Rose Wilde transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host,Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of three baking books, including my latest, Snackable Bakes. Each Saturday I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Rose Wilde, a human rights lawyer turned baker. She's also a chef, cake artist, and the owner of the Red Bread bakery business. You've probably seen her signature squiggle cakes all over Instagram. Rose just released her debut cookbook, “Bread and Roses,” and she joins me to chat about her journey into the culinary world and of course, cake. Rose guides me through the recipe for the confetti cake from her book, from batter to baking, to layering to decorating. Stay tuned for my chat with Rose.
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Today's episode is also presented by California Prunes. I'm a California Prunes fan when it comes to smart snacking. Funnily enough, at the same time we started this podcast, my doctor told me how good prunes are for your gut, your heart, and even your bones. Prunes contain dietary fiber and other nutrients to support good gut health, potassium to support heart health, and vitamin K, copper, and antioxidants to support healthy bones. So prunes became a daily snack of mine. I have them in my cabinet at home. I put them in smoothies and I bring them with me when I'm on the go because they're perfectly portable. Now let's talk about my true love, baking. California Prunes are a great addition to baked goods, especially this time of year. They work beautifully in recipes with rich and complex flavors like espresso, olives, and chilies, and they enhance the flavor of warm spices, toffee, caramel, and chocolate. Consider adding prunes to scones, gingerbread, coffee cake, or any baked good that calls for dried fruit. If you're looking to make some holiday showstoppers like a fruit cake you make ahead of time, keep prunes in mind when you're assembling the dried fruit you need. They add just the right texture and flavor. Be sure to check out the California Prunes website at californiaprunes.org for recipes and more. That's californiaprunes.org.
Peeps, the new holiday issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine Host With The Most is here with culinary superstar Molly Baz on the cover. Inside you'll find profiles on your fave foodies and creatives, lots of hosting tips, and delicious recipes perfect for your holiday gatherings. You can snag a copy or subscribe at cherrybomb.com or pick up a copy at a retailer near you like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York City, Now Serving in LA, and Matriarch in Newport, Rhode Island. Check out cherrybombe.com for our complete list of retailers.
Let's check in with today's guest. Rose, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie and to talk Sonora Vegetable Confetti Cake with you and so much more.
Rose Wilde:
Oh my God, Jessie, this is a dream. I love you and I'm so excited to be here.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love you too. So you grew up in Ecuador in a large Hispanic family, but before you moved there you were in Florida where your parents ran the Good Earth restaurant. Your mom made bread based on your grandfather's recipe and your dad grew food and composted. Tell us about that restaurant and any memories you might have of it.
Rose Wilde:
My memories are very vague and magical because that ended when I was about four. But basically I often say that the garden was my first babysitter because it was attached to the kitchen and you could kind of look out of the kitchen at it. And since my mom was running the kitchen, me and my brother would be in there just playing with the plants and stuff where she could have an eye on us but still work.
People used to ask her and my father all the time, what's your favorite thing growing in the garden? And my mom would tell them that it was the rose in her garden. She didn't have any roses. So if you could figure out that it was me, then you'd get a free slice of whatever the dessert was that day. It was always destined for me to be in food, I think because if you find me now, you can probably get a slice of something
Jessie Sheehan:
Maybe you're also in your garden.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, I'm also in my garden a lot. But yeah, the way she cooked there and all the grains she used just ended up informing my baking because it was what I knew.
Jessie Sheehan:
Can you describe your dessert style?
Rose Wilde:
My dessert style is very grain heavy, obviously. I like to use them for flavor. They're obviously delicious and super nutritious for you, but there's so much flavor there. As a chef, that's the only rule I'm after, which is flavor has to be huge, impactful. It's the king.
And then I love to bring in the garden because I just feel like it's so romantic to make something feel alive by adding in these wilder elements. So I use a lot of blossoms and herbs and I call it eating root to blossom. And so I'm a really big fan of thinking out of the box and using many different parts of the plant to really impart color, flavor, wildness.
Jessie Sheehan:
You write that grains give us more flavor, texture, and knowledge. I love this, you've likened grains to wine grapes, like both have terroir and flavors that were reflect the conditions in which they're grown.
Can you unpack that? I mean, I am sort of embarrassed to admit that it had never occurred to me that grain is a seasonal ingredient found in a farmer's market the same way a berry is or an apple is. That has, I will not lie, blown my mind.
Rose Wilde:
Yes. I love mind-blowing. It's a personal fun little thing for me. I think that most foods have terroir, but we have lost that natural kind of mind leap because we deal with so much commodity products in our food system here in America. What I mean by commodity is that it has been standardized for industry so that whenever you get it, it's the same.
We see that in a lot of our products that we consider agricultural otherwise. We know there's many different kinds of apples and we know they come in the fall, but if you go to the grocery store, it's like two kinds of apples. You have Red Delicious and you have Granny Smith. Those are commodities basically now. They're standardized. You can always expect the thing.
Similarly, grains, there's so many thousands of different grains, but when you go to an average grocery store, you're going to see all-purpose flour, white flour, and whole wheat flour, which is not whole grain because it actually only has two of the three components of grain. It's best known as just brown flour because we don't know what grain it is. It's most likely mixed grains. So those are the commodity representations.
If we step back to the agricultural product, then we have things that are affected by seasons. If it's affected by seasons, then that means that if there was a drought on a certain farm, it's going to affect the protein content of that grain or if it was really rainy.
If you talk to your local miller or just email them, they love to chat. They're actually working really closely with farmers to find out what their season was like in order to get that knowledge and then apply that to how they mill it. And then that's the conversation I have with my miller to know if it's different or how different this season.
But you can also just do a couple tests which are in the book on my favorite page, which is probably the flour flavor wheel, which is where we really dive into how to taste grain. That'll give you some really valuable information about whether this is a good pastry or bread flour, how much hydration does it need with a porridge test, and how does it taste with fat and sugar with a shortbread test?
There's big wheel that break down flavor in there just into language because I think language is the first step to access. If I tell you to taste something that you've never tasted before, it is a lot as if you're like a kid again and you have to learn to taste it. But I never want to be in a position where I'm like, spelt tastes like this period, because flavor is so unique and informed by memory and culture.
So if I say it tastes one way, that could not resonate with you at all if you're from a totally different part of the world. But if I give you some different groups of flavor, some different adjectives, then you can start applying it to your personal memories and then it becomes very unique to you.
This is essentially what people do with wine. We're more accustomed to abstracting flavor from wine and cheese to a degree. So I'm just trying to add grains back into that cannon where we start to taste it and get excited about it.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. Now I want to talk about Red Bread, your Los Angeles bakery founded on local grains and produce from the Santa Monica Farmer's Market. You describe Red Bread as a social justice organic kitchen, like sustainability and environmental impact is really important in all aspects of Red Bread. Can you tell us a teeny bit about it and when it started and what's happening with it?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. I started Red Bread in 2011. Now we have language for what my bakery was back then, which is like an internet-based micro bakery. So that's how we started. I was just on my bicycle delivering around LA, got into a couple cafes, then got into the farmer's market. We did a Kickstarter and had a brick and mortar for many years.
I will admit that I had spent not a lot of time in the back of house of kitchens, but I'd been a waiter and server for so long. I was always really honestly the only one who ever hung out of the pass and ran the food. So I was always hitting up the chef for like, oh, what's that? Oh, how did you do that?
Red Bread just grew out of that, and my only knowledge of how to organize was through international development. So I really organized my business around these social justice themes of I want to make sure that farmers get to taste the stuff that they grow and we make because so often that's not true. We always made sure to bring something to the farmers that we'd made from things.
And I wanted to make sure that I was getting the best possible employees regardless of their background. I wanted their passion and their enthusiasm. So we partnered with St. Joseph's Center in Santa Monica as well as the Chrysalis Foundation, which have externship programs for culinary students coming out of addiction and homelessness. We would take them on, and then once they graduated, we would just keep them because they were incredibly great workers. They were so excited to be a part of the crew.
I had such little turnover. It was really a blessing. I didn't even realize it at the time that most kitchens turnover staff in like one to two years, and we had the same staff for about seven years. It was heartbreaking when we had to close down because I just missed them all, but it was so great because of the reputation we had built, we were able to place them in some really fabulous kitchens around Los Angeles.
Jessie Sheehan:
I want to talk about “Bread and Roses,” a book with recipes for delectable pastries and desserts using grains. You write that you want more whole grains in pastry, but also I love this, also more vegetables, herbs, and flowers because pastry for too long has been just about butter and sugar. Tell us more about that.
Rose Wilde:
First of all, I want to make sure that I'm not knocking butter and sugar because they're bae, but yeah. The book actually has a lot of cooking recipes too, so it's not just for baking. I would say that the main focus is doughs, which has great crossover for both things.
The second part of the book, the and roses is all about more vegetables and botanicals and not just for garnish but for creating deep flavor. Another mindblower is that there's no such thing as vegetables. It's all fruit. Botanically speaking vegetables are a social construct. It will change depending on what culture you are in, what is called a vegetable.
So basically anything is up for grabs. All you have to go is by what tastes good. For me that was super freeing. I like to know rules to break them and then find out what are the real rules. That means that I use stems and leaves and I'll put an eggplant on a cake. I'll make a custard from corn or sweet peas because they are sweet and they taste beautiful with other different components. I will eat flower petals that I know are organic and non-sprayed and taste them.
I think there's a big distinction to be made between edible and palatable. So many things are edible, but what I think is palatable, what I like and what you like are different. There's so much nuance there to explore and embrace.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. Also, you have this really cool thing in the book, which is your flower tasting wheel. You say it helps readers familiarize themselves with aromas and flavors of heirloom grains. Just tell us a little bit about the wheel because I think it's such a cool aspect of the book.
Rose Wilde:
I love the wheel. The illustrations, especially the flavor wheel probably took me about as much research as writing the book. So it's like a book inside a book. Basically this flavor wheel breaks down different components of flavor, whether it's bitter, sour, sweet, but then even fractures that even more into earthy, minerality, salty, forest floor, different kinds of sweetness, like creamy, saccharin, or even texture in there.
What it is really meant to do is just give you some different bits of language to latch onto when you're tasting something so that you don't have to start from a void. You can put a grain in your mouth, look at this wheel, and just drop your finger on the things that you taste, and then looking at that start to even more develop and abstract.
So yeah, I think language is really fundamental to access to anything. So many people have said that they love it. I also have it on my website as a poster you can buy. It's already hanging up in my house. I use it all the time, so I really hope that it helps people play.
Jessie Sheehan:
We'll be right back. Today's episode is also presented by Ghirardelli Professional Products. Ghirardelli is America's number one premium chocolate company. When baking and making desserts is your passion and your profession, you want premium ingredients. Whether putting your own spin on chocolate chip cookies, building your entremet with a layer of chocolate ganache, or whipping up some chocolate buttercream for your next layer cake, you want a chocolate that takes your creations to the next level. The Ghirardelli team selects the highest quality beans from around the world and maintains high standards throughout the entire chocolate making process. They roast only the cacao nib, not the entire bean, which results in a more consistent and intense chocolate flavor. They also refine the chocolate and conch it for hours to ensure a velvety melting sensation without bitter off notes. No matter what kind of chocolate you need from milk to dark to semi-sweet and whatever form chips, mini chips, wafers, Ghirardelli Professional Products has you covered. You can find Ghirardelli Professional Products at your favorite kitchen or baking supply stores and on Amazon. For more, visit ghirardelli.com/professional. You can request product samples by filling out the Ghirardelli contact form. Visit our show notes for the link and be sure to use referral code Cherry Bombe.
Now back to our guest.Now we're going to talk about the Sonora Vegetable Confetti Cake with greengage plum, whipped cheesecake, and smoky honey Swiss buttercream.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
The cake is inspired by a rainbow of veggies, or fruit as we can now call them, available at the Santa Monica Farmer's Market inspired by childhood confetti cakes, which makes everyone including me extremely happy.
Rose Wilde:
Everyone loves a funfetti.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's based on a vintage silver cake, which I love because I have a silver cake in “The Vintage Baker,” so I love a silver cake. And just so people understand, a silver cake as I understand it is a cake with egg whites. It's a white cake.
Rose Wilde:
Just egg whites, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, great.
Rose Wilde:
I chose it because I wanted to make sure that these veggies really popped in color.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. First things first, we're going to heat our oven to 350. We're going to line two eight inch and one six inch pans and spray them and line with parchment. Tell me your technique. Do you spray, line, spray or spray, line?
Rose Wilde:
I line, spray. Now I'm like, is that wrong because you didn't give me that as an option. But I feel like the parchment does the job of separating, and certainly if I have a cake pan that's bigger than any parchment I have and I don't want to cut one, then I'll spray before I put down.
Generally I just put it down and spray. I don't do that for chiffon cakes necessarily because they like the grip. But yeah, this one is good to just parchment paper down, give it a quick spray. I just use a baking spray. I tend to use a coconut oil or olive oil one because again, I like to go the natural route.
Jessie Sheehan:
Do you have particular pans that you like?
Rose Wilde:
I use a lot from Restaurant Supply. I have a lot from, is it Fats Domino? Is that what it is?
Jessie Sheehan:
I think it's Fat Daddio.
Rose Wilde:
Fat Daddio. It's like one of those great singers from the '50s. They're really great. I think that they have a really nice thickness to the pan. I like lighter colored pans. I think the darker ones tend to brown your cake too fast. Yeah, I like basically aluminum and light colored.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now in a stand mixer, KitchenAid?
Rose Wilde:
I do use a KitchenAid. Yep, KitchenAid girly.
Jessie Sheehan:
KitchenAid. In your stand mixer you're going to beat room temp butter. Unsalted butter?
Rose Wilde:
Unsalted butter always. I like to control the salt. I do a lot of salt, so I guess I could use salted butter, but this way I know what I'm doing.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yep. We're going to beat some room temperature unsalted butter. Is it granulated sugar?
Rose Wilde:
It is granulated sugar. I generally use cane sugar, but white sugar is also fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
Cane or white on medium speed to light and fluffy. Then in a separate bowl, do you have a favorite kind of mixing bowl? Do you like metal? Do you like glass?
Rose Wilde:
I use the metal bowls that you'll find in standard kitchens, but if I'm being fancy, I like to use my Falcon Enamelware because I just think they're really beautiful. I am a Virgo, so everything matching makes me feel calmer.
Jessie Sheehan:
In a separate beautiful bowl, we're going to whisk Sonora and all-purpose. Sonora is a soft white wheat, bakes up tender, great for pastry.
Rose Wilde:
Great for pastry. You could even go 100% with Sonora because it's such a tender creamy grain and it's so blonde that if you don't tell people it's whole grain, they would never know.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I love that. It's Sonora and all-purpose or all Sonora. That's one for one swap.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Baking powder and salt. Is salt kosher for you?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, always kosher.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to add our dry ingredients and some water in intervals. That's also I feel like a silver cake thing to have water. Again, you don't want to add any other flavor, no more fat, and no more color.
Rose Wilde:
What you're really trying to do there is just keep that really perfect white crumb.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. We're going to add the dry ingredients and the water and intervals into the stand mixer bowl on low speed. Are we scraping with a spatula intermittently?
Rose Wilde:
I generally scrape before the first edition of the flour water, but I don't really scrape between each one. I'll scrape to get the butter and sugar that you've just creamed off the bottom because there's always a little nipple area at the bottom of the bowl that needs to be really dug into. And then once I have the last edition, I'll sort of do a deep scrape to make sure that's incorporated as well. I love the restaurant standard heat spat. It's big, it's wide, it's got a long handle.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is it like the white top and the red handle?
Rose Wilde:
Yes. It's a perfect item. No one can improve upon it. That said, I do have some spatulas from GIR that are covered in sprinkles, which I really love just when I'm cooking because they make me happy.
Jessie Sheehan:
With our handheld mixer, we're going to beat our egg whites until medium peaks and then we're going to fold them in to our batter and not in stages, not like first we do a third a little bit and then the rest. You just plop it all in?
Rose Wilde:
I know. I guess this is controversial. I tend to add it all in. I know that there is this technique of a little bit of a sacrifice in the beginning, but I think if you have good folding technique, you don't need to do that.
And it is about taking things to a medium peak. It should stand up but be soft. If you're taking it to the place where it's breaking apart, you're going to have a harder time combining it. I've long made teaching what folding means my mission, which is just anytime I see it on TV, especially in an episode of “Schitt's Creek,” I die laughing.
But folding it sounds weird, like I fold laundry, not cake, but all you're doing is taking your spatula, going to the bottom and lifting the batter up and pushing that egg white gently in. You're just going to take this as a meditative thing. I think more even than how you do it, it's just to do it slow.
Jessie Sheehan:
I was taught to move the bowl-
Rose Wilde:
In the opposite of the direction.
Jessie Sheehan:
... to the left and the spatula to the right.
Rose Wilde:
Absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
And so I think that's the same thing, the same fold. I was told to take the spatula, go from the top center of the bowl down to the bottom, then along that left side.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, scrape the side.
Jessie Sheehan:
And then turn the bowl and then do it again.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
You and I need to do a YouTube video, which is just the two of us folding.
Rose Wilde:
The definitive guide.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, so now we're going to fold in some confetti sprinkles, which are made of, wait for it, minced parsley sprigs, different colored rainbow minced carrots or beets if you only have orange carrots, and minced lemon peel. I had a couple of questions. First of all, parsley sprigs, so no leaves?
Rose Wilde:
No leaves because we want it to look like sprinkles.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love it, love it.
Rose Wilde:
Which means pull off those leaves, have a salad, and then save those stems, which are notoriously tossed and cut them into little, I don't know, quarter inch little segments and they're going to keep that shape and look like these incredible green sprinkles throughout the whole thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. And then the carrots, mincing about the same, about a quarter inch?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, yeah. I use a lot of Shun knives. I also have a Made In knife that I recently got that I really love. It's got a red handle and I just find myself reaching for it constantly.
Jessie Sheehan:
We're going to portion the batter evenly into our pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes until springy to the touch in the center. You're not a cake tester with a moist crumb person?
Rose Wilde:
I do have a cake tester, but generally I go off of the finger bounce test. I think that sometimes if your oven especially is hot, then your top crust can set. Even if your batter's wet, when you pull that cake tester through, it can clear itself even though it's not done. But if you can bounce your finger off the top and it doesn't wobble or sink, then your cake is done. Plus I just like bouncing my fingers off a cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Who doesn't? We're baked and then we'll let them cool in their pans. Now we're going to make the jam. We're going to toss halved and pitted greengage plums, which are bright and juicy, tannic and sweet. But you can use regular ones.
Rose Wilde:
You can use any kind of plum you want. I just really love greengage. I think it tastes like you're eating an emerald.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that. And we're going to toss that with sugar, a granulated or cane again?
Rose Wilde:
Yep.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to add a little lemon juice. And then in a large non-reactive bowl, is that glass for you? Is that-
Rose Wilde:
Glass or stainless steel.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. We're going to let the sugar and the plums rest for about eight hours at room temp. Is that essentially maceration?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, it is maceration. I generally like to start the plums the night before.
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell us why we macerate our plums.
Rose Wilde:
All stone fruit really needs some time to break down because they have a lot of moisture in there, but their flesh is really holding it in. So macerating basically is a form of cooking with sugar where you let it sit in the sugar and it's going to start pulling that liquid out so that your jam comes together faster.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. Now we're going to heat in a non-reactive pot.
Rose Wilde:
I have a Made In stainless steel pot. I also have some copper pots that I've just had forever that are romantic to make jam in but not necessary.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. In our non-reactive romantic pot over medium high heat, we're going to cook the plums and the sugar stirring constantly for 20 to 25 minutes. What's our stirring tool?
Rose Wilde:
Our stirring tool is that classic super great restaurant quality spat that has that long handle. You really want whatever pot you choose to have a wide pot. It's all about evaporation so you can condense that and get rid of a lot of water content to make the jam come together fast.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also love spat. I might have to start calling spatulas spat.
Rose Wilde:
Oh, spat? Oh my god, I can't believe you don't.
Jessie Sheehan:
I know. Hello. I have been under-
Rose Wilde:
Spats!
Jessie Sheehan:
... spat. I've been under a rock.
We're going to be removing a thick yellow foam that is rushing up the pot. Can you tell me about the foam? I've never heard this, I'm not a big jam maker, but I want to be, and I've never heard about this rushing up the pot. Can you explain what that is?
Rose Wilde:
Whenever you have sugar work, like if you've ever made caramel, at one point, once it starts to heat up, it runs up the pot and gets really tall and is bubbling crazy. You feel like a witch in those moments. The thing about stone fruit is unlike all the other fruits you might jam with, they have two sugar rushes as I call it.
The first one is always this really thick yellowish foam no matter what the color of the fruit is. You can really tell it distinctively because it kind of sits like a thick cloud on top of the jam. You can easily just scoop it off.
What I've noticed is if you don't and you fold it back into the jam, your jam tends to brown and it doesn't stay a nice jewel color. Taking this off and setting it aside, usually it's not more than like a cup and a half if you're making about four to five pounds of jam, which is my minimum because it's a good yield for your effort and it's not a ton in the end of the day.
And then you'll have the second rush of sugar rush where the foam looks the same colors of fruit you're cooking in. That one you can just keep stirring in. I do not advocate skimming that because ultimately you'll lose like two cups of jam and that foam will work itself back in without any detriment.
But that's just a little special thing about stone fruit is they have these two sugar sources. First one, take it off. Second one, fold it in.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. We're going to cook 15 to 20 minutes more. There'll be more rushing and some bubbles. We're saying, "Yay, yay, bubbles rushing." You do your thing, just stirring. Now we're going to continue to cook till the jam condenses into this jewel tone, which I love. We're going to turn the heat off at this point and then stop stirring for about four minutes. And then you have this trick to see if the jam is done where we take our offset, small or large or does it not matter?
Rose Wilde:
You can use that same spat we were using earlier.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to stick that spat into the top quarter inch of the jam and push it away to see if the jam wrinkles in the spot where we just pushed. If there's no wrinkle, we turn the heat back on and do five more minutes of cooking. If we see a wrinkle, we're good to go.
Rose Wilde:
We're good to go. Yeah, that wrinkle on the surface is going to tell you if all the pectin that's naturally in fruit has been activated and your jam is going to set up once it cools.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love.
Rose Wilde:
So just a really quick visual test.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to refrigerate or oven can. Now, I had never heard that expression before. Is that what you call when you make jam shelf safe?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. In this country, we're really big on water canning. We are the only ones who do that in the world.
Jessie Sheehan:
Wow.
Rose Wilde:
It doesn't really make a lot of sense because A, water is a precious resource. We sort of artificially have made it a non-precious resource in this country, but people in California should know we're always in a drought.
In most of the world it's canned in an oven, and there's so many benefits to that. First of all, a water bath is limited by the boiling point of water, but an oven, you can set to any temperature. A lot of bacteria survives the boiling point of water but not in the oven temperature. So we're setting our oven at 250 because that's going to kill off anything.
But my favorite thing is that with water canning, you're so likely to get burned even if you're a pro. Steam burns are the worst. If anything opens in there and water gets in, it's not safe anymore. But if something overflows in the oven, you just eat that jar first. It's fine. Also, your oven is so much bigger than any pot you have, so you can do a lot more. So really I have nothing to recommend water canning.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love this oven canning idea. You can't put it into Ball jars and put it in the oven?
Rose Wilde:
Yep, Ball jars.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, they won't break?
Rose Wilde:
Nope.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, amazing.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, you just put them in Ball jars and you're going to spin the lid to fingertip tightness, which basically means the minute you meet resistance, you let it go because you need a little looseness to create the vacuum. And you spread them out on a sheet tray and bake them for 15 minutes and then pull them from the oven and they'll all pop.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. I think I'm going to become a jam maker because that is so easy-peasy.
Rose Wilde:
So easy-peasy, right up your alley.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. Love. All right, now we're going to make our whipped cheesecake layer. In our KitchenAid with the whisk attachment, we're going to whip our cream cheese. Room temp?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, room temp is best.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay, room temp cream cheese and sugar again, either cane or granulated.
Rose Wilde:
Either, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
For five minutes till fluffy. Is there a speed you want us doing this at?
Rose Wilde:
I generally do it on medium.
Jessie Sheehan:
Medium?
Rose Wilde:
If you go straight to high, it's just going to throw it against the walls of your mixer and not really break it up. So a medium is going to be good to just get movement going.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perf. We're going to scrape with our spat. Now we're going to add heavy cream and lemon zest and whip to combine. Are we going to turn up the speed a little or keep it on medium at this point?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, we'll turn it up to medium high because now that we have the cream in there, we're incorporating air.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect.
Rose Wilde:
I think people often forget that those speeds are actually technical things. Lower speeds, you're making cookies, medium speeds, you're making doughs and stuff. And then high speeds, you're incorporating air. It's for meringues and cream and stuff like that.
Jessie Sheehan:
What are we looking for? What's our visual on when it's ready? Just it'll look cohesive and fluffy?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. It should look pretty fluffy and it should have a thickness. You really don't need to worry about the cream breaking because the cream cheese is going to stabilize it really well. I like to get it pretty thick and structured so that I can get a really thick layer in the cake because I love whipped cheesecake. It's just delicious.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me too. I love cream cheese, period.
Rose Wilde:
I love cream cheese.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to make our smoky honey Swiss buttercream. We're going to heat honey over medium high heat in a sauce pan. Similar kind of sauce pan situation to what we described before when we were making jam until the honey bubbles and smells a little burnt. We're going to let that cool.
And now we're going to whisk. At this point we're whisking over a double boiler using the stand mixer bowl. Are we whisking with a hand mixer or are we whisking by hand?
Rose Wilde:
Whisking by hand. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay. We're going to whisk by hand some egg whites and sugar, again cane or granulated, in our double boiler over medium heat. And we're going to use a candy thermometer and bring the mixture until it is runny, the sugar's devolved, and it's about 161.
Rose Wilde:
I have one of those instant reads that they snap back.
Jessie Sheehan:
Like a Thermapen?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, Thermapen. Thank you.
Jessie Sheehan:
I like those too. Once we hit 161, we'll place our stand mixer bowl back on our mixer with the whisk attachment and we'll whip or whisk on high till the bowl is cool to the touch. Now, I usually test on the bottom. Is that how you're testing?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. I like to test on the bottom too because that was your hottest part so that's the one you want to make sure has cooled down. Don't be a hero. Wait for it to actually be cool to the touch. I generally say you should be able to hold it for 10 seconds without feeling heat.
Jessie Sheehan:
Also another visual because it's always nice to have something that you can feel and something that you can see. The mixture should have tripled in volume.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, and it should be really white and glossy and voluminous. Basically you have meringue, so you could stop there and pipe out pavlovas or frosted cake. Adding butter just takes that to the buttercream, but you've already made meringue. Bravo.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's Swiss meringue. I love American buttercream, don't get me wrong, but I love Swiss meringue buttercream.
Rose Wilde:
It's stunning.
Jessie Sheehan:
Which is essentially adding butter to this meringue. Now we're going to reduce the speed to medium high and we're going to add room temp butter a little bit at a time. Then we're going to add the honey, which is cool at this point, and liquid smoke, which I have never used before, but I'm in love with this idea. And we're going to add some smoked sea salt. If you don't have liquid smoke, do you think-
Rose Wilde:
You don't have to. Honestly liquid smoke is at every grocery store, but if you only have smoked sea salt, you can go heavy on that and you'll get a similar flavor. This was inspired by an event I did in Texas with a barbecue pit and I put the meringues in the pit so that they could absorb the smoke. I just thought of it like, this will be fun. And then it was stellar.
It worked so well because it's porous. And so I wanted to figure out a way how I could add that to buttercream without needing to have a pit master on hand.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it.
Rose Wilde:
Just a little liquid smoke will make you feel like you are having this cake at the best barbecue of summer. I always like if food can send you somewhere. So that's why I did it.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. Now we're going to release the pans with an offset.
Rose Wilde:
I have all the restaurant ones and I have 15 of them.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love you. Okay, so now we're going to place one of the eight-inch cake layers on a board. Is this going to be the base for the cake that we're then going to serve?
Rose Wilde:
This is the base for the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah, and it's up to you. There's cake drums, there's cake boards. If you have a beautiful cake stand and you want to build it right on the cake stand, that's fine too. Or it can be a dinner plate. Nothing about the way I approach baking is like you must have X, Y, Z. Make it work with what you got. It's still going to taste great.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So cake on board, cake on plate, cake on cake stand, cake on turntable.
Rose Wilde:
I have an Ateco, like the classic one. It's heavy duty. It spins well.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. Okay, now we're going to pipe a ring of buttercream around the edge of the eight-inch layer and fill with the whipped cheesecake.
Rose Wilde:
I have a lot of Ateco tips. I also have a lot of random tips that have been given to me from various makers. I tend to like to use the biodegradable bags, but I try to stay away from the green ones because I can never tell what's in it once I load it, if it's green. I have used reusable ones in the past, but often it's just really difficult to clean them, especially since I use such different size tips. You can only cut them once.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to press a second eight-inch layer on top and fill the gaps between the layers with our offset and we're going to fill the gaps between the layers with buttercream. We're going to do a buttercream ring now about an inch inside of that eight-inch round because the top is going to be the six-inch round.
When you say fill between the layers, you mean kind of that weird gap where you've put the buttercream but it's not flush with the side of-
Rose Wilde:
It doesn't need a flush. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
I understand totally. At this point, are we using a large offset or it's just what you like?
Rose Wilde:
I like to use small ones. I just feel like they're easier. I'm a small person so it's easier for my wrist to handle. I always feel with the large one I'm cranking my shoulder. Also, this is a dome cake, so I think the smaller spatula is going to give you more maneuverability around those curves ultimately.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. Now we're going to fill this buttercream ring with the jam and then we're going to press a six-inch cake on top and kind of seal it. It will hopefully kind of land on that ring we just made. We're going to seal that with buttercream with our offset and then coat the entire cake in a thin primary layer of buttercream. Is that a crumb coat?
Rose Wilde:
That's essentially a crumb coat. Really what we're trying to do is get just enough. A lot of people stop here and call it a naked cake because that's a style too. But what you're really trying to do is just like any little bits that might fly off your cake, AKA crumbs, you want to just attach them, seal them in, and just give yourself a blank canvas.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. We make the cake sloped or domed as you said by filling in areas between those six and eight inch layers. Then we chill for 30 minutes. And then when we add our final layer after it's chilled for 30 minutes, we'll do it slowly and kind of dip the offset in the hot water just to make it really pretty and smooth.
Rose Wilde:
At the end.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love that.
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. Hot water is your friend in finishing a cake to make it have a beautiful smooth surface and also for your knife in cutting a cake really smoothly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. Do you also say that you can use a bench scraper at this point to smooth out the frosting?
Rose Wilde:
You can. It's a little more challenging. It's really best for more of a cylindrical cake because it matches that side. So your little offset is your best friend here.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we chill for 30 minutes after we've put on our final layer?
Rose Wilde:
You can if you want to make sure it's really stable.
Jessie Sheehan:
But you can also move into-
Rose Wilde:
You can also move into final decorating. It really depends. If it's summer, absolutely I'm going to chill for another 30 minutes just so I have more time to slowly enjoy the process of decorating. But winter generally I just go for it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to use the Ateco number 803 tip to create clouds or bloops.
Rose Wilde:
Bloops.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love a Rose bloop over the surface and decorate with colorful edible flowers and then refrigerate till an hour before serving. And then do you take it out so that it comes to room temp?
Rose Wilde:
Yeah. I think this is crucial. A lot of people don't think to temper their cakes because they're worried about them melting, but if you serve really cold cake, the crumb is going to be stiff, the butter's going to break. So you really want to let it warm up enough to get that lusciousness back, that moisture back. Also, when we eat things cold, you can't taste all the flavor as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
I just really don't like cold cake. It's just my thing. It's very upsetting.
Rose Wilde:
No matter how delicious the cake is, it's no good cold.
Jessie Sheehan:
Very upsetting. Besides clouds and bloops, are there little, I know there's some Rose squiggles that sometimes end up.
Rose Wilde:
I mean I do a lot of things. If you don't have the 803, you can also just cut the tip of the pastry bag and that's going to give you a circle.
Jessie Sheehan:
Or even a Ziploc?
Rose Wilde:
Or even a Ziploc. Again, use what you have. You can also make a bag out of parchment paper, although that I feel like is a little more skill. But I like to use all kinds of styling techniques. I'll do squiggles. I'll use the basket weave tip to make huge fat rolling rivers of textured frosting. I've demonstrated different ones in each showstopper cake in the book, but I really want decorating again to be something that feels like you are just getting an expressive moment to make it your own.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love. All right, so I want to just hopefully be able to squeeze in two other recipes. If you could quickly tell us about your oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies, which were voted the best cookie in the city by LA Weekly. And your blondies with dates rehydrated in brown butter.
Rose Wilde:
Yes. Okay. These cookies, I very much considered not putting in the book because it is the recipe that I've been asked for the most over 12 years. People would come up to me at the farmer's market and be like, "Okay, you don't have to tell me, but I'm just going to say some ingredients and nod your head if I'm right." I'd be like, "Okay."
The people have been hungry for this recipe for a long time, but ultimately I decided to put it in the book. They are just my take on an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. When I was making them, I was trying to make the best tasting cookie, and at the time my favorite cookie was an oatmeal raisin cookie. A person I was with, my partner at the time, chocolate chip cookie, and I was like, "Well, I don't want to make two cookies because I'm lazy, so I'll make one really fabulous cookie."
The big secret that everybody has been chasing is a ton of cinnamon. That's the big secret. I also do not use vanilla extract in all my cookies. I think vanilla is its own beautiful ingredient that deserves its moments to shine and doesn't need to be a filler ingredient.
This cookie has a lot of cinnamon. It's really chockfull of oats, so when you break it apart, it's almost geological in its structure. It's very craggly and knobbly and it has toasted California walnuts and a little bit of dark chocolate and milk chocolate. This split has been what I've found is the perfect way to make it feel sweet enough for a kid but indulgent and mature enough for an adult.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. Can you tell us about the blondies?
Rose Wilde:
Yes. I would say the blondies are actually the thing that most people are making from the book right away. I get so many photos of it. I love it. I keep making them because I'm team blondie over team brownie for sure. These get rehydrated in brown butter, the dates, and you just brown the butter. And so what's browning in the butter is the milk solids. When they separate, they fall, they get toasty.
I don't have this in the book, but something I do to even amp up the flavor is while that butter is browning, I'll add more dry milk powder in basically to get more solids to brown than are in a stick of butter. And so you're just amping up that flavor. And then I'll put in that super brown butter into the dates and let them rehydrate.
Honestly, that's just a great perfect snack right there. If you want to just have fruit for dinner, you're welcome. But then you can pour that into the blondie batter and it's just going to give something that's already a celebration of brown sugar and butter, this really beautiful nutty depth.
And then you take those dates that are so luscious and you push them into the top of the blondies and they're just going to create these caramel pools of really delicious sticky dates. It kind of reminds me if a blondie met a sticky toffee pudding, that kind of vibe.
Jessie Sheehan:
Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Rose. I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Rose Wilde:
You're my cherry pie. Thank you so much, Jessie. This was a blast.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugrà Premium European-Style Butter, California Prunes, and Ghirardelli for their support. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, 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 Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial assistant is Londyn Crenshaw. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.