- Hi, my name is Bill Yosses and I was lucky enough
to be the pastry chef for two presidents; George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I'm going to be making one
of Mrs. Obama's favorite cake The red velvet cake. (soft music) You may have heard that
most of the desserts at the white house during
the Obama years were pies, but this is an exception. Red velvet cake was popular and often served at birthday parties. As so often, we start
with creaming the butter. So take soft butter and
mix it with the sugar. Here we begin to introduce air
(air whooshing) into the butter process. That's going to begin to build up. In the meantime, I'm going
to sift my dry ingredients. (soft music) Now that the butter is starting
to fluff up nice and fluffy, you can see the difference already. That's why they call it
blanching the butter. It's starting to get wider and wider as the air is introduced inside. And at this part, it
really takes two people. So I'm going to introduce John. He's going to slowly sift in the flour as I add the liquid ingredients. We're going to alternate
liquids and dries. So it all comes together
into a smooth mass. (soft music) I think one of the misconceptions about Mrs Obama's healthy
food initiative, Let's Move, was that she might be
anti desserts in some way. That was not true. Mrs. Obama never asked
me to make Spock cuisine or low calorie desserts
or not use butter or sugar but the way she saw it was that desserts should be not
as frequent as it can be. So frequency reduced and
portion size reduced. But if we were going to make a dessert, whether it was to be served
to the family or to guests, it should be very good
made from great ingredients and great technique. That way a person is satisfied
with a smaller amount. So we always made the
best desserts possible. We used the best ingredients possible. There's probably no such thing
as a healthy dessert in fact, but I believe there a healthy lifestyle that includes desserts. (soft music) Bakes for 20 minutes, at 350. One of the most powerful
things I saw happen at the white house was Mrs.
Obama's Let's Move program. She invited chefs from
all over the United States to come to the White
House for a conference. And this was somewhat hastily put together with about two weeks notice. Chefs from all over America came. On their own dime, two weeks they had, and 700 people showed up on the South Lawn of the White House. So Mrs. Obama gave a speech asking chefs and our profession to help with the
childhood obesity epidemic with just generally healthier foods and avoiding the kind of bad food habits that have been building up in our country. It was an impassioned speech
and really everyone signed on to agree to do whatever they could to talk to their customers,
to their families, friends. And one of the important points was to try to introduce healthier
foods into school lunches. A program which continues to this day and which all over the
country communities are facing and coming together in
order to feed their kids a better style of food, better diets, and to reverse the negative aspects of fast food and unhealthy eating. To do this, she then introduced
a garden onto the South Lawn of the White House, which
is not as easy as it sounds. It's a very compact area. It's only 18 acres on all of the grounds, but finally a perfect area was found close to the fence on the South Lawn. And we planted a garden in
full view with the full sun and 1400 square feet
of vegetables, fruits, there was a fig tree, every vegetable you could
imagine, eggplant, tomatoes, corn you name it, beans,
all kinds of beans and an herb garden. That became a symbol, I think across the country
for improving the way we eat. And it launched a huge program of planting gardens in people's backyards. So there were reports of garden supplies and seeds and composite sales
really going through the roof. It was a great effort and it was something I'm proud to be part of something that I continued
to do to this day. I go to schools and talk
to kids about cooking, about baking and about their health. This classic American dessert
the red velvet cake is usually and best decorated with
the cream cheese frosting. So we'll start out by creaming our butter, soft butter that's been left out. We'll just use part of the sugar to really get the butter into a creamy state. Once we get the butter
creamy, which means no lumps we'll start to add our cream cheese. This process similar to making the cake with whipped butter is we're
whipping the cream cheese like we whip the butter and the sugar acts as those little knives which are cutting into the cream
cheese and introducing air. So it becomes lighter and
fluffier as we go along. People often ask me the question, did in the Obama White
House, did they sneak snacks or did they follow the
healthy cuisine all the time? And the answer is they walked the walk, talked the talk and walked the walk. Yes, everything was healthy from day one. Mrs. Obama talks about this
in her book, "Becoming" where during the campaign, it was very difficult to
keep a regular schedule, to have regular meals. Sometimes there had to be
like last minute arrangements. So she was very concerned about that for herself and for the children. So once things settled down and they moved into the White House, it was like the first week that Mrs. Obama called all
the chefs into the meeting and said she wanted this
to be a very healthy time for ourselves and for the kids. And also asked for our help in
making this sort of a program that could be sort of spread
out as an educational program for families and kids across the country. And that became known as Let's Move, became known as the school lunch program and efforts to just improve
the way people thought about food and especially about kids and what they're eating
in schools in particular. So yes, they walked the walk. There were no snacks. There were no like plates
of cookies left around. If there were guests, yes, there were sometimes
buffet of desserts but for the family themselves,
breakfast, lunch, dinner, healthy and healthy and happy. (soft music) So you see how how much
higher this frosting has come up in the bowl. We started out way down here
and now it's tripled in volume. All that air is being
encapsulated inside the frosting. Once we have our red velvet cake baked we're going to cut this cake
in half and trim off the sides. We're going to assemble the cake starting out with this piece. I just use the pastry bag for this process a little easier to control. So it doesn't get all over you. We're going to build this layer up with the cream cheese frosting put the second layer on top, cover that. (soft music) And then we're going to do the
sides as we build the cake. This cake was often made for a very special family occasions, birthdays in particular for
the girls, Sasha and Malia. I have such fond memories of them and seeing pictures of them. They often would accompany their parents on travels around the world. One particular of Sasha in the Kremlin walking next to these Russian
generals with the high hats. And she's wearing a trench coat, sort of like a little small mini detective walking down the hallways of the Kremlin, incredible shot, looking
quite confident I have to say. And of course, wonderful pictures of them at Buckingham palace and being
received by Queen Elizabeth. (soft music) The Obama's really made us
feel part of their family. And when I left, they gave me a gift. The gift that they gave me was a letter that Queen Elizabeth had given to president Eisenhower after one of his visits
to Buckingham palace. And during that visit,
President Eisenhower had complimented the queen on the scones served at Buckingham palace. And so she had the recipe typed out and sent to him with a little note saying, thank you for complimenting our scones. Here's the recipe. This is Obama gave me that
letter as a parting gift. So this is that letter typed in that wonderful
Remington typewriter. You can see the date down here is 1960 enough for 16 people. So I was very moved by this gift. I mean, for a pastry chef, what an honor to receive this piece of history! But I was a little taken aback and I said, this is a historical document. I mean, can I really have that? Can I have this gift? And she said, Bill, it's all gonna be. (soft music) And that's the famous red velvet cake. It was a very popular
item at birthday parties during the Obama administration, it showed up on the Christmas buffet and now we can enjoy it here. I hope you guys are
going to help me eat it. (soft music)
