Cake Flour is Passive Aggressive, & Other Things I Learned from Rose Levy Beranbaum

I had the great pleasure of meeting Rose Levy Beranbaum and Woody Wolston for the first time when they made a stop in the Bay Area on their way to Portland for the IACP conference and winning two IACP awards (including Cookbook of the Year).

Rose came to speak at the Bakers Dozen, and I agreed to write an article summarizing the meeting, which proved the perfect way to capture all the details of such a thrilling experience I might have otherwise lost in the excitement of it all-- like lightning bugs in a jar.

I would like to share my article with you so you can feel like you were there, too. You will notice in my closing that I caught Rose's comment "Cake flour is passive aggressive" but didn't hear why. Rose filled me in: "[cake flour is] so tender, yet stronger in the elastic sense, so that the cakes will rise higher!" I want to be like cake flour.

[Article begins after the jump. Pictures will be added shortly.]

Rose Levy Beranbaum Comes to the Bakers Dozen

Rose shared an amazingly shiny chocolate lacquer glaze from Japan, introduces her assistant Woody Wolston, and dishes with fellow bakers on her swing through San Francisco(on her way to the IACP conference in Portland) in support of her 9^th cookbook, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes (RHC).

By Rachel Colleen Boller

Let me start out by disclaiming any charade of impartiality. Rose Levy Beranbaum’s books formed the backbone of my baking chops. I baked my first wedding cake, for my best friend, from an old copy of the Cake Bible. Pie crust peace came to me after working with the Pie & Pastry Bible. Others might find her too wordy, picky, or scientific – not me. 

Like Rose, I wasn’t very interested in theoretical science, but “delight in submitting [myself] to rules and formulas if it means achieving repeatable perfection” (via BD member Pat Kline) so am fascinated with baking science as it applies to real-life empirical baking. I have come to realize how much work, testing, and care goes into producing an excellent recipe, but creating a recipe that is good enough to teach someone a technique that heretofore most had only learned by apprenticeship (i.e. actually watching someone else do it right in front of you, over and over)? That’s rare. Rose writes at the textbook level (as I think fellow Bakers Dozen member Flo Braker does – Flo’s recipes are flawless) but the joy comes off the page (never dry) and the detail is there for a reason: for absolute clarity of instruction. As Rose described an editing error to the group in the Grand Marnier Wedding Cake recipe in RHC, (paraphrasing here) “I cannot live with someone getting halfway into the wedding cake and not having enough ganache!…when the ganache takes 6 hours to set?!“ Rose cannot live with such an error, because she knows how painful that would be in the heat of the moment for the baker at home, and so she made an (possibly unwelcome, last-minute) edit that would assuage her conscience.

How Rose Met Flo Braker & Why Collaboration Among Bakers Helps Us All

Rose was rhapsodic about bakers - lucky because Foreign Cinema’s hall was packed to the gills with about 110 bakers. “Bakers are such wonderful people, because you do what you love…. nobody makes you go out and do baking for a living.” Rose was also rhapsodic about Bakers Dozen’s own Flo Braker, and she shared the story of how she and Flo met, at a baking demo at the first IACP conference. Flo was making petit fours in good humor despite all her stuff being locked in the walk in (if it has been Rose she would have been shaking)- Rose declared Flo “the loveliest person [she has] ever met, and was discouraged after seeing Flo’s book come out…Rose thought there is no need to do another book after seeing Flo’s book The Simple Art of Perfect Baking. But as Rose discovered there is room for all voices, and for her books, and by collaborating instead of being secretive, we all gain.

Rose adored the Dark Chocolate Cake in Flo’s newest book, Baking for All Occasions – my go-to chocolate cake (Flo was kind enough to give me permission to post the recipe on my blog - and it inspired some tinkering. Rose has come up with something called the “FloRo” - a marriage of Flo’s and Rose’s two chocolate cakes – the FloRo will be included in Rose's next book.

Rose’s New Book On Cakes – 22 Years After the Cake Bible

In Nancy Kux’s introduction, I learned this was Rose’s third visit to the Bakers Dozen is support of her 9^th cookbook, Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. Some may wonder why a new cake book, but Rose’s dream was to have every cake pictured (the Bible in black and white) and she wanted to include breakthrough recipes (like the one she demonstrated; read on!!), oil layer cakes, and cakes for the now-common 2”-high cake pan.

I am very familiar with Rose’s Heavenly Cakes (RHC), having participated in the online Heavenly Cakes bake along—one cake from RHC is featured every week and participating bakers make at least two featured cakes per month. If you picked up RHC at the meeting, after you have leafed through the gorgeous photos and chosen your first recipe, you might want to check to see if the Heavenly Bakers have made that recipe, because you will see step-by-step photos, and recipe reviews.

My favorite cake so far is the Sicilian Pistachio Cake (click the link for recipe; pg. 65 of RHC; also pictured right), but my favorite recipe is the ground-breaking, baby-grand-piano-shiny Dark Chocolate Lacquer Glaze (pg. 290 & 416 of RHC), a recipe originating in Japan from the “renowned patissier Sugino-san, whose bakery is in Tokyo”. Rose and her assistant Woody Wolston demonstrated this recipe for an eager audience in Foreign Cinema’s gallery.

Rose shared juicy book publishing “stories behind the story” while waiting for the glaze to come to temperature (it glazes best between 80 & 85 F). She got to meet Lionel Poilâne, who revolutionized bread baking, when she was invited to come into the legendary Paris bakery when writing the Bread Bible, and said the following year he died.

She mentioned meeting redhead Apollonia Poilâne, and in looking up the reference to Apollonia, I learned of the terrible helicopter accident that took Lionel Poilâne’s life in 2002, and caused then 18-year-old Apollonia to inherit the legendary bakery. Rose was full of stories with baking legends, but I could not type fast enough to get all of them – Rose is a New Yorker and speaks quickly!

At one point, Woody ran to the back bar (where I was perched with my laptop, furiously typing notes) to ask for ice to get the glaze to cool down faster. From personal experience, I know how critical it is to use this glaze at 80-85F. It covers beautifully in “one shot”, but will not coat as evenly at a higher temperature. Here is a shot of a completed tier for a wedding cake I made, glazed with the Dark Chocolate Lacquer Glaze (look at the reflection!!).

Story of the Lacquer Glaze, All the Way from Japan

Rose was researching an article on sugar in Japan when she met Sugino-san, who runs a tiny one-man bakery in Tokyo, and came upon this incredibly beautiful glaze. Her friend Reiko offered to provide translations of the recipe, and Rose was afraid to make it fro three years! Pierre Hermé (the king, or should I say roi of macarons) is Sugino-san’s god, but Rose thought his work more exquisite than Pierre’s. Finally, Dallas chocolatier Zach Townsend emailed Rose with a question on gelatin and chocolate, she guessed he was working on a similar glaze, asked if Zach got his recipe from Japan (which in fact he did but from another source)….and so began a collaboration between Rose and Zach that resulted in the final recipe for this glaze. Zach’s La Bomba (pg. 285), a glorious blackberry tea-infused, chocolate mousse cake made in a 7” boule shape (4 cups), covered with Zach’s version of this glaze, is the hardest recipe in the book.

Bakers Dozen members baked many recipes, selected by Rose from RHC (I made the German Chocolate) was a table for everyone to taste next to the book table Celia of Omnivore Books set up with all of Rose’s Bibles, and I had to leave so I have no idea how long Rose stayed to sign books for the long line of BD members patiently waiting for her signature on the patio. Also, it may go without saying, but the lunch that Foreign Cinema made for us was fabulous—everyone must try the Madras Spiced Fried Chicken (I later found out it made Marcia Gagliardi’s – aka tablehopper- best fried chicken list.)

In closing, I know there is so much more touched on that I did not get to here, and I do have many inscrutable notes. I am dying to know what exactly Rose meant by saying that “cake flour is passive-aggressive.” She said it with such conviction, I am sure there is a story there. If you have corrections, or anything to add, feel free to tell me or the group. I am thrilled for the chance to meet Rose, and incredibly grateful for the people I have met and experiences I have had with the Bakers Dozen over the past year. I agree with Rose. Bakers are wonderful people, and that means all of you.

Things Rose Mentioned (but ran out of time to explain)

• Rose mentioned articles she had written for Food Arts magazine including one called “Sugar Bible.” They are linked to or reposted on her website. The Japanese sugar she saw a master hand-kneading (and asked to touch his hand) is called Wasanbon, and is “a pale beige powder, is a very pure artisanal sugar from a Chinese variety of sugar cane that has been grown organically for the past 200 years only in a very small area on the island of Shikoku in the Tokushima area in Japan.”

• One of the recent breakthroughs Rose mentioned during her talk was “Kate Flour.” There are many places where bleached cake flour is not available (including most of Europe) and UK home baker Kate Coldrick developed a way to recreate the superlative texture and flavor in butter layer cakes that made with bleached cake flour by ‘heat treating’ unbleached flour. But don’t listen to me—head straight to Kate’s excellent summary of her experiments with photos (via Hector Wong) of Kate Flour (PDF article).

• Rose’s website, Real Baking with Rose (www.realbakingwithrose.com), is a fantastic resource, with forums full of helpful bakers, including Hawaii-based Hector Wong.

• Rose answered questions, and surely I didn’t have time to incorporate every word, but for troubleshooting, Rose says the oven is usually the biggest culprit in a failed cake.

Comments

[evilcakelady]

Excellent recap! Thank you for sharing this article with all of us. What a great photo of the three of you!

[Rachelino]

Thank you! I am so glad you like it. I like that picture too, but there is one with all of us laughing that would have been great had it not been a little blurry.

[Jenn]

Very nice write up Rachelino! Thank you for sharing. And a nice picture of you, Rose, and Woody. It's so lovely to see your happy smiles :).