always trying to control the sweetness level of everything. The cake already has sugar in it, so I'm not really trying to add more sugar. But what I want to add is more interesting flavors or richness. So something like the maple milk soak. I'm actually boiling the maple to reduce the water content a bit, and then stirring in milk to make this really nutty, caramelly delicious soak that will infuse the cake with that flavor. But it's not overly sweet. I'm constantly looking for ingredients that I feel like will help me build flavor without taking it over the top sweetness-wise.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, I love you describe it as almost like your soaks for your cakes are like vinegarettes for your salad, which I loved. And then we have our cake, we have our soak, and then we have the filling, which you say you like it to be something creamy and fruity, which I love, not too sweet custard or a curd or a mousse. Tell us about the mascarpone. I'm mentioning ones that we won't talk about when we talk about our tequila cake. So tell us about the mascarpone mousse and honey.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Definitely. I wonder if people will notice that I'm not a chocolate person when they look at this book because there are so few chocolate recipes. I have to force myself to shoehorn them in. There is a chocolate layer cake set that I love and think is insane, that has ganache in it with a burnt honey that I think is delicious. But the mascarpone mousse is my favorite all-purpose cake filling. It goes with absolutely everything. You could also pipe it into choux puffs. I mean, it can be used for absolutely everything, but again, it's not too sweet.
And this is really my method that's lifted from how I made tiramisu, which is you make a zabaglione with egg yolks and sugar and you're kind of whipping that until it's frothy and light, and then you're paddling in a bit of mascarpone to give richness and some tang and then folding in some whipped cream. So can you just make whipped cream with heavy cream and the mascarpone? Yes, but I love that extra silky richness that you get with a bit of extra egg yolk in there too.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. And then finally, there's a frosting, and I love this. You're so strict, and I so appreciate it, but you're like, frostings are only for adhering the layers together and covering the cake. But the idea is what you basically say is the frosting is too rich and sweet to be inside of your cake. You want to cover your cake with it, which I feel like is wildly radical, but I love it.
Natasha Pickowicz:
That's just like my palate, I feel where ... Yeah, because the buttercreams are very rich, and I think you want everything to be in harmony and support each other. The mascarpone mousse is creamy but not heavy, and the cake layers are also not overly rich too. And again, I feel like I was very inspired by some of these moussier cakes you're seeing coming out of East Asian style bakeries like Korean, Japanese style cakes where the frosting isn't in the cake necessarily. It's more just to spackle the whole thing together at the end.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. And then finally, I loved that time is also an important element in cake making. It's not just frostings and soaks and fillings. You have a great way of assembling these layer cakes in the refrigerator using a cake pan, a spring form pan, a sauce pan. Can you describe that? And describe why time is such an important element.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh my gosh. I mean, it's so important, and that's why I try to make a little plan for myself when I go into a project of making space in my fridge to put this thing away overnight or whatever it is. I did this gig for Graza and I had to make a cake and the buttercream and ice them in the same day. That was how much time I had. And the buttercream, it was really warm in the kitchen, and it's just one of those things where if you don't give yourself enough time to do certain things, it will never come together. If the buttercream is too warm, it's not going to set and whip up in the right way that you want it. So you need to give yourself a little time to pop it into the fridge so that the butter can firm up a bit before you whip it up again.
Especially for something like a cake, because you have so many elements coming together and co-mingling, the cake is going to be better after a few days. The cake is going to be great on day two. It's going to be incredible on day three. That's when the cake really starts to become one, and it's every bite. It feels more cohesive. And so you want to give yourself that time to make it. And with my technique of building cakes, which is instead of building cake layers vertically from a flat surface, so maybe something is wobbling, that's where you see the cake teetering over because there's nothing there to support it. It's not iced yet. It's completely naked.
So my workaround is build your cake into something like you're making a lasagna. Use the pan as a support to help you. It's like, why fight gravity when you have these creamy thin layers? Set yourself up for success. Give yourself a structure that will literally contain the thing you're making. And so my trick is always lining a cake pan or a bowl or whatever with plastic wrap or parchment or whatever you want to use, and then building your cake directly into that.
It can't fall over, and then you can throw it into your fridge, stack stuff on top of it. It takes up less space that way too. And then when you're ready to ice and you invert it, it's always still thrilling to me to peel back that plastic and see the perfect layers. It's like, I didn't do that. It was the bowl. Determine how neat it was going to look later.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that also, just for what you were saying about the refrigerator, then you're putting something in and then somebody knocks it and-
Natasha Pickowicz:
I can't put a cake stand in my fridge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, no.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I don't have room for that.
Jessie Sheehan:
No, no. So passion fruit, coconut, and tequila layer cake. We're going to just talk about the ingredients and then how we assemble them. In this particular layer cake, it's this vanilla sponge that reminds you a little bit of Chinese bakery cakes, and it's really absorbent like a sponge. I love this. So we're going to bake it in a half sheet pan as we discussed, this 18 by 13. Basically what a regular cookie sheet is what we're calling a half sheet pan. And I love this that you don't grease the sheet pan because you'll have a taller sponge if you don't, which I'm imagining is almost like angel food cake, the way you don't grease your tube pan. And that's what makes ... because the cake grabs on it.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Exactly the same reason, except there's just yolks in it. Yeah, exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. Yeah, I love that. And no parchment paper.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I do use parchment paper just because it's easier to turn out later. And also I want to say, have I made this cake and also sprayed it with non-stick spray before baking it? And did it still come out great? Yes. That's the kind of thing that I hope people take away is here's my preferred way of working, but also it's also fine if you do it a different way.
Jessie Sheehan:
And do you have a favorite half sheet pan brand that you could share?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love All-Clad. I honestly just have a bunch of sheet trays. I keep them in my oven. I don't know where to keep them. It's terrible. But yeah, so I just use that, line it with parchment, no spray. When you're looking at a butter cake or something like that, I'll do the non-stick spray, so it's easier to remove later but yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
So the recipe calls for eggs, obviously, and I love this note, you don't want us to warm the eggs because that's going to make our cake more voluminous. Can you explain that?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I wish I could explain the science of it more, but I will say that when I was recipe testing and also just developing new recipes organically in kitchens over the years, trying it every which way, I think that was one piece of advice that I picked up from an old pastry chef because I was like, "The eggs aren't tempered. Everything has to be room temperature." And she was actually like, "No, it'll whip up better if you just go from cold." And I like that because I've noticed that once eggs are room temperature, it can be harder to separate the yolk from the white and the yolk might break more easily, which is frustrating when you're trying to get clean whites. So if you just do it when they're cold, it's very simple. It goes by really fast.
Jessie Sheehan:
I wrote that down. Makes separating easier. Yeah, no, I love that because I think for a lot of us, and I know for home bakers too, not that I'm not a home baker, I am, but all those little steps of bringing everything to room temp, if you know, can skip a thing like that in this recipe with the eggs, I love knowing that. So you're going to separate your eggs, and I love how you separate your eggs because I do that too. Can you tell people how you separate them.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh my gosh. Well, so when I sent my manuscript into my editor and a few passes later, I got all these notes back from their copy editor, which was a super intense experience to get literally thousands of comments about my work from somebody that I haven't met yet. But obviously incredible, necessary, and essential. But I remember one of the first comments she made was like, "Just flagging this, are you sure you want people to separate the eggs by hand?"
That was sort of like a hill I wanted to die on. We would make French toast batter before brunch service in restaurants, and you see cooks cracking 100 eggs into a giant bowl and then pulling out all the yolks all at once to make the whites for the batter or whatever. They're not doing it one by one. They're doing it all at once. And so if I see anybody working any other way, I'm like, "Stop what you're doing. You need to work a different way."
So the way I do it, wash your hands, wear gloves, whatever you need to do, crack all the eggs into a bowl while they're cold, and then just pluck out the yolks with your hand. I don't want people to feel gross about handling ingredients. These are expensive, delicious things that we should be engaging all of our senses with. Well, I'm not going to pass the yolk from shell to shell. I can't. I don't have time for that.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's exactly how I separate my eggs. I was so happy to see it in a book. So you've separated your eggs and then you're going to whip your yolks with some granulated sugar for five minutes. Add a little bit of vanilla. Do you have a favorite brand that you like?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I mean, I love Heilala, obviously. I mean their mission, the flavor, everything. Yeah, perfect.
Jessie Sheehan:
You're going to transfer that to a bowl, clean the bowl, then you'll do your whites and some sugar and a little bit more vanilla. Is there a reason you separate the vanilla to flavor the yolks and the whites?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I like adding a little bit of that liquid at the end, just in case I take things a little too far. It kind of helps me smooth out the mixture.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. And we know we're done when there's like a soft, floppy peak. So you pull it up and you see it droop a little bit. I love when you talk about the network of bubbles in meringue, how strong meringue is. People don't give meringue enough credit for.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I learned that from Claudia Fleming. I read that in one of her books where she was like, the number one thing people do is over beat their whites. And it's actually, people don't realize that if the whites look too soft that they're going to be stronger in the oven when they rise.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that.
Natasha Pickowicz:
And I'm like, I trust Claudia.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Yeah, Claudia for the win, always. You're going to sift in some flour, all-purpose flour. Do you have a favorite?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love King Arthur. I've also liked tons of subs with this. The gluten-free flour mixes work with this recipe. Rice flour is delicious in this recipe, but yeah, I just use a AP [all-purpose].
Jessie Sheehan:
And then some kosher salt. You always using kosher?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Always using Diamond.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you're sifting the flour and the salt into your yolks and incorporating, then you're going to add that meringue in, and I, like you say, fold confidently and with strength, which I appreciate it in life, basically I want to fold confidently.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Well, you see somebody like with these tentative of little emotions, and I'm like, you're deflating the meringue faster than if you just went in and just got it done.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, 100%. So you're pouring that into your sheet pan. You're baking. We know it's done when we just touch it and it springs back. There's no sticking in a toothpick for crumbs or yeah, no need.
Natasha Pickowicz:
It's so thin.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love because I'm always thinking you have to put a toothpick in everything, but you're right, if it's really skinny, yeah, you can just feel it with your finger. Do you have a tip for removing the cake? Because I know that can be hard for people. Do you need to go around the edge with a butter knife?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I mean, another indicator of doneness with the cake is that the edges of the cake will slightly pull away from the sides of the pan. So, it kind of naturally wants to pop out on its own. And I think if you're lining the sheet tray with a bit of parchment or Silpat, then it'll make removing it easy because it won't stick to anything. Butter knife, great. Desert island pastry tool is definitely the small offset spatula because it doesn't have an edge that will scrape or ruin a pan surface, and it's slightly flexible, so it really gets into those corners. I will let the cake cool completely in the pan first, and then I'll run in offset around the edges of the cake to loosen it, and then flip it over and peel off the parchment.
Jessie Sheehan:
And will you flip it onto a piece of plastic and immediately chill it? Or could you assemble this cake from just a room temp cake that you just baked?
Natasha Pickowicz:
For sure. And also this sponge even completely frozen. It doesn't ever feel frozen.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that.
Natasha Pickowicz:
So it's not hard. So even if you threw it in the freezer, it's never going to get brittle because it's like sugar and eggs.
Jessie Sheehan:
So I love that. So that's resting while we continue with our other components, although some of these components you probably could have made first if you wanted. You could make your soak ahead of time. You could make your fillings ahead of time. But the soak here, yum, yum, yum is a tequila coconut soak. Not too sweet as you say, you're going to combine coconut milk. Do you have a favorite brand of coconut milk?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Not necessarily. I just look for organic, unsweetened, full fat.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great.
Natasha Pickowicz:
And then I just make sure I emulsify that fat layer on the top.
Jessie Sheehan:
'Cause sometimes it separates and then you add some tequila. Do you have a favorite brand of tequila?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Well, I think it's also great with Mezcal if you want kind of like a smokier note. I just use an El Jimador tequila. This is where time and resting really comes into play. If you feel like that flavor of raw alcohol in pastry almost has a burning feeling, if you let it sit and rest, then those flavors become so much more mellow and rounded. And so that's really where time helps the soak become itself and bloom inside of the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's almost like a cold infusion where you put lavender and cold milk or cream to make a lavender whipped cream, and the longer you let it sit, it doesn't taste flowery by the end.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Exactly. Yeah. I love that.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. So I love this too, that the coconut milk and tequila go in a mason jar and then you kind of just shake to sort of bring those two together. But then you need to heat in the microwave before you use.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh, I just found that if you were are making the soak in advance that it chills. Some of the fat in the coconut milk could resolidify. So I think you only really need to take the edge off of that if you see that happening. But if you are making the soak the day that you're going to put the cake together, then there's really no need to warm it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. Perfect. I wasn't sure if maybe the warmth of the liquid helps, I don't know, absorption, et cetera, but that's good to know. Then in this particular modern layer cake, there are two fillings, which I love. There's a passion fruit curd filling, and then also a coconut streusel filling. Streusel is bringing texture and flavor to the cake. It's vegan, gluten-free. It sounds like perfection, calls for white rice flour. Is there a brand that you love of white rice flour?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love the Vietnamese brand, so I'll go to a Chinese grocery store or at Chinatown and just look for the Vietnamese white rice brands. But also King Arthur makes a great white rice flour as well. I think Bob's Red Mill does one too.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. And you need that for this grainy soft texture that you want from the streusel. And you say don't substitute it. Like it's rice flour is really what you want here.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I've tried that recipe with wheat flour, and I think what I love about it that makes it special is it has a sandy texture that is not hard on your teeth. If it's baked too long and it can feel pebbly, it's actually a very soft, delicious streusel. So that's why I do it that way.
Jessie Sheehan:
Sounds so yummy. So you combine the white rice flour with granulated sugar and kosher salt with your fingers and drizzle in some coconut oil.
Natasha Pickowicz:
You want it to be in its liquid state. So that might be something where you have to heat it up in the microwave or in a little sauce pan. It'll just be easier to incorporate into this streusel if it's a liquid.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you drizzle in a little bit of coconut oil until it's like wet beach sand, which I also love. And then you're spreading it on your half sheet pan and just baking 'til brown and fragrant. And it seems like it almost comes together in a big piece and you need to break it up with your bench scraper. I love that. Fun. And is there a brand of bench scraper?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love all the Ateco ones. I think they're nice.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Natasha Pickowicz:
King Arthur also also makes a really nice one, but it's a little bit more expensive. I think it's like $25 but, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I love a bench scraper. Then the passion fruit curd is the other filling. You give a little bit of history about curds in case people don't know about wanting to make them with a not very sweet fruit because there's so much sugar in them to preserve them and give them a velvety mouth feel. In this particular curd, you need some gelatin and you talked about both sheet gelatin or powder. Do you have a preference?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, I do prefer the sheet gelatin. It's just easier for me to measure out an actual sheet than to get a teaspoon out or a gram scale to figure out the granules. I think that's more of industry standard than the granulated gelatin. There's definitely like a structural function for gelatin in this curd. If you are making a curd to just spoon into a pavlova or to make a little ice cream sundae or whatever, I would say you don't need that gelatin because you're just drizzling it over something. Here it has a structural purpose too, which is you don't want it to squirt out the sides and be too runny. So the gelatin is something that really helps with that texture and keeping it in place. But yeah, I love the sheet gelatin for that.
Jessie Sheehan:
I just learned to use that in a bakery before I ever learned to use powder.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Same.
Jessie Sheehan:
So I still feel like where are my sheets?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Right.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you're going to put the sheet gelatin into a bowl of ice water or the powder in a little bowl with a tablespoon of water and let it sit. You're going to melt some sugar, which is granulated sugar with some passion fruit juice or puree. And you mention the Boiron brand. I love that brand too, and it's easy to find.
Natasha Pickowicz:
You Google it and you can find it online.
Jessie Sheehan:
Easily, and you simmer it and you say only to a simmer you don't want ...
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, I don't want to reduce that liquid at all. All you really want to do is make the mixture hot so that you can thicken it with the eggs later and to dissolve the sugar.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then you're mixing corn starch and a little sugar and that hot passion fruit juice to make the slurry. Can you explain what a slurry is?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, so I think corn starch is notoriously fine and powdery, and if you dump it into something that's very liquidy, it will just clump up. It's hard to sort of dissolve evenly. So with a lot of those kind of powdery textures, I like to temper before introducing to a larger volume. So what I mean by that is whether it's powdered pectin or corn starch or whatever flour, you're introducing a small amount of liquid just enough to whisk up that corn starch so that it gets dissolved in a smaller amount of liquid so that when you reintroduce it to the larger pot, it won't clump up. It'll just evenly melt away.
Jessie Sheehan:
Makes sense. And in the bowl with the corn starch, you're going to add your egg yolks and remaining sugar, and then you're going to whisk, but then you're going to begin tempering with the hot mixture that's on the stovetop. Can you just explain what tempering is?
Natasha Pickowicz:
It's the same technique that I would use to make a crème anglaise or a base for an ice cream, which is eggs in this case act in concert with the corn starch as a thickener for the curd, if you introduced raw eggs into almost boiling hot substance, you would get scrambled eggs. And so the way that you can prevent that is sort of by again, tempering them, which is introducing a small amount of hot liquid to the yolks to kind of protect them and gets them ... It meets it halfway so that you're controlling it in a side bowl.
And then when you introduce it to the larger pot, the egg proteins don't scramble. As long as you keep agitating the mixture and stirring it, it will just thicken instead of forming those weird protein strands. But again, have I made a curd and the eggs have scrambled a little bit because I rushed a certain step? Yes. So what's the workaround around that? Don't throw away all your great work. I just strain it and it's fine. Or if you have a immersion blender or whatever, you can buzz it up and it'll be fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. I love those little tips for not having to throw everything away.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Never. I hate throwing anything.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know. Once it's all tempered, you're going to put it all on the stove top, cook it for three to four minutes, add your bloom gelatin. And this, I love. A lot of curds called for butter, but this one calls for olive oil, which I just thought was the most delicious and easy and nice flavorful way to add fat to this.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, it definitely makes a very different tasting curd, obviously, but I love, it's a different kind of body. It's a different kind of shine, and obviously the flavor is different too. And I was just thinking that with this particular kind of layer cake, those kind of like grassier notes fits really well with the richness of the coconut and the booziness of the tequila.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. And then you're going to let that chill. We have two filling components now. The frosting, it's a vanilla bean Swiss buttercream, which you love for this cake because it's so easy to customize, which you're going to do here with a little bit of that curd and not too sweet, which is a refrain. And I think that's the next book is called Not Too Sweet by Natasha.
Natasha Pickowicz:
But tons of butter.
Jessie Sheehan:
And maybe olive oil. For vanilla Swiss buttercream, you're going to cook your eggs and sugar on the stove top for until 115 degrees, which is like if you didn't want to use your thermometer, could you do that by just waiting until it was warm on your fingers?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Totally. I think what that does, the Swiss buttercream method, what you're doing is you're creating a meringue base to introduce butter to make the buttercream by dissolving the sugar over low heat indirectly in a bain-marie situation. I often don't use a thermometer. I just wanted to give a number so that people want that number, but I'm just sticking my pinky in. If it feels hot and there's no grains of sugar attached to my finger, then I'm like, "I'm good to go."
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love those tricks because there are things that people can make without a thermometer. Sometimes I think thermometer scare people more than them just being able to say, "Oh, that feels warm." Or when you make caramel, "Oh, that color is what I want."
Natasha Pickowicz:
Exactly. I think that's a great point because I'm less about 30 minutes until it's done baking and more about how are we engaging our senses to inform us intuitively that something is done baking. So instead of being like, well, it's 30 minutes, it must be done. It's more like, well, yeah, what does it smell like, look like? Is it pulling away from the sides? Is the fork pulling cleanly, whatever?
Jessie Sheehan:
Once it is warm to the touch with our pinky method, you're going to beat it in a stand mixer to a cool, and you add a little bit of confectioner's sugar, which I haven't seen. Is that for the corn starch that ... What's this powdered sugar doing here?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love the texture that powdered sugar can give a buttercream, which is almost like a matte kind of finish. Powdered sugar does have a little corn starch in it, so it has that kind of powdery thin matte finish, which I love that mouth feel. But also I think it helps structurally with the buttercream too, because you're introducing so much butter at the end that I think it helps the buttercream be a little bit more supple, so it doesn't feel too buttery on your palate.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I think that's a great trick. So we add a little bit of the powdered sugar, beat until glossy and stiff. Add vanilla bean. Can you substitute extract?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Definitely. Yeah. I just love seeing the little flecks in the frosting. It's so pretty.
Jessie Sheehan:
So pretty, so pretty. Yeah, and I love that when you describe how you get the seeds out of the vanilla bean that you call it harvesting. Maybe everybody does, but I love that. Harvest your vanilla bean.
Natasha Pickowicz:
So satisfying.
Jessie Sheehan:
And maybe just describe that for people in case they don't know how to get the seeds out.
Natasha Pickowicz:
So the seeds or the caviar or whatever is actually inside the pod. So what I'll do is I'll take a small serrated knife and run it down the length of the pod and sort of open it up like a book, flaying it, I guess, and then I'm pressing the two sides so that they're open. And you can always tell when a vanilla bean is really good because the outside will almost be greasy and it'll be really soft and fat. Whereas sometimes with cheaper vanilla beans, they feel desiccated and almost like bark.
The whole process that goes into vanilla is out of control. It takes years and years to cure a vanilla bean so that it's ready for us to use. The whole history behind it is super crazy and intense and fraught. So anyway, that's why I'm like, if I'm going to use vanilla, it's going to be the good stuff made by good people. Yep. That's important to me. So then I'll like run not the sharp side of the knife because I don't want to tear the pod, the outside leathery part, but I'll run the dull side of the knife down the length of the pod to pull up and harvest all of that vanilla bean paste caviar or goo, whatever. And then you extract so much that way. But even then I won't throw away the pod. Even then I'm like, well, this is steeping in a syrup, or I'm throwing this into whatever.
Jessie Sheehan:
Can you just put it in granulated sugar?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. And then it makes you vanilla sugar.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love that. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
So we put our vanilla in. Then we're going to add unsalted butter, softened unsweetened butter over four to five minutes. And you say it might break while you're first adding that butter, but just you keep going. And we're using a whisk attachment at this point. I didn't mention that this was a stand mixer. Or is it the paddle?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I would do whisk all the way.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, perfect.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Perfect. Yeah, you just want to incorporate tons of air and volume, and that helps bring the temperature of the mixer down as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. And then we're going to add our kosher salt, beat for five minutes and add some of the passion fruit curd that we made. Some of it's in the filling, but some of it gets put in this frosting, which I love.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I love what this curd does to buttercreams. It makes it so silky. The texture is out of control. It adds this beautiful kind of pale yellow, but it just adds this amazing richness to it, and it makes it really easy and fun to frost where you just get this really velvety, yummy, swoopy kind of thing. It's just fun.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now, this is really fun. Now we're going to assemble this cake. You have to tell people how you get your three eight-inch rounds from your half sheet pan because it is amazing geometry, and I'm so impressed. But basically, we've baked up our cake and our half sheet pan, so it's skinny and it's 18 by 13 inches. And then you have this fabulous way of how to cut it into three rounds. And I just want to say incredible pictures. Photos in the book. Sometimes I'm more of a visual learner, and so I'm reading it and reading it, but you can look at the pictures and understand perfectly.
Natasha Pickowicz:
100%, and that was my editor Judy's [Kim] idea. She was like, "I think we need a drawing here." And I was like, "You're absolutely right." I'm anticipating that a lot of people are going to be like, "Can't I just bake the whole cake batter in one cake pan and then divide it into thirds?" And I'm like, "Well, first of all, I don't think the cake will bake as well, because the amount of batter that you're making, I don't think the cake will be as fluffy. I think the texture will be different. And second of all, I think you'll find that it's very hard and frustrating to slice three one centimeter thick layers from one cake.
Maybe there's a tool out there that will do it, like a cheese string or something. But for me, I'm like, give me an arts and crafts project where I'm tracing shapes onto something and cutting them out. I can do that. So I just trace an eight-inch round of parchment or paper or whatever. The dimensions of the cake are such that you really can use every single piece. If you trace out a circle in the bottom left-hand corner in the top right-hand corner, then you're sort of left ... That's two perfect circles. Great. Done. Set them aside.
How do you get the third inside circle? And I always use this Frankenstein layer as my middle layer, because then I have the two nice layers on the outside, which makes icing it later really easy. Also, I want to say that I know Christina Tosi has detailed this technique before with how she does layer cakes like this. I think this is something that a lot of chefs who are thinking about ingenuity and kitchens, reducing amount of waste to incorporate with their layer cake building.
So once you trace out two round cake circles from the opposite corners of the half sheet tray, you're left with sort of these little scrap areas, little crescents or little half moons. So from there, I'm tracing out two little half circles, and then using this bar in the middle to kind of cobble together that middle layer that's made out of actually three scraps of cake. But the way that the cake rests and soaks and the chills, you cannot even tell once you slice into this thing, it will just look spectacular. No one will be like, this isn't a full. So I'm all about, it's fun to patch it together and use every single piece of the cake from one hash sheet pan.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. And if it sounds confusing, which it doesn't because Natasha explained it beautifully, it also is really well laid out for you in the book, which I loved. I love the idea you cut out your parchment round so you know exactly your aid in shapes, but you suggest a little pairing knife. Do you at home have a huge cutout that you use, or do you end up ... Could someone buy that if they ... Does that exist almost like a huge metal cookie cutter that was eight inches wide?
Natasha Pickowicz:
Oh, you totally can. Yeah. I mean a ring mold or a big cookie cutter. Yeah, that would be amazing.
Jessie Sheehan:
I thought that sounded kind of cool.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah,
Jessie Sheehan:
I was like, "Ooh, cutouts."
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, definitely.
Jessie Sheehan:
We've lined, let's say a large three-inch-high cake pan with plastic wrap. We're going to put one of our eight-inch rounds in the bottom. Natasha said, we'll save that Frankenstein one for the middle, but the bottom, which will be the top of the cake, is just that perfect eight-inch round, and here you have us make a little bit of whipped cream for this recipe, and I wondered about why we needed that, and I know you're not flavoring it.
Natasha Pickowicz:
I mean, the curd is super flavorful, but it is rich. So I like having a little bit of whipped cream in there too, to sort of give you that kind of creamsicle, like milky, creamy and also tangy element inside the cake as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. Yeah, so you whip up a little bit of cream 'til stiff peaks. Then you're going to dab about a quarter cup of that soak that we made, the coconut tequila soak. The verb you use is dab, which I love, but are you brushing? What's your ...
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, I just like, I'll put a pastry brush in the soak and let it soak. Travel with the bristles, and then this cake is so absorbent like a sponge. If you just make contact the brush to the cake, it just transfers the liquid over, so there's no need to agitate the surface of the cake, which might bring up crumbs or anything. You can really just dib and dab.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I love it.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Whatever.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I love that. So we're dabbing our soak and then we're spreading two-thirds cup of the straight-up curd and then a quarter cup of the streusel. So there's lots of texture and flavor here, which is incredible. Then you're spooning half of that whipped cream that's going on top. I love this. You have a technique for applying the whipped cream so it doesn't agitate the streusel, which is again, like spoonfuls.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah, so I'll scatter spoonfuls across the surface. So instead of smearing one amount all the way to the sides of the edges of the cake, I'm sort of dispersing it evenly, and then I'm just pressing down so that the layers don't mix and it's discrete layers. But again, if they mix and swirl together a little bit, then that's great. I just do that because I love seeing that neat look when you cut it and you can see the whip, the drizzle, the curd, the cake layer.
Jessie Sheehan:
Then you add your kind of Frankenstein layer because of how you're setting up the cake. You have lots of room to push those pieces around, get them to look as round and perfect as possible, more soak, more curd, more streusel, more whipped cream, your final layer, and then you're going to rest. You like to rest this cake in the fridge for eight hours.
Natasha Pickowicz:
At least, I think, because you'll really start to see that the curd will set back up with the ... activate the gelatin, that the whipped cream will be firm. The cake will be chilled and more structured with the added soak. I mean, sometimes I'll throw it in my freezer and I'll like completely let it get frozen, which makes icing it even easier. So either way, but yeah, you want to give yourself overnight or a long day or something.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then you're going to invert the cake onto a cardboard round, ideally, I guess, on a cake turntable.
Natasha Pickowicz:
If you want a cardboard round, which is what industry folks will do if they're making multiple cakes and need to move them around. But if you're also just making a cake for a dinner party at your home the next day, you can just invert it directly onto a platter or a cutting board and just whatever you want to present it on.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. I mean, a turntable is great for decorating. If you don't have one, do you have any suggestions or do you just ...
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah. There was a period when I was testing it where I lost half of my turntable because it's the kind where the top, the tops hooks in kind of like jams into the base, and I couldn't find the top to that. I would just say, you can just artfully apply icing using an offset spatula or a butter knife or whatever, and it doesn't have to look perfect. You can still smooth out the edges or use the back of a bench scraper to get that kind of straight edge.
Jessie Sheehan:
For your technique, you like to kind of start with the frosting on the top, get that all settled, then do the sides then go back to the top, scrape off anything to the sides.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Exactly. I'm like, is that how other people do it? I don't know.
Jessie Sheehan:
Do I start with the top? I mean I so rarely am frosting a layer cake. Yes. But anyway, just the way you described it seemed to make sense. I think of what I was struck with is I think you say half the frosting on the top and half on the sides, and I think I would worry like, oh, I need more on the sides. But so much of it comes off the top that gets spread on the sides. That's actually a nice way in your head to figure out how much frosting to use.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Obviously, the frosting should be room temperature when you're doing this, then we get to a very Natasha part, which is decorating. Yes. This particular cake, you like to decorate with petals like tulips and roses and pansies. Is this a really dumb question? Can you eat those?
Natasha Pickowicz:
I think it depends. It depends. You actually can't eat tulips. Don't decorate with anything toxic that's not edible. But also it's like how you're sourcing the things too. So if you're buying roses from a bodega, those will be sprayed with pesticides and grown for decorative purposes, not for eating, but if you go to a specialty store or an Eataly or Whole Foods, they'll have edible flowers in the produce section, and then you know that those are organic or not sprayed with pesticides safe to eat. And of course, if you grow your own flowers like I do in my backyard, then I know that they're also safe to eat.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. I also love this. You say the decorating should be effortless, like a vase of flowers dumping over onto your buttercream, and I just thought that was such a pre… I mean, obviously not all the water splashing on your cake, but I loved the idea of just the natural fall of the flower.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah. I think that was just coming from ... As I was trying to develop my aesthetic and approach to decorating cakes, which is something that I feel like is very intrinsic to me and how I think about pastry, I found that the more I would fuss over something, the less satisfied I would be with how it looked like. I would try to make a perfect looking thing and arranging all the flowers and making it look a certain way, and I would never like it as much as when I just did something simple and just kept it simple and loose and kind of free and sort of organic looking.
Jessie Sheehan:
So true in life, the less you do sometimes the more-
Natasha Pickowicz:
Impact.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Just not being too studied or fussy.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I loved that. Well, I just want to say thank you so much, Natasha, for chatting with me today, and I just wanted to tell you, you that you are my cherry pie.
Natasha Pickowicz:
Thank you so much. This is so much fun.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Le Creuset and California Prunes for sponsoring today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on your favorite podcast platform, and tell your baking buddies about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studios in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.