Ep510 - Rose Levy Beranbaum & Woody Wolston | The Cake Bible: 35th Anniversary Edition
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Natalie, bringing you this week's episode with baker and author Rose Levy Berenbaum and her partner, Woody Olston. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that can be seen at youtube.com forward slash Talks at Google.

Award-winning author of 12 cookbooks, Rose Levy Berenbaum, visits Google to discuss her hugely influential cookbook, The Cake Bible, 35th Anniversary Edition. This updated edition contains recipes for both classic and innovative cakes, plus complimentary adornments of all types, instructions for making stunning decorations, and flavor variations for every craving and occasion.

The original cake Bible is a guiding light in the world's baking literature with Rose Levy Barenbaum's deep knowledge and respect for craft to be found on every page. It's for home and professional bakers who want to make glorious, technically perfect cakes and understand why the ingredients in cakes work the way they do. The book was hugely influential from the moment it first came out in 1988, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and going through 60 printings.

It introduced the reverse creaming method, incorporating flour and butter first instead of butter and sugar. This makes mixing faster and easier, helps cakes rise more evenly, and results in a finer and more tender cake texture. And it's among the first American cookbooks to offer measurements in weights, highlighting the superiority of the metric system, which has become the gold standard in baking books.

For 35 years, Rose has been tweaking and reworking her methods based on reader feedback and constant conversations with other bakers and food and equipment professionals. Rose's fans, professional and amateur alike, will love this perfect distillation of her decades of experience and the pure joy of creation. Moderated by Hena El-Azizi, here are Rose Levy-Berenbaum and Woody Wollston.

The Cake Bible, 35th Anniversary Edition. Welcome everyone to Talks at Google. My name is Hannah and I'm on the core infrastructure team at Google where I lead a team of amazing TPMs and core data foundations. I'm very excited today to introduce today's guests Rose Levy-Berenbaum and Woody Wilson.

Rose is an award-winning author of 13 cookbooks, of which 12 were award-winning. She is an internationally known baker, food and baking expert, whose books have been translated into multiple languages. She has been called the diva of desserts.

The most meticulous cook who ever lived. I agree. And a legendary baker. As you can imagine, she has mentored many, many bakers, aspiring bakers, written for all sorts of major food magazines, had a very long-running show on PBS called Baking Magic, which, not to date myself, I used to record on DVD so I could watch them again and again.

And she's also the designer of equipment, baking equipment. And she has a very popular blog called realbakingwithrose.com and has created an international community of bakers. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and partner, Woody Wollstone. And today she joins us to discuss her revised version of her book,

The Cake Bible, 35th anniversary edition. And this new edition has many, many additional photographs compared to the previous version. Has expanded section on new recipes for classic and innovative cakes and complimentary adornments of all types, instructions on how to make stunning cakes, and flavor for every occasion.

For 35 years, Rose has been tweaking and reworking her methods based on reader feedback and constant conversations with other bakers and food and equipment professionals. Rose Levy-Berenbaugh and Woody, it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to Talks at Google. Thank you. Standing room crowd. This is great. Good luck.

I just wanted to explain to you about our aprons because Publishers Weekly called us partners in crime and it's been used ever since. And the production editor actually gave this to us as a wedding present. But I never know whether the cleanest one, which is mine, is mine or it's his. So...

I'm determined never to get any chocolate on it. So I just reached into my pocket for proof and what did I find? But I wanted to remember the names of my three greatest influencers because I can never remember Madame Curie's first name. But anyway, Madame Curie, she was the oldest but not alive. MFK Fisher from the Bay Area and Julia Child, of course.

So that's what I wanted to share. And back to Hannah. Thank you for sharing. All right, well, we're going to get right into it. And this demo is going to be a lot around food science and what happens behind the scenes when we're baking. Why do things work the way they do? And why don't they work the way they do or should? So today we're going to dive right in by talking about how to properly beat egg whites. Rose, please tell us.

Well, I discovered many years ago when I started adding cream of tartar to egg white, and that's commonplace, that if I added extra and I kept adding up to the point where it started not working,

if I had the exact right amount, which is 1/8 teaspoon of cream of tartar per egg white that you can beat till the cows come home and they don't separate. You know, you always see in recipes, beat until stiff but not dry. And what happens when it gets to be dry is that it breaks down and you lose all the aeration. So I consider that to be my main contribution, maybe even more important than reverse creaming. We'll get into that later.

But here's proof of the pudding, or rather the meringue. And the thing is though that egg white in those days, the yolk was around 18 to 19 grams and the white was 30. But now that the yolks have shrunk, the egg whites are larger. So if you don't weigh them, you'll end up with not, yeah, it won't work as well at all.

Yeah, and here is what happens when you don't use the right amount of cream of tartar. And it does add a bit of acidity, but you always use meringue, adding it to other things, and I don't want that touch of acidity. Has anybody tried doing that? Well, you'll really be amazed. You never have to worry about, say, you go to the other room and,

Although I have to say that I never leave my mixtures unattended because once one fell off the counter, they walk. Until I discovered the great pencil trick where you put the pencil in front about five inches away, the short way, so it goes from the long way to the edge of the counter. And when you hear it drop, come running into the room. LAUGHTER

Okay, so we're making a chocolate layer cake. Basically, they made a chocolate layer cake, which you'll be served cupcake versions with a chocolate wicked good ganache chocolate frosting. So that's...

It's my top favorite ganache, actually. And the reason I called it wicked is I was doing my back exercises one morning, watching the Today Show, and they were talking about the show Wicked. And I thought, hmm, my brain would love to. Well, when you put cayenne, just enough so it's like a fine Bordeaux that keeps evolving after you've eaten it, that it could be called wicked as long as you say wicked good. And at least it will attract people to want to make it. Okay, so we're going to be making the...

the all-American chocolate cake on this book, which got revised to be just a chocolate layer cake in this book. And this is one reason why we did the book. In the original cake Bible, most of the pans back in '88 were, the cake pans were just 1/2 inches tall.

And this is two and a half inches. - I thought it was two and a quarter. - Two and a quarter, okay. - Yeah, okay. - But they were shorter. - A quarter an inch makes a big difference. - So that's what the home baker get themselves into. So with the pans now being more like two inches high, if you go to the store these days, we decided we better scale up all the recipes. So all the core recipes, your yellow downy cake, your white velvet cake, and the chocolate layer cake had all been scaled up, including anything else that had a shorter pan.

So we did that. Over the years with testing with people and when Heavenly Cakes was done back in 2010, people were saying, "You know, the chocolate cake's kind of a little dry at times. How can we fix that?" How did we fix it? We added a little bit of oil. It didn't work for the wedding cake size, interestingly, but it worked beautifully for two reasons.

Well, first of all, then we should talk about the cocoa, right? Because cocoa makes the best cakes when it's baked. And we can get into how you can get the taste of chocolate into the cake later if anybody's interested. But meantime, about cocoa.

The miracle that I found out when I was a consultant at Procter & Gamble, and I got to speak to the head scientist, an old man that everybody ignored, but when I found out that he could maybe tell me what makes chocolate taste the most chocolatey, he said, "Use cocoa and hydrate it with boiling water." He said that cocoa is made up of little particles. Each one is a cell, and when you break through that cell, all the components of flavor are released.

Isn't this wonderful to know that? So we decided that we would hydrate cocoa wherever we could. And we even did that in our favorite cake, which is a chocolate domingo. It has sour cream, so we thought we couldn't do the water. But Woody one day said, well, what if we sacrifice a little of the sour cream and replace it with boiling water? And not only does it for sure have more flavor, but it doesn't have that slightly dark line that it used to have at the bottom.

which I accepted because of all my cakes that I did in the original cake bible, that has the most butter of any cake. I managed to work in the most butter. So that's one of the changes that we made. - So the first step actually for the recipe is to, actually the first step is to take a butter, make sure it's nice and warm. - Yeah, putting it makes it come to room temperature. - Yeah, so we'll get into that next. So using Dutch processed cocoa and boiling water, we combine it.

Like that, whisk into a bowl. But to prevent evaporation, because it's going to evaporate a little bit, we add the oil on top. It floats on the top. You almost don't have to use plastic wrap.

- See, but the thing is that many people think the cakes are dry because they allow the cocoa and water, or cocoa whatever, to sit there uncovered and it dries faster than almost alcohol. Vanilla's distilled in alcohol, so it's really important to keep almost everything covered. I mean, egg yolks I spray with Pam. - So butter, we're using just double grade A butter.

Sliced into cubes and we all make sure this is we're gonna talk about the reverse creamy method next. Oh Okay, okay. What is it? Well, I just wanted to say that thank you Hannah for bringing the wonderful thermopin one which is my right hand and This is the way you can tell you can press it down. It should not squish too much should be cool, but squishable 65 to 75

Oh, look at that, 70 on the nose. I knew we'd come to the right place. Thanks, Google. Everything is done just the way we do it. Ingredients are dated. Anytime we open something, we date. And oh, by the way, this is a total aside. For those of you who don't follow me on Instagram, I posted a discovery the week before we left on tour that you can use 13-year-old safe instant SAF instant yeast.

13 years and the bread was better than ever. As long as you put it in the freezer. Yes, I was going to say, do keep it in the freezer. Yes. And it doesn't matter what the freezer temperature is. And somebody, when I posted on it, said her father was in technology in some aspect. And he said that yeast is forever. That's good to know. You can't even get rid of it when you want to. Okay, so reverse creaming.

When you go to Wikipedia, they say I invented the reverse creaming method. They like to shorten things because actually people have been writing to me lately saying, you didn't invent it. I have a cookbook from the 19 early 50s where they're doing that exact method. So I wrote back immediately and using shortening, right? And she said, yeah.

Well, during the war, after the war, butter was very expensive. So people started using shortening. And with shortening, it will work. But all the textbooks, conventional wisdom always said that you cannot do it with butter. And ever since I was a baby, practically, when somebody said you can't do something, I wanted to know why. You know, my grandmother who brought me up told me my face was like a question mark.

And for years I thought it's because I have a big forehead and a small chin. I mean all kids ask why, they have a curiosity, which is one of my favorite traits because I never lost it. And I'm sure you all can relate to that. You want to get to the bottom of things to understand things and that's how you can create and control things. So what the reverse creaming is, is that you combine all the dry ingredients, which is here the flour,

We'll get to the type of flour later. The flour, sugar, leavening, which is baking powder here, and salt. I like to use fine sea salt, but if you use the kosher diamond, you have to use just about double the amount because it's fluffed up.

But we do everything by weight, so it really doesn't matter. - So we're gonna be putting all the dry ingredients in first. - Right, we mix it together. - Not the sugar and the butter. We're gonna put all the dry ingredients. - And we don't sift them together, we stir them together because when you put something through a sifter, it comes out the way it went in pretty much. You can do both, but there's no reason to. - Yeah, so we got the bowl on here. Actually, I wrote down the weight just in case I forgot to tear out the weight 'cause that sometimes happens. We tear out the weight. This is in grams.

And so there we put that in. And it could have been a bag of sugar, just a bag of flour, scoop, scoop, scoop. Same thing with sugar. - Would you, Rose, would you like to talk about why you use a scale instead of measuring cups? - Yes. - My favorite subject. I once wrote an article for the LA Times Syndicate way too big.

And there's nothing that would be a downside to it. It's more accurate, it's easier, it's cleaner. But the main thing is that if you were to measure it with a cup,

you would maybe end up getting one and three quarter times the amount of flour. And that's why your cakes would definitely be dry. The reason is that there are many ways to measure by cup. You can either lightly spoon or sift into the cup and level off or dip and sweep. And each method and each time you do it will be different. So to me, that's the common denominator of failure in cake baking is people who still use the cup. We're going to stir this up a little bit, get it mixed up a little bit.

put on this on here and we mix it up. I'm just gonna do it by hand. - Where are my protection goggles? Okay, so the next thing about the reverse creaming is that we add all of the butter that's the right temperature and in most recipes it would be about a quarter of the liquid ingredients. In this case, it would be all of the cocoa mixture.

- There it goes. - Because the rest of it's gonna go in three parts and that's with the eggs. Eggs and vanilla is the final thing. So the reverse creaming method is actually easier, faster, and better. You get a finer crumb. You can see that you get just a gently rounded top dome, which we want if it's a single layer. If we want it to be dead flat, we would probably end up

increasing the baking powder a tiny bit, or most people just level it off. Or I reverse it upside down and that flattens it. - Yes, I do the same thing. - Well, we're kindred spirits. You know that Hannah baked her way through how many of our books? - Several. - Several? More than two. - "Heavenly Cakes," "The Baking Bible." - That's how we met. - Yes, indeed. It was such a privilege to test some of your early recipes. - It was so wonderful to get your feedback. - Yes.

I think I was a little bit of a nightmare for a cookbook author because I always tweak things. Well, that's because we wanted to substitute for various allergies. The idea that people bake through it the way we said so, so we can actually compare and then we get these wonderful tweaks. So...

With chocolate cakes, a lot of times we'll mash it up a little bit first to get everything sort of started. If you don't want it to jump out of the pan, you can either do that or you can drape plastic wrap over it. If you use a towel, then some of it gets stuck in the towel, but plastic wrap, it goes right back in. Okay. Oh, let me do it because I can see it from this side. Like that? Yeah. And we're done.

No, no, you have to lift it up. Well, he does it gradually actually in this type of food, kitchen egg. Because we still have the tilt back because that's what most people have and we wanted to test with what most people have. Once it's kind of mixed, we're going to put the medium speed. One and a half minutes.

This is why I say that for children this is the best lesson, baking, because it teaches patience, it teaches math and science and art. And I was teaching this little boy how to bake and

after the third year, he said, "When you count," because I said, "What's the point of putting a timer on? It's such a short time. Just say one and two and..." And he said, "If you count faster, will that work?" And I said, "Yes, I always think about that and wish it would." See, what's happening is that the butter is coating the flour, so it protects it from getting too hydrated right away, and that's where you get a more tender cake.

Oh...

So Rose, maybe we can talk a little bit about gluten formation. When flour gets in contact with a liquid ingredient, it starts forming gluten. And what happens during reverse creaming? It connects with the protein, gluten and gliadin, I guess it's called. I haven't been thinking about that for a long time. And it forms a network, which is the structure you want in a bread, but you don't want the texture of bread and bagels in a cake, right? So by coating it with flour, with butter, it doesn't

It isn't coated completely, but enough so that it will prevent it from forming the hardest structure. And you knew the answer, but you just want everybody else to know. Feel free to ask questions as we go. I mean, we've been doing it so much, we won't lose our track. Now we're getting to one of our favorite subjects, eggs.

- Hmm. - Geez. - I know where this is going. - Okay. - The make or break. - We will say with this cookbook, we've gone the way everybody else didn't want to go. Reason why we're saying is a lot, if you look at most cookbooks today, they'll say all purpose flour. Do they tell you if it's bleached or if it's unbleached? They generally don't. Do they tell you if it's how they measure it? Well, you have to go find out that in the book. Where we will say that right in the recipe itself. Is it sifted?

Spoon to the cup, we do that. Eggs, since about, you're from early 2000s, have you cracked eggs lately? What's happened to the yolk? - Yeah. - What? They're smaller, they're smaller by a lot. An average egg should be, an average large egg should be two-fifths yolk, three-fifths white. That has scaled down, if you go that in grams, 20, 30.

We've seen yolks go down too. We'll do it right now. Oh yeah, we always break it on a flat surface. Yeah, I did that. Okay, get my hands nice and dirty.

- I find that using your hands is also very gentle to the egg yolk. - Exactly. - Compared to all of these one time use gadgets that you can't use for anything else. - And they don't always work very well. - And they don't work. - And in fact, the way I felt it was acceptable to do it is I studied with James Beard. Has anybody ever heard of him anymore? And he used his hands, so I thought, okay, if he can use it, I can use it. - And this yolk is? - I bet you it's 15 grams. - Wrong. - 13.

In between. 14 grams, when it should have been 20 or it should technically be 18.7, something like that. That's including the clients though, so we rounded off at 20. That's a good example, there's 14 there. - That's 7% off. - That was quick.

We'll try again. - See, but we should tell you why it matters. Not only do you get more white, which is not good, but the yolk is an emulsifier. It has lecithin in it. And that means it distributes all the other ingredients more equally. And I discovered it when I was making a wedding cake for a really good friend's daughter, and I was making a 12-inch one, and the texture was coarse. And somebody had written to me on our blog saying that their genoise suddenly became coarse.

And my first thought was, what is she doing wrong? Because it doesn't happen to me. But guess what? I hadn't made a genoise in about five years. So when I made the 12-inch one and committed to such a large one, I thought, she's right. What's going on? And then I started thinking, it's the only sponge cake which doesn't use commercial leavening. It depends on the eggs for leavening. The only one that you don't separate the eggs. So you don't know.

I mean, like with the chiffon, the whites are beaten separately. With the genoise, it's whole eggs. So you don't realize that you're getting much less yolk, and that's part of what's in it. Well, the next one improved. It went to 15. Yes. So right now we're at 29, and technically it should be at 40. So when we prep today...

How many, it calls for four, and how many did you have to break? Five and a half. Five and a half. And it really makes a difference. Which meant that the whites are that much more accessible. And people think, okay, I'll use jumbo eggs. Well, then you may get the Rhein-Malai yolk, but all of your whites just shot way up.

Somebody has a question, Woody, before we go on to explain about-- - Yes. - I was gonna ask, when you say your genoise was coarse, what does that look like? - Instead of being a fine crumb like this, for example, it had like cornmeal, like cornbread.

Good question. When I was a consultant on chocolate cake at Procter & Gamble, I was the first person ever to be called in from the outside. And we were all sitting around the table discussing the flavor, and somebody was saying muddy, coffee, this and that. And suddenly I thought to ask, I said, I'm a stranger here, and a foreigner kind of. Tell me what your definition is of those words. And no two people had the same definition. There was no guide. So this is a very good question, because you can't assume people know what course it is. That never happens here at Google.

I thought you guys could relate to that. Okay, we're going to move on. We're going to be combining. So we're going to be putting the egg yolks and whites back together again. If you're doing a liquid measure and it's also something like egg yolks that have fat in them, you can also spray the cup with a little...

non-stick Pam or non-stick cooking spray to make sure things slide out well. - We're big scrapers 'cause people end up, they can make a whole muffin out of the cake that you're making by leaving it in the bowl. We had to use those French corn. It actually means horn because the original ones were made from horn.

That's how we're gonna scrape. I love that tip of spraying your measuring cup. Like let's say you have to measure molasses, like holiday season around the corner. Use molasses or something require corn syrup.

it's very easy to get it out of your measuring cup that way. - Exactly. And that's why for glucose, I put it into that type of squeeze container. It can stick in the microwave if you need to. The thing you should never do with glucose or corn syrup is to put a wet spoon or something to wipe off any excess because it starts molding.

That's what happened to me. I guess by the time you live as long as I do, everything has happened that's going to happen. But there's still some surprises in baking. I forget what the most recent one was. Okay, that's what we're putting in there. What he's supposed to be doing instead of deviating. We're going to put one in there. Also some water. Home bakers, you have a whisk. We're using a fork because we don't have a big, nice, stinky little whisk.

Stinky? Stinky. Stinky. So let's say you have a cake that requires all egg yolks. How would you recommend storing the egg whites? Angelwood cake. Go ahead. I was just watching what you were doing. How do I recommend? Oh, it's really easy. It's in the book. Okay.

Now the egg whites will freeze. I have frozen egg whites. They still work after a year, but that does depend on how cold your freezer gets. But a good three months wouldn't be a problem. It's yolks that are the difficult thing because yolks get gummy. So what I do, I've been doing for years, is adding a little bit of sugar to the yolk and then marking on the container how much I added.

So then I can make ice cream with it or whatever, but I remove the sugar from the recipe So I'm not just sweetening it excessively. You could use corn syrup too. I heard people use salt as well. Have you done that? No, but I wouldn't want to put too much salt in. Right, if it's for a savory application would you be able to use salt? No, you wouldn't because I know I learned from a Japanese student to make the eggs strain more easily, the yolks for whatever we were doing. She said we always put a little salt.

That's how I can tell you it's not just theoretical. You know, the proof is always in the pudding. You can be a scientist and try things out and find that they're proven wrong eventually, but an alchemist tries everything until they reach the point of what they want. And I think of myself as an alchemist more than if a scientist. Okay, we're going to continue on with the reverse creamy method. We're going to put some of our egg...

- Chocolate mixture in here? - Is that about half, Woody?

- Actually it's about half or a third. - And that's one thing we don't weigh, 'cause it doesn't really matter. - We do it in three parts on this one. - My editor wants-- - We'll do it in two this time. - Can you believe Food Arts Magazine? Has anybody ever seen Food Arts? It doesn't exist anymore, but it was the best professional magazine there. And they didn't believe in giving recipes with weights. And I heard that one of the editors, the owner said to one of the editors, she weighs everything, even air.

And I said, "Tell him to think about gravity." And he was not approving. What I'm doing right now, I'm just... And we are stirring and scraping down a little bit before we start and also making sure the bottom's been kind of mixed in there a little bit. And a couple of people have commented over the years that

Having a Rose cookbook is having Rose in the kitchen 'cause she basically walks you through everything. We don't guess that you'll scrape the bowl or you'll do this or you'll cover-- - Or reach to the bottom of the bowl. - Reach to the bottom of the bowl. - And sometimes-- - Or that you'll cover something with plastic wrap. We tell you to do it. Whether you wanna do it or not, that's up to you. So we're gonna beat this and we start on low. - Backing off. - So they don't get blasted.

Does anybody have those bowl beater blades that scrape the bowl? Oh, they're out there. But if you are using them, make sure you start low and for sure put the cover on top or otherwise you will get nailed. So we're going to...

So we'll count to 45 seconds everybody. Starting at one, two, three, four. You count. You have chocolate on your face. Well then wipe it off. Jeez. There's more, there's more. Thanks honey. When I translated A Passion for Chocolate, a French book, La Passion de Chocolat, and Papa Bernuchon said,

Chocolate is a salmettee, it's a dirty profession. And it's true, you cannot get near chocolate without it getting on you. Just a little bit, it's worth it. It is. Are we almost there? Sure. Sure? I take that's time. And again, we're saying scrape the bowl,

So what's happening while we're adding the liquid ingredients? Well, we're adding, we're getting it to emulsify gradually so that you don't get big clumps of anything. Yes.

We met with Amy Guitard. Have you all experienced Guitard chocolate? It's one of our absolute favorites. Probably our favorite now that Valrhona is not making 61% anymore. This is why I don't like to list things because companies change their equipment, their ingredients. Anyway, I told her that

Michael Ricciuti, are you familiar with his amazing chocolate? - Yes. - The Bay Area. Well, he always wanted to do an event with me where I do it from the home baker point of view, home chocolates here, and he does it from the commercial. And Amy said she'd love to host it, and always looking for an excuse to come back to the Bay Area.

2025 will be it. - Nice, wonderful. Yeah, they have a lovely store at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. - They're the only chocolate there anymore. - Oh, really? - Yeah, that's what I was told. - Oh, I was not aware of that. Okay. - And I don't know if you all know, but because I'm so insistent not just on weights, but on the cacao percentage in the chocolate, and I'll tell you why in a second, when Robert Steinberg called me and said,

I'm a doctor and I have only seven years to live and I really wanted to be a chocolatier. Can you put me in contact with the Baroness Jones from that book? And I did. And he went into remission because he got a John Steinberg, no, Scharfenberger.

to sell his champagne company and to start Scharfenberger chocolate. And so I said, when you do that, please put the cacao percentage the way they do in Europe. They didn't even do it when I was first working with Swiss chocolate. And so it was the first American chocolate to have that. Now, why is it so important? When I came here to do the PBS show, Margie Poore in the Russian area was the producer and she...

to impress me, made one of my cakes using 70%. You know, it's just as bad with butter. If you use high-fat butter, it's not good, just because it's more expensive and more fat. It's good for laminated doughs, but it's not good for cake or even pie crust. And the same thing with the chocolate. So what she did, this is apropos of the new book, too, is she covered it with a ganache, and her husband was laughing his head off because...

He told her, "You'll need an ax to cut through it." But the higher the percentages, the more it gets. So in this book, we show the different percentages of chocolate and then the different amount of cream you need to add. Of course, having a higher percentage of cacao means you have less sugar. So for people who want it to be more in the bitter than the sweet, that's a good thing to know. I mean, we had the chance to really look at things and see what wasn't in the first book and what we need now, actually 36 years later.

Are we done yet? Yeah, we're done. Well, we're done. This part. Oh, we didn't talk about preparing the pan. See, always prepare the pan before you get this far because you can put, if you're not ready to bake, you can put the batter into the pan and even refrigerate it. But if you let it sit in the bowl, it loses a lot of its chemical reaction. I'll be naughty and not go completely clean, okay? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

- I have a question. Can you say more about that, leaving the batter in the bowl and how it negatively impacts the batter? - Yeah, it starts, the leavening starts reacting by agitation when you pour it in afterwards, the aeration.

So it might not rise as much once it goes into the oven because it did part of the rising while waiting in the bowl or cake pan. Exactly. In fact, that was an interesting thing. Somebody wrote to me saying that she wanted her cupcakes to be domed and they weren't.

And we discovered, because I have cupcake mix, that if you do it and you let it sit, the second part, like you do a big batch, the second part will be more domed because part of the leavening is already acted. And the leavening is the tenderizer. So if it's already reacted, it will not serve to create the dome. I mean, to create the right texture.

Okay, we made our batter. With cupcakes, you mean? Yeah, the thing is not to do a huge batch. In fact, I don't like those 12-cup things because whatever bakes in the middle is not going to bake evenly anyway, you know, so that's just the way it is.

- Okay. - Oh, you know what you can do? I just realized what I did in the, and it's not in this new book, but for wedding cakes is if you want to make just one batter and you need different amounts of leavening proportionately for each tier, you start with the one that needs the least amount, weigh it out, and then add the leavening to, and with ice water to keep it from reacting and add it to the next part. I know it sounds crazy, but it really worked. Most people I know who make wedding cakes just use

one leavening for everything and lob off the top. I don't know what they do with the extra that you've lobbed off, but I didn't want to be wasteful. So yeah, you could do that with cupcakes too. - Okay, back to our cake. - Oh yeah, the cake. - Okay, a tip we suggest you do is always weigh your bowl out and tear it out so you know when you put the batter back on there, how much batter is in there. So I'm gonna pretend here that we did that.

Now, at the top of most of the charts, there will be a marking that it should be what the batter weight technically should be, and we do fudge off the ingredient chart. So the actual ingredient chart is probably about 1,650 grams. You will lose something as you scrape along. So I just weighed out my batter. I'm at 1,642, 1,630 grams.

I'm only off by about 10 grams. I got enough in here. Have you ever made something where you've noticed that something... - Those are the grams on the beater. See, so you're not off at all. - Good. Has anybody made something where they realize halfway through after you got done that something's missing? I've done, I made a pumpkin cheesecake once and realized that there's the sugar just about ready to put in the oven. And I tried with, this was before I met her.

Years before. True confession. I tried mixing it in, and of course it didn't turn out. It was a Thanksgiving pumpkin cheesecake, too. And I tried eating it for a couple days and finally gave up. That's what he's making for this Thanksgiving. In fact, it's one of our favorites. Yeah, and also addressing about whole eggs. Again, like, are we crazy? Yes, we are crazy. That's the reason why whole eggs in the new book are marked in red. You'll see, like...

for this recipe, four whole eggs, 'cause we'll split 'em out. We'll show you what the egg whites are, what the egg yolks are. It's up to you which method you wanna do. I'll just put the eggs in there and not worry about it. I'll weigh out the eggs themselves for 200 grams, do it that way, or I'll do the Rosen-Woody method and actually do it all the way. So it's up to you. So that's how we're doing that. So we made our batter.

Now we need to put in the pans. So most of the pan preparation we have, which is pretty standard, is putting some shortening down, putting the parchment paper on there, spraying the inside. We suggest cooking spray with flour. Now they've done very well with using just

I'm not sure if the home baker could get that, but we see how it is perfect outside. So it's great to know. I have both, and you can get that one at Restaurant Depot if that's close to you. I've used both, and that works remarkably well. It's really important because I have a cousin who's allergic to lecithin, and it's in all the sprays. So I immediately took a picture so I could tell her. Yeah. Okay. So we've done that, but then we went the next step. Does anybody use...

- Cake strips. - Cake strips. And these have been around since the 70s. This is kind of like a ironing board material. - Yeah. - Is this brand. Wilton makes it. - Wilton, yeah. You can buy it at Michael's and Joanne. - Yeah. - And probably on Amazon. - Or if you're really smart, you'll buy my silicone strips. - That's right. - But unfortunately-- - They don't get dirty. - Unfortunately right now, one's available because right now there's a,

- Shortage on products. - Yeah, shortage on silicone in China. Oh, we only have 15 minutes. - Well, we're getting there. - And we've got lots, yeah, okay. - Thank you, Dee Dee. - We baked the cake, so. - We're almost done. We wanna get to the lemon curd, it's really exciting. - But let's say you don't have that and you don't wanna get Rose of the Heavenly Cakes juice 'cause it's not available right now anyway. Make your own, which is very simple. - Especially if you have a larger pan that's handy to know. - Which is very simple, aluminum foil.

Put some paper towels or cloth towel if you want. Wet it. Wet it down. Then fold them up. Seal the edges. And then you wrap around your thing. Pin it with a clamp of some sort. Yeah, but the purpose of this is because what happens, the batter that's up against the metal sets first. And then it's finished setting and it doesn't continue. But the center starts rising more. That's when you get the dome. So it really pays to do that.

So at this point, it's all yours. We have to talk about flour before we get too far. Okay, now we're going to get into a real nasty subject called flour. Did you want to move this? Should we move it? I think we can just push it aside. We'll just push this. In the original cake Bible, we could just say cake flour.

There's cake flour, there's all-purpose flour, there's bleached all-purpose, there's unbleached flour, there's bread flour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then something happened. Another company decided to come out with a flour that wasn't bleached for cake flour. And we fortunately had an editor for the original cake Bible, about four or five editions back, who was able to put in bleached for all those instances. - Every single instance. - Why use bleached flour?

Well, the flour particles are like ball bearings. So when you put other ingredients in, they slip through the flour, whereas bleaching makes them rough. And so they can catch on to the butter, the eggs.

And it makes a huge difference. If you use unbleached flour, you have, again, a coarse texture and it dips in the center. So if people have to use unbleached, I tell them to use tube pans because there's no center. But it still doesn't have as good a texture or flavor, which you will see when you taste. And that's with all purpose. So...

And as far as the bleaching effort goes, there's a couple ways. For cake flour, they do use chlorine, but it dissipates. It's gone. It's out of the process. For all-purpose flour, they use chemical bleaching. If you say, I don't want that at all, but I still want bleaching, you can also take unbleached flour and you can heat treat it in a microwave, which we give the method in the book, which we got from Kate Kaldrick in

in England who was having a problem with cakes being a lot shorter than they were supposed to be. - Well, in Europe, it's very hard to get access to bleached flour. - Yeah. - So you can get-- - The day that we're about to send the book into the editor for the final version of six or seven, I got a note from one of the bakers who baked along in England, and she said, "As of today, Cotswold Flour is now making their heat-treated flour available to the home baker." It was always available to consumers in the,

How would you say? Commercial bakery. So whereas a cake could be, my cake could be like that, and their cake was like that when they didn't have the bleached flour, the heat treated will work. So I was able to change that in the book, and just in time before it went to press. It was a miracle. So we had our wonderful team over here baking, and sorry about the scratchy noise there. This is one made with softened silk. And this one was made with...

That. Couple differences. This one's got holes in it. It's coarser looking. This is nice and soft and fluffy. Hannah. - Oh, thank you. - Rose. - Do I have to do that? - No, put it back there. - It's good. - No, I think I've never done a side by side taste 'cause I didn't think why bother. - Well, you could. - When I'm not playing games. - Thank you. - Mm.

Did you have any of this one? Yes, yes, I did. It's drier too. It's definitely drier. Oh, you don't bully about it.

We'll pass around so you can check this. We'll do this later? We'll do that later. We've done both, they've cut up all the cakes so you guys can sample to see what we're talking about. - Yes, and you can even come closer later to actually, you can see the difference between the two cakes. - So we have that. So how many people have had the original cake Bible? Few, okay.

They're still available. But not for much longer. It's in the 60th printing, the original one. This book's in its 60th printing. And as far as independent authors, there's no one even close to that in baking or in cookbooks. Let's say Joy of Cooking, which is a collaboration type thing, or the Bay Crocker cookbooks. They've been out for many editions, but that's a collaborative type effort. Okay, how much time do we have to do Lemon Curd?

Maybe about three minutes. Oh, good. Oh, we got tons of time. Maybe we'll also have some time for some questions. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that was included in our time. Okay, we're going to talk about lemon curd. Anybody make lemon curd? Yes. Lots of hands there. Good, you got great lemons out here. Yes, we do. Okay. Two key tips on lemon curd.

We've been on the road for two weeks now. Well, what do we do first? Oh, this is wonderful. We learned this in San Francisco from... Oh, she's not alive anymore. She had China Moon Cafe. I can't think of her name. Christina Cho? No, it goes further back than that. Barbara Tropp. Barbara Tropp. Thank you. So she was the one who taught me that...

If you don't wash the citrus with detergent, but you have to rinse it off, you get a bitter taste. And I had our truffer, who's a chocolatier, do a taste test for himself to see the difference, because he didn't believe me. I did it in water so I could see, and it's really bitter when you don't wash it like that. So we washed our, we did that, we zested them. Yeah. So how do you make lemon curd?

What do you bake it in? Oh no, not bake it, make it. Make it. What do you make lemon curd in? Anybody can say how they do it. You tell us. What? Double boiler. Double boiler? A glass one. Okay. Or somehow on a stove, correct? Or the microwave. Ah! Shut up! Stop that! And we thought we were the only ones. Yeah.

So in the New Cake Bible, where the old method always was on the stove, double boiler, but generally you've got to strain it, right? Yes. And strain it through what? Something that's metal. So usually people complain about what? How do they describe it? Is it bitterness? No, metallic. It definitely has a metallic. It reacts with the citrus somehow. So one day I thought,

The microwave for making sauces. I was one of the first people to get to work with microwave because I worked at Ladies Home Journal on my first job and we were given the first microwaves. We found that sauce thickens faster and better in a microwave. So I thought, what if we do it in glass in the microwave, take off the coliza, and then when we whisk it, use a silicone whisk.

and then put it through a plastic strainer, but you don't need to because it's so silky smooth and it doesn't have any colism. And that's what we have in the new book. It's just sensationally different. You have the pure taste of the lemon and never any metallic. But nothing metal comes in contact with it. Not even the word. Let's get on to ganache.

Oh yeah, another thing they said can't be done. When I was in Switzerland and when I was doing the Passion for Chocolate. Oh no, faux pas. Use a food processor. What did you get to eat?

- Pardon? - Okay, I'm sorry. - Okay, see it gets a bit dull when it sits because you can really restore it if you put it in the microwave, but it's risky 'cause if you zap it too long then it melts. But they said, you know, people originally when they made ganache without using a food processor, they would put it maybe in a double boiler or maybe not. What would happen would be the cocoa butter would separate out and you couldn't get it back in. So it was all that chocolate wasted.

This is really nice texture. But as I said, it's very shiny closer to the time that it's made or restored. And also when you put it on, it's best to do it when it's really soft. Don't wait until it gets really stiff. As long as you can make a swoop, it will be fine. So this is a wicked good ganache and I like to use preferably glucose, but corn syrup will also give it that shine. - But why is it wicked?

I already said, didn't I? Did you? Yeah, I did. You weren't listening. I was prepping. See, I have very few cakes pictured in the book that have pipe decorations because I've decided I don't want, first of all, too much buttercream. Oh, we have to tell you about the white chocolate fondant. All right. I don't like too much stuff on the cake. So with ganache, it's never too much. At least be that seven minutes of

- Okay, we definitely have to tell you about that fondant 'cause it's a major breakthrough.

So I also don't like to put too much on a cupcake. It looks pretty, but then you have to eat all of it. But as I said, I don't mind when it's-- it's like eating a truffle. There we go. So I have instructions for piping, but very rarely do I use it myself. I love Bundt cakes that don't require piping because we have enough moisture in them from the syrup. Oh, one of our top favorite cakes, if not our top favorite non-chocolate, is the triple velvet.

- Very near and dear to my heart. - Thank you. Cenk from Turkey, who wrote the wonderful book, "The Artful Baker," he said that he and his mother tasted it and they thought they wouldn't like that white frosting.

And then they wanted to tap it on every single piece. And he said it's the only lemon cake they'll ever eat again. It's true, I've been going around saying it's the most beautiful baking book I've ever seen. But still, he didn't lie. So where were we? Now we're going to go to White Fond. Oh, Beth Ann, all you tell them. It's your story. How many of you go to wedding cakes where you get that White Fondant? How does the White Fondant taste? Gross. Gross. Inedible. Sweet. It looks sweet, but it looks pretty.

Perfect. So when we did the baking Bible, somebody local here in Menlo Park, Beth Ann Goldberg, who has Studio Cakes, said, I've got something for you guys to try. I've made it white fondant. It tastes good. I've blended in white chocolate. So she has a recipe that takes white chocolate. She makes what she calls white chocolate plastique.

where she makes the white fondant, then she makes this little thing of white chocolate, you put in the middle, you put together and combine it, and it tastes great. In fact, so in the new book, where the white fondant recipe is, the white fondant recipe is actually the white chocolate fondant recipe, and the white fondant recipe is a variation. And if you, after our second event today is at Boychuk Palo Alto, you've been there!

Well, leave work early and come and taste the fondant because it's working. Yeah, so she's going to be having, Beth Ann's going to be bringing cupcakes to that event where she will be having her white fondant. But you forgot to tell them about the wonderful discovery. This is how bakers share. She went to this whatever contest for cakes and somebody said, don't you use Tylose powder in your fondant?

So she told us about it, we tried it, and not only is it more elastic, it's easier to work with the fondant. I think it even adds a good flavor. I can't tell you what it is chemically. Probably you'll discover it's dangerous, but it's just a little. It's just a very little bit. - One thing we really appreciate with all of us as bakers is we're a community that exchanges ideas back and forth. So here she gave this recipe to us

We put in one book, then she revised it, then I sent the recipe to her after we proofed it for the book, because we wanted to make sure she was confirming it, and she confirmed back, and I said, "We're making white chocolate rolled fondant." She gets her textbook, she got her advance copy about a week and a half ago, and she emailed back and said, "You didn't have to do that!" And I said, "What do you mean?"

You named it Beth Ann's Title Space Fondant. We believe in giving acknowledgement and credit. Otherwise, who's going to believe what we really did invent? Like, I actually created a dark chocolate fondant. It didn't exist. It was called Plastique. It came from France, I think, and it was inedible but beautiful.

So I did just create this fondant and we should try it with the Tylose powder. Did we ever try that? The dark one? - Yeah, we did. Oh, not the dark one. - But that's what's on the cover of the book. It's like fine Italian leather. - Yes, yes. So I think this is a wonderful way to close out our talk for today, sharing with the community.

And what I love the most about your recipes is that I can apply those tips and tricks to any recipe. Now, you could ask yourself, why would you make any recipe except roses? But in the event that you do,

The tips about the egg whites and the cream of tartar, if the recipe from a different author says use four egg whites and use 1/8 of a teaspoon of cream of tartar, I say no, no, no. I'm going to follow Rose's tip to use 1/8 of a teaspoon for each egg white.

and on and on. And so you can use these tips, share them with your loved ones, with your friends, and they will carry you through all other recipes. - That's beautiful, Anna, thank you. - You're so welcome. Thank you both so much. - Can I say one more thing? - Yeah, sure. - Real quick? We got a couple minutes? Okay. One thing different with this book than virtually most all your books out now is that it's not for color. So you're not gonna see,

chocolate layer cake and a big beautiful picture. It's going to still have the insert like the previous one. Why did they do that? Why didn't we have a full color picture? It's called by giving up going to the full, going to the insert of 40 pages, we still get almost all the cakes in here. You get 100 more pages. So we trade it off.

That was a big thing. Now, most authors do not make all these beautiful cakes and all these beautiful pictures. They usually don't do that. They have something we call a team.

And we've been lucky to have the same styling team for the last four books, which we make sure they're acknowledged. So because this book would not have come around unless we went to Kansas City for 10 days in a room that was in the houses heated only about 60 degrees 'cause she wanted everything cool to pull off all these cakes.

And that's Erin McDowell, if you ever had the book, The Book on Pie, or her new Savory book, or Fearless Baker, and she's working on another book. She's one who did all that work, along with our incredible stylist and photographer. - Thank you so much, Woody. Thank you, Rose, thank you, Woody, thank you. - Thank you, and please give her a hand.

Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us online at youtube.com forward slash toxic Google. Talk soon.