Baking Class with Great Jones and Claire Saffitz!

and now i'm very excited to introduce claire who is just this book is a triumph i mean it's we're so excited to have her share a recipe today from this and like claire is just a enormously talented pastry chef home cook just skilled recipe developer and it's really yeah it's really an honor to have her here sharing your talents with us today so i'll let you take it from here okay thank you sierra and thank you natasha um i'm super excited to be here for a lot of reasons um first and foremost to support god's love which is an incredible organization and like sierra said she and i are both like local in new york um and god's love is such an important sort of pillar of the community in new york um and i recently had the pleasure of taking a tour of the facility which is so impressive and i got to see those personalized birthday cakes they make for all of the clients and it is just it's an expansive organization that also manages to be so personal um and so it's really a pleasure and privilege for me to support them and to have all of you here following along and of course it's like sorry i have a light that like flickers off and on so sorry that might get annoying um hopefully it doesn't like strobe um we're in prime holiday baking season right now and so i'm really excited to bake this recipe from dessert person along with you but like sierra said um i'm here to answer any of your holiday baking questions or baking questions in general so use the chat as she said and sierra will be talking with me and asking me questions as i go along and i i know at least some of you are baking this recipe like simultaneously we're going to do some synchronized baking which is super exciting and i'm going to use this phenomenal great jones cake pan to make it which i just realized i'm like christmas themed with the green pan and the red shirt so um i'm just really excited so i'm gonna get started because we have some baking to do and it's also i just love that this is sort of like early on saturday and it's really cold and kind of gross outside in new york and it's just like i'm in my sweats and my socks and very excited about turning on the oven um so okay i want to say thank you and happy holidays and now i'm going to start so the recipe that we selected is from dessert person and it is for a pear and chestnut cake and this is from my favorite chapter in the book which is the loaf cake and single layer cakes chapter just because these are the kind of casual any time of day cakes that i love to have around and that i love to make and most of them feature some kind of seasonal fruit so obviously it's fall or you know really winter um and pears and season so here is the cake so this is kind of like a close-up shot so there's pear slices on top and then chestnuts and chopped up pear in the cake and it's really easy and fun to make you will need a stand mixer so i'll just say that you could make it with a hand mixer if you had one sorry my stand mixer has like a hair trigger when you turn it on so it accidentally turns on all the time uh okay so i have all the ingredients ready hopefully you do too um they're mostly measured out but i'll also take my time and go slowly if you have to measure everything out but it's always a good idea to start with your what we call misonpass so pulling all of your ingredients down making sure you have the correct pan all of your measuring cups all of that so hopefully you can see if at any point you like don't have a good view of something you can put in a chat and sarah can let me know um and i'll show you i'll tilt the camera down you know sorry you guys are all in my zoom so i'll see what i can do about the frame um okay you'll notice if you've made anything out of dessert person that every recipe starts the same way which is it will tell you to prepare your pan and preheat your oven so that's what i'm gonna do first so i have an oven rack in the center position anytime you're baking one thing you always bake in the center that's just for even baking this i literally had like a strobe light sorry um and then we're going to prepare the pan so the recipe in the book calls for a skillet but it also works great in a cake pan like this so this is the great jones nine inch what was it the patty pan what does it call a patty cake right okay clear um if someone is using a cast iron pan do they need to adjust the baking temperature no same temperature the timing might be a little bit different it could depending on the dimensions if you're baking and something that's wider and therefore your cake is a little bit thinner it could bake a little bit faster but we'll we always start checking a little early so not to worry um but so 350 is our temp um which is sort of like the the standard you know to baking temperature for most cakes and so great these the great jones pan has these little wavy lines at the bottom which at first glance seem just really fun and decorative but also help to prevent sticking on the very bottom um but i'm gonna line it with parchment paper anyway just as an extra precaution because i just think like you know what you really don't want to happen is to have your cake stick in the pan and so it's always good to have an insurance policy for the chestnuts and creaming if you don't have a mixer yes you can you absolutely can uh good question so this cake is pear and chestnut these are two ingredients that come into season at the same time this is a time of year where you will see chestnuts at the market um and i have done the thing where i bought actual whole chestnuts and like roasted them and peeled them and it's a huge pain in the ass and i'm never doing it again so what i do instead is i buy like jars or bags of them so here are some that i have left over they come in a jar like this or in a little bag with a little zip top and like they're pretty much ready to go so i have all of that here and then i know i'll get back to the pan in a second but um i have some really tiny pair so i have four instead of three but just go ahead and weigh them out it's about a little over a pound total of fruit and i call for pairs that are firm ripe which just means like it's not super soft but it will yield you know so it's i'll get a clean cut it's not mushy but it is a pair that if you were to eat it you would enjoy it because it was it's ripe enough what about if someone is using walnuts instead of chestnuts if you're using walnuts if you're using walnuts walnuts are a relatively good swap in terms of like a nut alternative because they're pretty soft then you're gonna really want to do that part of the food processor to break them up um you know chestnuts are an interesting nut because they're very soft like they have um i just saw someone say also pecans you could also use pecans but like these will break up really easily i could just smush them between my hands whereas other nuts don't have that same moisture content so if you're using any nut as a substitute you're going to want to do that initial step of mixing the chestnuts or nut and sugar together in the food processor okay but let's quickly do the pan so i have some butter here that's room temp in addition to the room temp butter that i'm using in the recipe which is 10 tablespoons i'm gonna give i like to use a pastry brush you could use your fingertips you could use the paper from the butter which i do often and i'm just going to give a generous coating of butter in the bottom and sides of the pan so get it all around and then once you have a good coating and i like to use you could use melted butter and it's okay if it was still warm you could use like you know if you have like pam or something a spray you could use that as well and now i put a round of parchment paper on the very bottom so not up the sides but just like a circle that's the same size as the pan and to do that you can either trace the pan i have like a sharpie or a pen that i keep in my kitchen you can trace around it or you can do this trick which i'll show you which is take your piece of parchment paper and fold it like into a half like a triangle the long ways and then just continue to fold that triangle in half making like subsequently you know smaller and smaller triangles so that you have a point and then once you get it pretty thin i'll show you what this looks like i have like i keep folding along this edge and so i have this point here i'm going to basically line up the center of that point with the center of the pan i'll go even closer to you and then where i see the edge line up with the triangle i'm gonna snip and i'm really just trying to make something that has like the same radius as the pan and like eyeball it's fine usually i end up cutting a little too small or a little too big but it really doesn't matter so i snipped it and then when you unfold you have this round and because i buttered it it's gonna stick oh see like i cut this one too small it doesn't matter uh so then just go ahead smooth that in i try to eliminate any air bubbles because we buttered it it will stick and then go ahead and give a little brush of butter onto that parchment you can be generous always and then one thing i like to do with cakes is give like a coating of sugar all around that pan and i just like it because it adds some crunch and a little bit of texture and of course a little bit of extra sweetness so um use granulated sugar that's what the recipe calls for but i also just had like an odds and end bag of this like more you know natural clean sugar so it doesn't really matter uh so i threw in a handful i don't know this part's kind of fun just like move it around tap it get some sugar coating around the sides as well um yes if you are concerned about sticking or you don't have extra sugar or you don't want to add the extra sugar you can also flour it and that will further prevent sticking as well okay so that's our prepped pan i can throw that off to the side and now let's talk about cake cake mison pass and cake prep so this recipe as i said gets built in the stand mixer if you're substituting another nut for the chestnuts go ahead and start the recipe in the food processor to really grind everything but because chestnuts are so soft i can do this part in the stand mixer and they will all break down so the idea of this cake is it's flavored with this subtle earthy flavor of chestnuts and that is kind of like ground up into a paste along with the sugar and then it's studded with chopped up pear and then pair of slices on top so it's a really lovely subtle cake um but that also gets great moisture from the addition of delicious creme fraiche which i have right here so i have my eggs butter you know these are all the usual suspects when it comes to cake ingredients besides the chestnuts and the fruit so the first thing i'll do is mix up my dry ingredients i have one and a third cups of all-purpose flour in this bowl right here and to that i'm going to add what we call the chemical leavener so that is baking powder two teaspoons of baking powder so add that right into the bowl and now i'm also going to add a little bit of baking soda often in a recipe that has an acidic ingredient in this case that acidic ingredient is crumb fresh there will sometimes be a little bit of baking soda added and that just gives the cake a little bit of extra lift because if you remember back to your second grade science project where you made the volcano and you like did the baking soda and vinegar baking soda reacts with acid and creates bubbles and gas so a quarter teaspoon of baking soda as well all right so whisk that all together and this is just to get all those dry ingredients dispersed and evenly mixed and then that helps you have a more evenly mixed cake in the end so i'll set that aside bring in some of these other guys what mixer attachment are you using ah excellent question so i'm going to use the paddle which is really used for like beading and mixing whereas the whisk attachment is really for whipping and incorporating air although the paddle and the paddle like the action of the paddle against the bowl really kind of like crushes things and beats it against the side of the bowl and that's why we use that for that creaming step in cake making so in most cake making the first step is what's called creaming you mix the butter and sugar together and what happens is and i'll show you the sugar crystals have like sharp edges and they create little micro air pockets in the butter uh and that those air pockets that makes that mixture really light and fluffy and then that is giving the cake like an airiness and a lift and stuff so you get that fluffy cake texture if you don't have i just a question if you don't have creme fraiche you can use sour cream you can use full fat yogurt that's all good okay so before i start actually building the cake and putting together the batter i'm going to prep my pears so let me move these things out of the way can you guys see the pears on my surface a little closer okay so these are bartlett pairs you could use bosque you could use anju you could use comics it's really up to you whatever you like um i like bartlett because they're kind of pretty and they have like this one has a little blush of red on it um so they're kind of festive for holidays so i'm gonna slice three of them and chop up one of them the chopped up one is going to go inside the cake in the batter so when i cut anything like pear or apple i with a core i cut down alongside the core so instead of cutting through it and then removing it i just cut off to the side a little bit and remove what i call lobes of fruit and then you're left with just like this little core which i sometimes like nibble on and that's what you've got so this first one i'm going to chop up don't i i couldn't care in the least about the shape of what you're chopping like cubes whatever can be pretty coarse with it i think this my pair is a good level of ripeness i probably bought these like on wednesday and they've been softening ever since so they're not mushy i can still get clean cuts but like it's tender still so okay and then once i chopped up the one pair i'm gonna slice the others and now i'll be a little bit more careful with the slicing on these because these will be decorative on top so same method of removing the fruit from that center core do all them at once you kind of go even when you're just making one single thing efficiency is always good so like you know take cut off all the cores then slice all the fruit at the same time okay so now i have all these different sort of size lobes some of them are like you know a full side of the fruit some of them are thinner and now i'm going to slice them all thinly lengthwise so down from what would be like the top the stem end to the base and the idea is to get even pretty slices and i like cutting it this way because it maintains the natural shape of the pear and just makes like the prettiest pattern on top so as i'm slicing here's a really good tip i'm using like a relatively this knife could be sharper but use your sharpest knife this one has a kind of a thin blade and i slice with the tip of the knife like really from like the first few inches near the tip um rather than back here and that's just because the fruit doesn't like the thinner part of the blade the fruit doesn't want to stick to so you don't have to keep like wiping a slice off of the tip of the knife you can just keep the fruit stays on the board you can just keep slicing give yourself a few minutes to do this if for any reason your ingredients are not room temp which they should be for this cake so maybe your eggs are a little bit cold or your crab fresh is a little bit cold while you're cutting the fruit you can like actually my cream fresh is kind of cold i'm going to put it right by the oven so it can warm up a bit and your eggs if those are cold you can throw them in a little hot water and like cheat it a little bit to get those things ready to go this part takes a minute or two and then you can just leave these on the cutting board so pears will oxidize oxidize a little bit but not like an apple where the flesh will turn brown so i just actually leave all the slices like after i've cut the fruit i leave it together so like this one is sliced but i'm leaving it kind of intact where the the half you know maintains its shape and that helps me when i go to assemble the top of the cake i like when you can sort of still see that shape and just fan the slices out okay is the room with me how's everyone doing any questions so far got some thumbs up okay good someone says they're a slow slicer which i can relate i know i'm trying to go fast because i'm feeling like i'm taking a long time but um you guys don't have to you can take your time with this of course yeah um slicing i understand the other thing is when you're slicing like especially when you're doing like little slices like that instead of having your fingers be like this when they hold and then you have the risk of like slicing that off pretend like you're playing the piano i don't know if that metaphor resonate resonates for anyone or like holding your hand in like a little claw shape and that way if you slice down the blade hits the front of your knuckles and your fingers and not your finger tips which is much more dangerous so um and then just make sure you tuck that son out of the way my mom will my mom will still be like oh my god like she'll get nervous and i'm like mom i'm a professional like don't get i'm i'm fine and then i watch her cut and then i started freaking out i i saw that you dedicated the book to your mom which was which i had also noticed that i was using as my bookmarks these like photos of my mom as a child so that a lot to me i'm curious if you could share more about how your mom bakes what you learned from her did you grow up doing this together yeah i've been thinking about this a lot more just because of that dedication and and i've been asked about it and my mom not really taught me how to bake she's a phenomenal baker and i think at this stage in her life you know her kids are all grown up like she bakes less and less but when i was a kid she baked constantly and made a lot of quick breads and cakes and cookies she went through like a long a years long phase when i was a kid where she made um like fresh bread all the time so that was just always sort of like a it was almost like wallpaper you know in my life a little bit and i didn't even realize it until later that my mom had such an impressive skill set when it came to baking um so and she helped me so much with this book so i just felt like i had to dedicate it to her um and i wanted to do that and it was it meant a lot to her so it was we bonded a lot over me writing this cookbook um which is very very sweet okay so if you're not done slicing your pears that's fine keep going i'm gonna move on so the first step i'm gonna do as i keep sort of jumping ahead and talking about is combining the chestnuts and the sugar and the action of the paddle against the side of the bowl like crushes up and turns those chestnuts into a paste and those sugar crystals because they're sharp um helps to break it all down so again for like the 18th time if you're using regular nuts pecans walnuts whatever it is do this part in the food processor because just the paddle and the stand mixer won't break down a harder nut on its own okay so that's the sugar i have the chestnut that's 300 grams which is about two cups it's three quarters of a cup of sugar and that's separate from the sugar in the pan and also separate from the two tablespoons of sugar that i'm holding back for the very top of the cake so to help break up those chestnuts i'm also going to add my salt to this i did not add it to the dry mixture so a teaspoon of kosher salt and if you're an experienced baker and you've made any recipes at a dessert person you might notice that there's like a slightly larger proportion of salt in a lot of my recipes and that's because salt is a flavor enhancer it's there to draw out the flavors of the other ingredients not necessarily make it salty i mean sometimes it's there to make it salty but usually it's just there to enhance everything and i like to think that that's important because the recipes have moderate sugar content and so when there's not as much sugar in a recipe sometimes you need that extra salt to bring it out um and so that was diamond kosher uh so it's one teaspoon if you're using morton's which is more common in other parts of the country use half that amount so about a half teaspoon um okay so now i'm adding my vanilla this is i keep this i use a lot of vanilla beans and so i keep this jar that i put so it's basically vodka and i submerge the empty vanilla beans in here but i also just pour vanilla extract in here to fortify it so this is just like a very concentrated um vanilla extract so two teaspoons and all that goes in with the chestnuts so i'm going to start with this mixer on low and just when i see all those chestnuts start to break up i can increase the speed a little bit okay so make sure you have everything else ready to go you saw me measuring out the rest was like two tablespoons of rum or pear brandy if you have it i i like to bake a lot with alcohols like that because it's kind of like um when you add soy sauce or a fermented ingredient to savory cooking you're at you're taking all of the time and complexity that went into that ingredient and like adding it to your cooking to to increase the flavor so to me that's what alcohol does in baking um so i'm actually this is an armenia that i'm using which i love baking with because it's like a little funky um arminius is similar to cognac and it's it's one of those things like it smells so good and i hate the taste of it but i like it in baking um all right so i'm going to turn off the speed a little bit so now things are starting to look familiar we have our eggs our wet ingredients which our are the creme fresh and the alcohol whatever kind how do you feel about vanilla bean paste oh i love vanilla bean paste that's a great product i say go for it use the same amount or maybe you can use a little less like if you don't want to use two whole pieces of that it's pretty cozy so use throwing a teaspoon or so um okay so this is starting to break up i'm going to show you what this looks like with my spatula here's what the chestnuts look like it has formed this very coarse paste and it's really starting to break down so at this point i'm going to add my butter this is 10 tablespoons of room temperature unsalted butter uh and this time of year like it actually gets really cold in my kitchen until i turn the oven on um so sometimes i have a hard time actually this time of year with getting the butter really room temperature uh but that's all right your apartment's always either too cold or way too hot yes always always truly um the other day i actually turned on the uh if i don't so my radiators are off right now and if i don't do that then it becomes stifling but now it's just freezing and so the other day i just turned on my oven because i was cold in the whole time um can you stress the texture you're looking for from the food processor oh so if you're using yeah so in the stand mixer it's still pretty coarse right now it almost looks like chunky applesauce not quite as loose but like that's visually that's kind of what it looks like um uh if you're using a food processor it's up to you in a food processor you could get the entire thing totally smooth where it almost looks like a like a coarse nut butter that's fine you can go there it's up to you if you want pieces of the nuts in your final cake which i think are really nice and adds great texture or if you want it totally smooth okay so i added the butter and now we're kind of entering the creaming stage where i'm mixing the butter with that chestnut sugar mixture and i want this to get really light and fluffy the chestnuts will continue to kind of break down and smooth out a little bit and it will leave it'll still leave little not that i like when you get bite down you get like a little crumbly piece of chestnut oh yeah what if you don't drink or want to use alcohol what else you don't want to use yeah if you don't use alcohol you could use um you can use a little bit more crumb fresh you could use milk it's totally fine you could if there was like a fruit juice that you wanted to add uh you could do that um but like milk or almond milk even like all of any of that's fine any any liquid where you don't mind the flavor of it in there uh or if you want to just add a little more crunch that's good too all right so i'm going to let this go but also give it a little bit of a scrape here and there so you can see after adding that butter the mixture has like lightened quite a bit in color and color added texture and so i think people in general sometimes undershoot the butter and sugar creaming stage so you want to really let this go it's possible to like do it too much um but generally people don't have the patience to get to that point so i think that the risk is actually pretty low so my mixture is on medium high at this stage you could build this whole cake in the food processor but if you have the patience and the space to transfer it to a stand mixer or use a hand mixer then that's probably a good idea you'll get a little bit more air into the batter that way so basically you started by breaking down the nuts and the sugar in the food processor and then you want to move to the mixer and then just build the rest of the batter that way again if you do the whole thing in the food processor that's fine just follow along it'll still turn out great all right so this is looking light and fluffy so the cake what i like about this cake is that it marries the subtle flavors of both pear and chestnut um but if you wanted to add a little warm spice i think it could be really nice in this so i think i just felt like a little tired of cinnamon the cinnamon is in everything um but i think cardamom would be a really beautiful accompaniment to these flavors cinnamon if that's your favorite spice even like a little bit of nutmeg or clove any of those kind of warm spices i think would go really well in this cake and also just feels very festive for the holidays so um if you feel like adding that flavor um go ahead and stir that into your dry ingredients here so if you're using cinnamon i would add maybe a teaspoon cardamom maybe a half a teaspoon to me that's a stronger flavor um i'm actually really really sensitive to nutmeg so i would not use that much i would maybe only put like a quarter teaspoon and clove clove like even less clove is so powerful and i love cloves but like i would do an eighth of a teaspoon because it'll be the only thing you can change if you do too much is there any danger of over mixing there is but given most people's spanishers at home and the fact that like you're probably not walking away and forgetting about it for 10 minutes you're probably the risk is low of overbeating so at this stage that is if at this shape the risk of overbeating it is low but once you start to add the dry ingredients that's when you want to be a little bit more careful about how much you're mixing it because at that stage yes but at the creaming stage not really um okay so this is looking really good it's super light and fluffy it almost looks like frosting um which it sort of is basically um so now i'm gonna add the eggs we're moving on to the next phase which is adding the eggs i'm gonna slow down the mixer don't have it going that high just because then you'll like splatter everywhere so add them one at a time i crack them into one container but you know eggs like hold their shape especially if they're fresh so even if they're all in one container you should be able to add them one at a time and then after you add it and it starts to incorporate you can go ahead and speed up that mixture a little bit and same thing if you're using a hand mixer drop the speed a little bit add the other one and once it's incorporated you can turn it up then go ahead and beat it pretty well at this stage again you won't over mix it okay so i give things a scrape really really often because part of the key to a well-made cake is just even mixing it's like the more scraping down you do in the process before you add the flour the more even it'll be and then the less mixing you'll have to do once you add the flour okay so now moving on to the next stage of the process we're going to add the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients and you've probably noticed this if you've made cakes before and you're sort of familiar with recipe language is you do that in an alternating order so you start with dry you alternate with the wet then you end again with the dry and the reason for this is because this helps to maintain the emulsion of your batter so basically what you have in here is an emulsion of fat and eggs and water if i were to add like all the wet ingredients for example at this stage i would overwhelm the mixture and break the emulsion and like your cake will still turn out okay it's all right if your batter is a little bit broken which basically means you see like little particles suspended in liquid um but by alternating wet and dry starting and ending with dry you maintain that emulsion and you'll get the best texture in your final cake okay so i'm gonna start on low again low so i don't like blast myself with a flower plume i'm going to add about a third of this mixture and you get oh my god see it it like has a mind of its own okay also like eyeball this part the exact volume isn't that important all right that was probably more than a third but whatever and now i'm gonna add just when you see the flower disappear go ahead and add your creme fraiche i'm going to talk for one moment about how this is one of my favorite kitchen tools it is this little tiny heat proof spatula that is just like the best thing ever for when you're measuring ingredients into any kind of cup then and then you scrape it out this thing is just perfect for it so i'm going to add the creme fraiche microfresh is a little bit cold so what happens when you add a cold ingredient to a batter like this which is butter based is like i had i started with room temp butter which is what you want in order to be able to incorporate air into it and have this beautiful fluffy texture but then when you add something cold like a cold egg or cold dairy that drops the temperature of the butter and has the potential to then make it make it firm up again and you kind of lose that suppleness and that also that emulsion so that's just to say that like when recipes say make sure you have all your ingredients from temperature it's not just saying that to be annoying like there's a real logic and reason behind that okay so now still on low once i see all that creme fresh incorporate i'm going to add another addition of flour so it's now half of the remaining flour which would be a third of the total i know the mixer is still on low my other liquid ingredient those two tablespoons of brandy cognac rum whatever you've got and then my remaining flour those three editions of flour and two editions of liquids so that we always start and end with the dry okay so i like pulsed the mixer a lot at the end and that's just to sort of like simultaneously make sure i'm not over mixing but also making sure it's well combined so it's okay if you see some streaks of flour in there go ahead and still turn off your mixture i usually end up finishing cake batter by hand and that's just so i can really get a look inside the bowl and see is there any butter that's trapped in like a dead zone at the very bottom or you know is there a clump of flour somewhere in there so i love i love a stand mixer but i also like to have my own sense of what's going on and so i'll usually finish it by hand so i'm gonna pop this one out how's my frame can you guys see what i'm doing for the most part let me know if you want a close-up of anything okay so now just scraping off the paddle okay so like i said using a flexible spatula go ahead and really scrape down those sides and give it a fold so folding sometimes i wonder if people understand what folding means because i'm used to saying it but i also think it's like a kind of a vague unclear term folding means let me watch it's creek that was one of my favorite scenes in shit's creek where moira tries to explain to daniel how to fold in the cheese and neither one of them has any idea what they're talking about um and then maybe think like do people know what folding means and it is worth explaining so folding basically means it's a gentle way of mixing and it means that you're taking what's at the very bottom and you're trying to bring it up to the top so i'm reaching down with my spatula and then i am lifting up and sort of as i scrape on the side and then there's a rotation of the wrist and a turning and that's taking what's on the bottom and bringing it up to the top so you see it's like a down go down around as you're scraping and then and then rotate and that's how folding is so this batter looks good go ahead is there a technical reason behind alternating wet and dry ingredients that reason is to keep the batter emulsified so if you were to add all of the liquid like before adding any flour um it would you would basically like overwhelm the emulsion it's like adding too much oil if you're when you're trying to make mayonnaise in the beginning and then the whole thing breaks and then once the emulsion is broken especially in cake batter you can't like you can try to add flour to bring it back together but by alternating them a little bit at a time you're just maintaining that smooth like fluffy cake batter and not causing it to break so yes there is again like same thing with room temperature i think people are so used to seeing that kind of language around cakes that it's easy to question like does this really matter you know and sometimes there's recipe language that doesn't matter where like i don't sift my flower anymore you know that's just not necessary so sometimes things get outdated but that is not that is not an outmoded idea okay so i'll show you what this texture looks like but when i so when i did fold it and scrape at the bottom i did see like a little bit of unincorporated batter that's why i'm doing that and now this is what the batter looks like it's thick but also super light and fluffy i don't know if you guys can see sorry now i'm like really up close um eating batter actually i like kind of i used to be a big batter eater and then i just stopped because it was like i just had it around all the time sometimes i forget to taste the batter but you should definitely taste the batter if you don't mind the raw egg which i don't it's like oh it is good it is very tasty i'll eat like okay like i'll eat anything anywhere i don't love all those but i do really like eating pata shoe raw which is weird but i just think it's delicious so everyone i was recently having this conversation about like all the weird dough things that people like to eat some people like to nibble on raw pie dough which is not my thing but i can eat his own um okay so i'm adding a chopped up pear so you can see i have my sliced pear here my chocolate pear here so add just the chopped pear and adding fruit like this to a cake obviously it's adding flavor when you add fruit like this whether it's dried fruit well i guess not really dry food because that would take moisture out the fresh fruit when you add like this is adding moisture to the cake and it just means that the cake is going to keep and not dry out even longer because you have that fruit in there that's not a lot if you were to add too much fruit sometimes adding too much fruit to a batter especially if the fruit is is raw or uncooked um you add too much liquid and then your cake doesn't really fully bake through and you have something kind of wet and unappealing but pear is low moisture we're not adding that much that's not gonna happen here okay so fold that in fold it in um and now our cake batter is done so there it is in the bowl okay so now this is why we started with a cake pan because now your batter is ready and you have your pan ready to go there's no delay we're going to scrape everything into the panel i'm a lefty but i'll try to switch so you can see me do it i know we're running a tad bit late which is actually my fault um but we're nearly there so scrape all the batter in and this mostly fills this pan this the great jones pan is a nine inch pan right and it's nine inches right or is it ten i think it's 9. um but it doesn't overflow this cake will obviously rise but it's not because it's a thick batter it's unlikely to overflow i've had many many many an overflowing cake which then drips out to the bottom of the oven and burns and makes smoke okay so scrape that batter in um and now my i'm a broken record but my favorite kitchen tool of all time my little offset spatula it's just the best thing for spreading and so go ahead and smooth out the surface you can just use the same flexible spatula as before um because it's a thick batter it's it's prone to like forming air pockets so just you know be aware of that and smooth it out make sure there aren't any big air pockets like in the sides of the pan or anything like that but also like you're not going for perfection because we're covering the top of the cake with more pear just i worked on this recipe i think i really finished this recipe about a year ago maybe a little longer and it's really fun to revisit because i'm just reminded about how much i like it it's a good feeling okay so the cake batter in the pan you can see it's full but not overfilled like you don't really want to fill a pan more than two-thirds to three-quarters of the way depending on the batter so this is just right it will rise basically to the top and now we're going to do the final step which is arranging our pear slices on the surface um and this part i think it's like you want to be artfully sort of haphazard about it you know like i like things to look really natural and not overly perfect you know like i'm not going to sit here and like make concentric circles or anything but but i like keeping the kind of natural form of the pear so basically i grab like a little stack of slices and fan them out and then you just kind of throw them on the top of the cake and let them fall wherever they want to and i fan them out in a way that what would have been the top of the pair near the stem which is the narrower part is like that's the part that i'm fanning out and then where the pair had its base that's kind of where it's staying together so i'll take like three or four slices at a time no more than that maybe four or five and just kind of create these little fans and then in order to keep everything looking kind of just the right amount of arranged i like rotate the cake pan a little bit and then you know they just get layered on top of each other and then i just think it ends up looking really really pretty so that's kind of fun and also feel you should also really overlap them because this is on the top of the cake it's going to get a blast of heat from the oven and so these slices will shrink a little bit so it might seem like there's a lot of fruit or you know there's a lot of overlap but they'll all kind of shrink and so you'll end up seeing little areas of the cake popping through okay so i'll try not to take too much time doing this but you can take your time at home like nothing is going to happen to the batter it's pretty stable and then make sure you have that remaining two tablespoons of sugar nearby because that's going to go all the way on top one thing i rediscovered when working on this book is just like what a great garnish plain old granulated sugar is because it just especially with cake batter where you have eggs in it like there's a cool thing that happens where the sugar on the surface kind of reacts with like the foamy eggs in the batter and makes this crackly like delicious sugary top so i just garnish this with plain old sugar okay i'm almost done i have like another half of a pair um so if you have if you like cover the whole surface and you still have pair left go ahead and take those slices either one or two at a time and just kind of tuck them in between like any gaps that you see so you don't have to keep them all intact at that point it just can be like oh like there's a little space i'm gonna put two of them right there there's a little space i'll put a couple right there that part can be up to you um i actually thinking about it there's no reason why you couldn't do this with apple if you wanted to make this version again apple and another nut of course i mean at that point it's like kind of a different cake because you're not either using pair or chestnut but the idea is sound and will work if you want to do it that way um okay so i have just a few slices left also you notice i didn't peel the pear i didn't feel the hair that was going in the batter or on top um you could peel the pear in the batter but like the skin kind of breaks down and is totally inoffensive um and of course on top i like it there because it adds a little bit of color so you're short on pairs do you need to cover the whole top to keep you don't have to cover it i actually i do like when the cake peeks through so it's that's an aesthetic choice and that could happen if your pairs were small or if you didn't cut them super thin but that's totally fine like they'll bake through they'll get tender um you can fan them out a little bit more or just leave them and you know you could do like you see sometimes those classic french pear tarts where you have like a section of pear in each sort of slice like you know arranged around in a radial pattern like you could do it that way um it doesn't have to cover the whole surface so here's what it looks like if you can see so it's like when you i like it when you can look at a recipe and know what's in it so it's like i know this is a pear cake because it has the unmistakable shape of pears on top um okay i just got nervous that this isn't sugar but it is okay so i tasted it always if you're not sure if it's sugar or salt definitely give it a taste i've made that mistake before okay so this is the final two tablespoons of sugar and because i want the sugar to cover everything i kind of hold it up maybe 10 inches or so above the cake and that's just so the crystals spread out as i shake it i'm rotating the pan so i'm just covering everything okay and now this goes into the oven we have our oven on 350 that rack is in the center and i this cake bakes it depends on the pan that you're using as i said whether it's a if it's a narrower pan and you have a thicker cake it'll take a little bit longer if you're using a wider skillet where the cake is thinner it'll take a little bit longer um i think the big time is like 35 to 40 minutes or so let me double check that um and i so i do have a baked version obviously everyone at home if you're baking along you will not have a cake to taste along with me in a few minutes but um set your timer be aware often i know something is done before the timer goes off because of the smell it smells you know like a done cake and so i check it um but in the meantime i'm gonna unroll the one that i made and show it to you and then sierra you and i can answer people's questions about holiday baking if they have questions about this cake or anything else whether it's cookies or bread or anything i'm happy to answer um as i show you the finished cake so let me know i'm just going to double check the fake time because i've forgotten uh the bake time is what oh that's a different cake i was like that's the apple keep this in an hour and 20 minutes knew that that was not right oh 50 to 60 minutes okay so a little bit longer thank you thank you sean martin 50-60 minutes okay um throw these in there wait someone has a question that i also have what did you name the new kitten oh the new the new kitten's name is archie because he's a redhead so which is perfect for him and it took us several days to come up with it um but then but then once i thought of archie it really stuck he's um he's blind so we're taking him to a cat ophthalmologist on tuesday there's a feline a feline ophthalmologist and so and he's been i mean he was a stray that we picked up now now i'm just talking about archie um and so we've had to keep him separate from the other cats because he's like getting over a couple of infections so we haven't introduced him yet and i'm very nervous about it but um we're obsessed with him and he's the cutest sweetest cat and like we were not planning on getting a kitten but then we had to and we're so happy so yeah sweet archie i like that's the question people have that went up fast okay um yeah so ask me holiday well here yes do you want me to unmold it now or answer questions what shall i do you pick choose your own adventure um here's what i'm going to do i'm going to tell you how to unmold it and then as i'm kind of plating it sarah like asks me questions because i can do both at the same time so this is just a quick note to say when you think your cake is nearing the point of doneness here's what you want to look for i use a cake an actual cake tester which is this little wire thing with this handy little plastic handle but i also keep nearby uh like a little wooden skewer which is just as good or a toothpick so you want to basically if if you have to move a slice of pear out of the way go ahead but you basically want to go into the center of the cake and press straight down all the way to the bottom when you pull it out there should be no wet batter clinging to the tester it might look a little bit shiny because of the butter and everything in the cake but there'll be no batter so that's when it's done let it cool completely in the pan and then you want to cut around the sides so i use you can use a butter knife i also i usually don't use a sharpener because i don't want to sting the pan or you know affect the finish but you want to slice keeping it flush with the side of the pan go ahead and cut all the way around which i've already done and now i'm going to unmold it by inverting it pull off the parchment and then i'm going to reinvert onto a serving plate and now i'm ready to answer all of your holiday questions okay so that just came out and actually the parchment stayed in the pan which is ideal so i don't have to peel it off here it wasn't quite centered and now we have our beautiful pear cake which smells so good and i'm excited to eat it and i actually haven't eaten anything today yet so all right let's hear your questions okay we've got we've got a ton coming in what recipe from dessert person would you recommend to bake for hanukkah oh um hanukkah i mean the traditional dessert for hanukkah is souffle or the jelly doughnuts which i don't have in this book because it's not technically baking um but i would probably just i guess i think chocolate cause i think of gelt and there's a really really lovely flourless chocolate cake in the book which i actually designed originally to be a passover cake because there's no dairy and no flour um but that is like a fantastic there's something about that recipe i think because i thought about it for passover that just makes me feel like it's a great holiday recipe so in the book it's called the flourless chocolate wave cake because as the cake kind of settles and cools it gets this like wavy edge which is really cool so also very straightforward and not not hard to make so that's a really good one what is the best bread to start baking with i really want to get into bread making first off welcome to 2020 to whoever wrote yes yes i'm yes i i hear you when i feel you um i highly recommend focaccia i actually recently had like i started a dessert person little series on youtube and the first thing i made with all recipes from the book and the first thing i made was not dessert even though it's a dessert person series it was focaccia and i think it is the ideal starter recipe for bread it's very hard to mess up and you're baking it in a pan so you don't have to worry about like forming it or shaping which can be a little tricky so and it uses active dry yeast you can find in any grocery store so there's like three ingredients you know it's yeast flour water salt olive oil maybe that's fine if you count water but and salt but anyway that's a great one i highly recommend that as an excellent place to start for bread baking are there any other common instructions in baking recipes that you either take very literally um or ignore like the sifted flour um there are certain and i think about it in terms of language a lot like there's one instruction that i take very very literally which is you sometimes see in what i are called egg foam cakes where like you the first step rather than butter and sugar and creaminess together you start with the eggs and the sugar and you whip it until it's really thick and often what you see is the term slowly dissolving ribbon like beat until you have a you know it falls off the whisk into a slowly dissolving ribbon um and i look for that i literally look look for it to be like a you know a rope that is like coiling up onto itself as it falls into the pan so as it falls into the bowl so and if it doesn't do it go longer so i i mean i guess i take all of it pretty literally um trying to think if there's anything where i just totally disregard sometimes sometimes like i guess when it it like challenges my own gut i'll i'll disregard i try to listen to my gut so if it because like sometimes there's errors in recipes and so it might say like you know makes one loaf and i'm making it and i'm like this is way too much batter for this pan you know i think this makes two or something like that you know that's when if if it goes counter to my instincts then i try to question it and when i don't question it and i do it often i was right i was like i should have listened to what i thought initially um so yes it happens what recipe are you the proud stuff in the book um there's a few that stand out i'm really proud of the tart tata recipe because i just feel like it hacks a recipe that i think is like a little unfair to bakers and it's the way that it's presented is that it's very simple and to me it's very hard and so i'm proud that like my approach to tarte tatan actually makes it more doable um and more approachable for the home baker uh like there's an honesty in it i guess is what i like trying to think of other ones i'm really proud of uh the ones that i'm proud of are the ones to me that tend to be like over deliver and are really at its core like introduce better results with a simpler process you know although i have to say that torture 10 doesn't exactly do that but i'll get back to you about any others that like you know check those boxes all right i just want to say that i took out a slice you can see you can see that there's like little it's started with little pieces of pear and in general the cake it stays really moist which i constantly try to think of another word to say that's not moist but there is no other word sometimes it's like very supple which isn't always like the best word but um it has a really nice crumb meaning sort of like the the amount of air and the texture of the cake itself um and i'm gonna do one finishing touch which is add a little bit of sweetened creme fraiche to it so but keep keep the questions coming because i'm i'm paying attention and listening if you have a small kitchen so many of us do in new york what what's your top baking gear um that's a great question you know what's really handy is a hand blender a hand blender can do a lot of things that you wouldn't that like or normally a recipe might call for a food processor and or a regular blender a hand blender can take care of it and so i'm very often like using a hand blender in my kitchen instead of a larger appliance because i don't have a lot of space either it's basically what you're seeing um and also like because i don't have a lot of counter space i don't keep my appliances on my counter and i get super lazy about getting them out and so i just hate the idea of like reaching out and lifting up my mixer or something so a hand blender can be so useful um and a hand mixer i've like recently fallen in love again with hand mixers and think that they're super super useful so yeah if you're if you're low on space i would say those two tools are really really helpful um like thank you thank you and go away um okay a great question from someone who's from the philippines how cool um thank you for joining us they're waiting there for their book to finally arrive this month or next month oh my gosh okay thank you thank you for your patience yes what what would you recommend that they bake first considering they're a super beginner baker oh that's a great question um so well i'll just say that the recipes within all the chapters are organized from sort of easiest to most challenging so anything that's early on in a chapter the first you know few recipes those are going to be the simplest but i think that for a really novice baker or a great place to start is the chocolate chip cookie because there's no special equipment needed you can just do it with a bowl and a whisk and it is like a classic baking recipe so i think that like that's something that i crave and like always want to eat so it's sort of a good combination of being like a recipe that really serves you and being easy and just being super delicious so um i would start there i think that's a great one and i just realized by the way that i have i've had this vanilla crumb fresh sitting in my fridge forever and i just realized i'm gonna use that instead of a new thing of creme fraiche um that's what i'm gonna use how did you decide what you wanted to base this book on and which recipes you would use and my i'll add in my question which we've talked about a bit is like how do you decide also what to say for the future for a future book for future pollen um side note i just realized that this is cream cheese frosting and not what i thought it was so i'm getting i'm getting the creme fraiche back out um no that's a good question i had to really think about i had a really built in some parameters for this book because it had to feel coherent you know it had to feel like within the two covers within the space that i had i wanted to feel like i gave i presented something that was like a sort of a like an encapsulation of something um so i decided to make it all baking recipes there's actually only one recipe in the book and i didn't even realize this until after it was published there's one recipe in a book that is not actually baked and that's english muffins because they're grilled like stove top which i didn't even really think about but everything else is baking and that's because like that idea sort of anchors the book that like everything that's in this book is something that goes into the oven and then comes out um but within that definition there's quite an expansiveness there's like savory stuff there's breakfast recipes and that part of that was trying to put forth the argument that baking is really flexible and expressive and creative and diverse and you know so i was trying to make the argument that baking could be so many things and not just dessert even the book is called dessert person because that's about like an attitude so um i i definitely had a lot of other ideas for different kinds of recipes and my editor i mean my editor did a great job at her job which was to be an editor and tell me you know like i don't really think that this goes so um i had to sort of rely on other people to tell me like to tell me to tell back to me what this book was about and let me know when i was getting away from that so that's why it's helpful to have because like sometimes you don't have perspective on it yourself you know you need someone else to to give that to you so yes that was very helpful everyone everyone needs an editor you know um it's very very important that's great come in about how substitutable the recipes in the book are with gluten-free flour it's a little bit of a case-by-case basis um any thing in like the bar cookie the blondies the brownies and the recipe all of those work really really well with substituting gluten free swap there are some naturally gluten-free recipes in the book there's a pavlova which is meringue you know it's all egg no flour at all there is a rice pudding cake which is almost like a custard so you make rice pudding on the stove and then you beat in some eggs and you bake it in a cake and it turns into this like totally set sliceable cake but no flour at all um what else is in the book that's gluten-free there's oh the flower shallow cake is gluten free so i tend to like to focus on gluten-free baking where there don't i don't do a lot of gymnastics to get to that to that point it's like there's either a low amount of flour or no flour at all to begin with um if you're in the cakes chapter you're probably pretty safe by in the substitutions um if you're using a cup for copper king or you know king arthur blend or any of those things so um very very very good question and um it just i just full disclosure it might require a little bit of trial and error um okay so just before i get to the next question i'm adding a little bit of the sweetened cream fresh on top you could do whipped cream you could serve it with ice cream but i like using crumb fresh because it's already in the cake and it has a nice tanginess that i love so that's going on there and getting a nice little dribble down the side oh there we go i'm going to start eating it while i answer more questions beautifully haphazard uh art artfully yeah yeah okay like you know i like i wanted to look on like studied in its unsteadiness you know if that makes sense yeah which is i guess a contradiction but whatever okay this will this will be the last question though i everyone i appreciate i'm sorry we can't get to all of them um best go-to cake for the holidays if i mean it could be this one right um let me think this is i mean this is kind of my favorite time of the year for baking so i do feel like most of the cakes and many of the pies which to me are the most like festive those are the first chapters because those are my favorites um most of them fit really nicely into this time of the year either because of flavor or ingredient or both um so there's just to say that there's a lot i think that the carrot cake is so delicious and has like the most delicious frosting and is such comfort food and this is the holidays we're like i don't really care about tradition this holidays i just want to care i just care about things that i want to eat um so i would say the carrot cake is just pure comfort food and i think could be a great choice for this holiday season um what else uh and there's a there's an apple cake in the book which i think for the same reason is also one i would really recommend it's like loaded with fruit it's pretty easy it's like stir together um it's the kind of thing you can eat any time of the day that's just and like also very comforting for me so um those are those are some great ones and like you know relatively easy to make you have many fans those recipes in the chat oh good the tart was i mean i i said this to you it's you're just you're so exceptional at what you do and it's so exciting to see people make those recipes and like feel and what we try to do as a brand too is like build confidence and i think like the the precision and the like diligence you put into the recipes both like the creativity of like how they taste and then being delicious but also how you teach and like you showcase that today is just it's just it's so it's so confidence building and it's just yeah it's very inspiring to see thank you that's my goal i mean that this sort of subtitle the book is is recipes and guidance for baking with confidence and that is how i that's sort of like who i want to be in this space as someone who is trying to like build people up encourage them to take risks to like learn something um because like i've experienced that evolution from novice to sort of like you know home expert and it's so rewarding and um i just think that it's something that people would really enjoy and so i like to encourage them and it's great to have this forum like i love i love teaching so much and it's so much fun and i love being able to answer people's questions directly so um it's a huge pleasure and of course to be able to do it to do it on behalf of god's love we deliver is just makes it like even more rewarding than it already is so um i i love thank you so much to everyone who came and thank you to sierra and reza and everyone great jones um and natasha and emman at god's love so it's a it's a true pleasure and like my holidays this year like a lot of people's are like pretty solitary and so i just am happy to be able to like connect on zoom with so many people and have and you know this is like this is a tree for me too so it's been a wonderful pleasure and i hope that everyone's cakes turn out beautifully thanks with us also we are leaving open the event right if you feel urged to make any additional donation all of the everything goes directly to god's love we deliver and so we're very appreciative of that that will be open through the weekend you could also donate directly on god's love we deliver sight at any point um they do amazing work thank you so much sarah and everyone thank you claire thank you sorry we went a little over time that was my bad um it was great thank you everyone for joining us today and hope you have a really safe and healthy and joyful holiday season bye guys thank you bye bye bye thank you claire i love you did you like that you

Channel: Great Jones

Views: 22,022

Rating: 4.9591837 out of 5

Keywords: baking, cake, claire saffitz, baking class

Id: vyQTeCuRnjo

Length: 73min 14sec (4394 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020