They had a food court inside their (Georgia) World Congress Center. CNN was one block away from the newspaper and we would walk down there for lunch. I also was in Atlanta at a time when it was really growing. I loved writing across the newsroom from some guy yelling about the Braves and here they are in the World Series. I absolutely loved it! I loved the newspaper writers, they were a cast of characters.
But you returned to the notoriously unglamorous world of newsrooms with our stale doughnuts and skunky coffee. Something I’ve always been curious about … after attending La Varenne in Paris you could have had a culinary career. I mean, would you rather grow up in a house where your mother or your grandmother made cakes using a mix or they didn’t bake? If that’s the choice, I think you’re missing out on so much. It’s really about baking a cake for other people and sharing and creating food memories in the house that you live in.
#THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK LOS ANGELES MOVIE HOW TO#
They didn’t have a grandmother or anybody to show them how to make scratch cakes, but they still want to bake. Aren’t there are a lot of people who still rely on cake mix?Ī. There may be people who pooh-pooh this book because, “She’s still baking with cake mixes.” But if they would read the forward they would see that this is something I need to do. I don’t know if it’s the times that we’re in but I’m really pleased. I was really taken aback that people would be kind of snobby about it. I don’t think anybody knows more about how Americans home bake cakes than you.Ī. Actually, it was the newspaper food editors who were the most receptive. And I was really kind of shocked that some food writers took it that way. I came from a newspaper background so I wrote for everybody. With the first book, I got a lot of flak. Do you ever get feedback from readers asking, “Why are we still using cake mixes?”Ī. I think, for somebody who writes a cookbook, it’s a challenge to be able to articulate that in a recipe that this is how you stack the layers, and this is how you cut off a little bit of the dome and if you freeze them first, it’s easier. You explain so well how to frost a layer cake. The vegan buttercream is delicious, with a beautiful mouthfeel. Like your other books, this one is loaded with tips and basic recipes. That, to me, is her legacy: She took the time to test all of those recipes and to break them down into manageable steps so that someone who has never been to France and had never cooked anything that elaborate before could actually really do it. She knew that she couldn’t just hand over these French recipes to the American public. There was a right way to do it and then there was a wrong way to do it. She was very disciplined in how she looked at cooking and baking and she was disciplined in how she looked at life.
I loved Julia Child and that was her strength. You said one of your biggest jobs was telling readers exactly how to do things and I know Julia Child was really big on instructions. My sister’s mother-in-law was from Louisiana and her grandmother taught her to bake cakes in a wood-burning oven. They’re intimidated by baking from scratch but they want a cake that looks fabulous. The second group are younger bakers who didn’t have a lot of baking experience. There are definitely two types of readers, one group already knows the Cake Mix Doctor and maybe they’ve got all of my books or they have been waiting for me to write one that has the smaller cake mixes and everything’s all up to date - and they’re looking for new ideas. I was amazed at how many vegan bakers really begin with a cake mix because they can jump-start the process. And also the increased interest in vegan baking.
That was really important because I had written a couple of books on gluten-free baking and I knew how to do it. Another reason is that times have changed the way we bake and who we bake for. It was time to make it easy on people just to pick up a box of cake mix. And they had a publisher who said we don’t really need to do that, this one’s just fine. At the time I really didn’t really want to do it. Readers started emailing me, begging me to write a Cake Mix Doctor with these smaller mixes. It’s been so long since I wrote that first one and the size of cake mixes has changed, probably seven or eight years ago. I have been wanting to write a new Cake Mix Doctor for a lot of reasons.