Zoë Bakes Cakes: Everything You Need to Know to Make Your Favorite Layers, Bundts, Loaves, and More [A Baking Book]

Copyright © 2021 by Zoë François.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

Hardcover ISBN 9781984857361

Ebook ISBN 9781984857378

Editor: Kelly Snowden | Production editor: Doug Ogan

Print designer: Betsy Stromberg | Print production designer: Mari Gill

Print production manager and print prepress color manager: Jane Chinn

Copyeditor: Dolores York | Proofreader: Amy Bauman | Indexer: Ken DellaPenta

Publicist: Erica Gelbard | Marketer: Andrea Portanova

rhid_prh_5.6.1_148350781_c0_r1

contents

INTRODUCTION

INGREDIENTS

EQUIPMENT

CAKE ACADEMY

1 pound cakes, quick breads, and bundts

2 fruit-studded cakes—upside down or otherwise

3 soaked cakes

4 cake layers, loaves, and sheets

5 light-as-air cakes

6 the layered cakes

7 rolled and fancy cakes

8 icing, frostings, buttercreams, and ganaches

9 fillings and flourishes

Sources

Acknowledgments

about the author

Index

1 pound cakes, quick breads, and bundts

vanilla-bean pound cake

marble pound cake

lemon-curd pound cake

banana bread with swirls of nutella

zucchini cake

best-ever chocolate-zucchini bundt cake

chocolate ganache bundt cake

pumpkin–mocha swirl bundt cake

2 fruit-studded cakes—upside down or otherwise

blueberry muffin cake

apple cake with honey-bourbon glaze

rustic grape and almond paste cake

plum cake

pear-cardamom cake

pineapple upside-down cake

rhubarb upside-down cake

3 soaked cakes

semolina-walnut cake with orange blossom soak

grandma ellen’s trinidad rum cake

sticky toffee–date cake

cinco leches—tres leches all grown up

tiramisu

greek orange-phyllo cake

4 cake layers, loaves, and sheets

white cake

yellow cake

chocolate devil’s food cake

hot chocolate cake

red velvet cake

coconut–candy bar cake

banana cream cake

hummingbird cake

ultimate carrot cake

5 light-as-air cakes

hot milk sponge cake

victory (victoria) sponge cake

espresso sponge cake

joconde (almond sponge cake)

brown butter genoise

anna’s hazelnut–brown butter cake

angel food cake

olive oil–chiffon cake

the og snack cake

dacquoise with cream and berries

pavlova

chocolate pavlova

6 the layered cakes

boston cream pie

chocolate–peanut butter cake

black forest cake

german chocolate coconut cake

coconut cream cake

turtle cake

chocolate hazelnut torte

7 rolled and fancy cakes

pavlova roulade

raspberry charlotte royale

bûche de noël (christmas yule log)

mod yule log

beehive cake

blackberry diva cake

wedding cake

8 icing, frostings, buttercreams, and ganaches

confectioners’ sugar icing

chocolate frosting

ermine frosting

cream cheese frosting

ultra-rich buttercream

honey buttercream

roasted chestnut buttercream

american buttercream

german buttercream

italian meringue buttercream

swiss meringue buttercream

fluffy swiss meringue topping

thick caramel sauce

white chocolate ganache

dark chocolate ganache

fondant

9 fillings and flourishes

simple syrup

perfect whipped cream

caramel whipped cream

pastry cream

coconut pastry cream

sticky coconut filling

cherry filling

lemon curd

berry quick jam

whipped milk chocolate mascarpone

chocolate bark

marshmallows

meringue mushrooms

crushed praline

candied hazelnuts

carrot peel candy

introduction

My obsession with cake started in an unexpected way—with the humble Twinkie. It was tucked inside a Charlie Brown lunch box, unfortunately not mine, and that little cake opened up a whole new world. A lifelong love affair with all things cake was ignited on my very first day of kindergarten. Perhaps the average kid wouldn’t even have blinked at that iconic tube of sponge cake, with its freakishly white and delicious filling squished inside, as if by magic. But, I wasn’t average.

I grew up with my parents on a series of communes, which absolutely had its benefits. In 1969, I could toddle sans clothes around the Woodstock Festival with a backdrop of screaming guitars, as if it were any other day; in fact, I did just that. I have visceral memories of sitting in my dad’s vast garden with the smell of tomato plants vining around me, mixed with dirt, pine trees, and wood smoke. The counterculture to which my parents adhered included a back-to-the-land philosophy on food. We lived in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, on a dirt road that was impassable by anything other than foot for long stretches of the year, due to mud or snow. Geography compelled our self-reliance. So, growing our own food was a necessity, not merely a fashionable trend, and we raised chickens for eggs and meat, a rather nasty-tempered collection of rams and sheep, and a cow for milk and the resulting cream that also became our butter.

My first kitchen memory as a wobbly toddler was standing inside the Big House. This was the only permanent structure on the land and where everyone on the commune gathered for cooking and a respite from the winter. The room was filled with singing and music while sharing the chore of churning cream into butter. That is probably why, to this day, I find music (and butter) essential parts of baking. If you know my Instagram baking tutorials, you’re familiar with the soundtracks that often start with Joni Mitchell and bring it all home with the dance beat of Drake by the end of the recipe.

Along with tending the gardens, my dad kept bees. The beeswax was transformed into ornate candles in a makeshift factory we had within a geodesic dome built out of VW car hoods (because it isn’t really a commune without a geodesic dome). We sold the candles at the local co-op, along with homemade granola and bread that my Aunt Melissa baked.

There was also sap collected from the maple trees on our eighty-plus acres of land. We brought the sloshing pails to a neighbor’s sugarhouse, where it was processed into syrup. Honey and maple syrup were the only two sweeteners I ever knew, and I was quite fine with that. Until that Twinkie.…

Today, those cylindrical cakes with the mystery creme on the inside are synonymous with junk food; but to a sugar-deprived flower child, they were a revelation—a parting of the seas, as it were, and the source of a newly born passion. I must have given my folks an earful about the deception they’d been pulling on me all those years. Carob was the actual lie—and decidedly not chocolate—despite all their lip service to the contrary. Grapes were fruit, period. Drying grapes in the sun to shrivel into raisins does not change them into candy. I fought that injustice with all the fervor and dedication those wonderful hippies had instilled in me.

The baking began soon after, tossing ingredients and a handful of hope in a bowl and expecting some sort of alchemy to return as cake. I was eight or nine years old before a miracle occurred by way of a Dutch Baby recipe, courtesy of my friend, and fellow commune-dweller, Sasha. That glorious mix of flour, eggs, and milk puffed to the point of exploding in the oven. We wolfed it down with maple syrup and slices of McIntosh apples from our yard. It was an auspicious beginning.

A parade of knowledge marched into my kitchen after that. First came the Time Life books on French cooking, which still hold space on my stuffed cookbook shelves. Through them, an attempt at a chocolate mousse was a gritty disaster, because I didn’t know that adding coffee didn’t mean Folgers coffee grounds. Lesson learned: mousse should be velvety, not chewy. The next batch was spot-on. Soon I had baked my way through Lee Bailey’s Country Kitchen, Baking with Julia, and Martha Stewart’s everything; Ina Garten’s brownies were on high rotation. Over the years, my affection for sugar only deepened, along with a determination to figure out its transformational powers.

IN PURSUIT OF SUGAR

When I was in college, I launched a cookie company after writing a business plan for a fictitious company as an assignment for my accounting class. I could not have cared less about the profit and loss calculations. In fact, I was never much of a student in the sense of academics. If it hadn’t been for home-economics classes in middle school, I would have had very little to wrap my head around in a school building. Growing up as the daughter of wandering hippies, I ended up going to sixteen different schools by the time I graduated from college. Each time I started at a new school, I’d reinvent myself, and by the time my folks were on to the next ashram, commune, cult, or concert, I was ready to leave too. I was bored in a school classroom, compared to the journey I was on with my parents.

College was no better, and that business class at the University of Vermont (UVM) had me wishing I could move again. Instead of sitting in class listening to business theory, I immersed myself in an actual business, taking a semester off from UVM to open Zoë’s Cookies. I ran the company out of my boyfriend’s (now my husband) tiny apartment kitchen. He even built me a beautiful rolling cart to launch my cookie-baking empire on the streets of Burlington, Vermont. The company was successful enough that I didn’t lose money, but soon it became evident that more school was probably a wise move.

Back at work on a fine arts degree, I haunted the art department looking for my medium. There was never a doubt that artists were my people. And yet…neither paint, clay, nor soldering was my love language; none of those things moved me to create in a way that left me satisfied. But I was getting closer.

Taking a part-time job at a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream shop, I was put in charge of decorating ice-cream cakes. Filling that pastry bag with cream, as simple as it seems now, was the first time I’d ever felt serenity in a task. I didn’t experience time, and I would have decorated those cakes even if they hadn’t been paying me—it felt like my art. Time seemed to melt away as I twirled swirls and shapes onto frozen sheets of cake. You might think that implies I was good at it, and that would be the wrong impression to go away with. I had fifteen minutes of training and no video tutorials to rely on, so I had to learn by trial and error. I think back now on some of those cakes and how rough they must have been, but I loved making them, even with their imperfections. I was too young at the time to realize that I was where I was meant to be. There were miles still to go.

FINDING MY BLISS

After graduation, I plodded along, working in advertising because it was supposed to be where creatives created. These were the 1980s, long before the Food Network made kitchens seem like a legitimate job, and blogging was decades from existing. Yet the work stifled me, and I found myself coming home at night and pouring my frustrations into a stand mixer. It wasn’t until I was married and settling into Minneapolis that my husband, after patiently listening to me whine about the cubicle I’d found myself working in, suggested I attend culinary school. Brilliant! I packed up and headed off to the prestigious Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in upstate New York. Once again, I found myself with a piping bag in my hand, and I immediately felt at home. I never looked back.

While I was at the CIA, I got a job; over the phone, sight unseen. It was with a Minneapolis chef named Andrew Zimmern, who was in need of a pastry chef assistant. Steeling my nerves, I took a giant leap of faith, left school unfinished, and landed spectacularly. Within six months, I was his executive pastry chef, and a lifelong friendship was born.

For a decade, I worked in professional kitchens—high-end catering and fine-dining restaurants. It wasn’t unusual to bake a thousand cupcakes or an ornate wedding cake while at the catering facility. The experience was invaluable because I had to do the same task over and over, piping buttercream rosettes on all those before-mentioned cupcakes; this honed my skills in a way that you just don’t get at culinary school or baking cookies at home, one recipe at a time. The pace and pressure were intense, and I loved every crazy minute of it.

CAKE IS (STILL MY) LOVE

Even though I have baked professionally for decades, I never tire of it. And my favorite thing to bake, after all these years, is cake. It is my medium, how I express my art and my love. It’s what I give to people for special events and how I busy my hands and mind when I am stressed or sad. A cake can turn a Tuesday into an occasion. There is no day that can’t be made better with a little slice. Cake is the way I tell my friends and family that I love them. When my son Charlie celebrated his birthday during his freshman year of college, I sent him a homemade cake. It was the best way I could think of to have a part of me with him. He and his dorm-mates made fast work of it and started requesting that cakes be sent regularly. I happily obliged!

I also profoundly enjoy the process of building a cake, finding the just-right recipe that a specific moment calls for. Old recipes are revisited like friends and often nudged into the perfect fit for a new era. I find fulfillment and delight in the process of creating, baking, and blowtorching (whenever I can find an excuse for busting out a flamethrower).

Part of the magic of cake is that what makes a great cake is somewhat subjective and emotional. There are cakes that are touted as the best in the world; I have tried many of these, and they left me yearning for something, someone, anything. They tasted as if they had been made perfectly but without the crucial ingredient—love. I don’t care if you make a cake from a box mix and scoop frosting out of a can; if you are enjoying the process and making that cake for someone you love, that cake will taste better than one made by a disgruntled professional. One of my favorite cakes of all time was made by a friend for my birthday, from a box, during a snowstorm. Was it the most delicious cake I’ve ever eaten? Hell no (sorry, Todd), but I was touched that he had so much fun making it for me; and as a professional pastry chef, people rarely want to bake for me. I am sending him a copy of this book, so that the next time we’re together on my birthday, he can bake me a delicious, homemade cake. And now that you have this book, you can make one too.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book began to take shape during an epic forty-five-mile cake-eating walk across Manhattan. I grabbed my best friend and we boarded a plane to New York City. The pace was ambitious: one mile, one slice. But we did it, forty-five cakes in all!

Because cake is always better enjoyed with others, and because two people eating forty-five pieces of cake is excessive, I pulled in some friends to share the bounty. I reconnected with people whom I hadn’t seen since high school; and over the course of three days, we shared slices such as a light-as-air sponge cake at Lady M’s on the Upper West Side and a Greek phyllo orange cake in Tribeca, with stops for Funfetti, carrot, chocolate, hummingbird, and a raspberry-stuffed charlotte along the way.

More cake walks followed through Los Angeles, Birmingham, Brooklyn, Madison, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia in the United States; Dublin, Ireland; and elsewhere. I ate phenomenal cakes that I couldn’t wait to re-create, along with some that were meh (and that’s being kind), both equally as inspiring and instructive to this book. I tasted cake triumphs and mistakes and I can now guide you to cake perfection every time.

In culinary school, I also studied the whys and hows of baking. There is a science to it, a bit of alchemy, and some hope that translates into lots of practice and process. Finally, when I made a cake, it would rise tall instead of collapsing. I unlocked the mysteries of textures. I mastered the tricks to prevent caramel from crystallizing in the pot. Soon I knew how to fix just about anything, including buttercream that had turned to soup in the mixer. Basically, I learned how NOT to panic. Instead, I enjoyed the process of baking so much that even my failures—which were many—added up to a level of confidence and competence that allowed me to become an award-winning baker, cookbook author, and baking instructor.

I have been teaching since my early days in the kitchen with Andrew Zimmern. He recognized my ability to explain complicated concepts to people who had very little, if any, experience baking. This was a time way before Instagram or Facebook—hell, this was before the internet—so he signed me up to teach at a local cooking school. I never stopped, and now I have more than twenty-five years of teaching experience to share with you.

This book spans all my favorite cakes, from family recipes such as Anna’s Hazelnut–Brown Butter Cake (this page) to cakes from my years in professional kitchens, like Chocolate Devil’s Food Cake (this page), and some new ones discovered during my cake-walk odysseys, like Hummingbird Cake (this page). The recipes get progressively more involved in each chapter. Some of the cakes you can toss together in a single bowl using nothing more than a spoon; but from there, I add techniques to create classic pound cakes, which are leavened with nothing more than air whipped into butter, or light-as-air cakes, made with egg whites that are super-delicate and delicious. Some cakes are simple, old worldly, and rustic, while others are sensational and adorned with flourishes that look complicated but are really easy to make when you know the secrets. The final cake in the book is a three-tier wedding cake, which is a gasp-inducing showstopper.

I want you to feel comfortable baking anything in this book. Some people will want to dive right in to the recipes and bake a special cake for a loved one’s birthday or for an after-school snack. Other bakers will want to know a little more about the whys and hows of baking the perfect cake. This book is for both the novice and the more experienced baker; there is truly something for everyone.

I created the Cake Academy section so you can jump to more information about the techniques I’m using. For those who share my enthusiasm, I geek out on things such as the science behind why egg whites whip up to perfection. But even if you aren’t interested in these details, you’ll still sail through the recipes. However, I recommend reading the chapter carefully if you want to be able to play with a recipe and give it your own spin. It’s remarkable how a touch of cake science and technique can be such a useful tool if your cakes aren’t coming out as you’d hoped. I will guide you through why that might be as well as put a note in every recipe if there is a lesson to be learned in the Cake Academy. I have the tricks to help you get your baking just where you want it to be. My first tip is to crank up your favorite music, any tunes that move you, then tie on your apron and get to baking cake!

INGREDIENTS

It is often said that a recipe is only as good as the ingredients used. I agree, so I recommend you buy all of your favorite brands when baking these cakes. When I have a particular recommendation for a brand, I will call it out. I do so only when I’ve tested with several and decided that one produced a cake that is superior to all the others. I try to bake with organic ingredients when possible, but I know they aren’t always an option. In some cases, the natural and/or organic products don’t create the cake I want. For instance, naturally derived food coloring is not as vivid as those made with artificial color. Organic cake flour is not as pure white as its nonorganic counterpart. They will all work, but just be aware that the results may be slightly different. Sometimes what you are eating is your priority, and sometimes you want it to look just so. No judging; you decide.

This is where I am going to get down on my knees and beg you to make ingredient substitutions in your cakes very carefully. There are times when I suggest you play with the type of fruit, spices, or varieties of chocolate called for in the recipe. Those substitutions are fun and will make a cake to fit your mood and occasion. However, swapping out gentle cake flour with equal amounts of a hearty whole-wheat flour will throw off the chemical balance of the recipes. You could accidentally end up with something you love, but chances are more likely it will be a dense and disappointing experiment. I spent a long time testing these recipes and I suggest you give them a go as I wrote them, before putting your creative spin on them.

CHOCOLATE

Chocolate is the grande dame of cake ingredients,