The Sugar Hit | The Dinner Special podcast

105: Elizabeth LaBau: Making Candy and a Sweet Food Career

January 13, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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SugarHero

Elizabeth is a baker, photographer, writer, taste tester and chief sugar officer of SugarHero.com which she started in 2011. Elizabeth went to culinary school after college to learn about baking and patisserie, and worked for years in a number of Los Angeles restaurants and bakeries. She now makes her living developing candy and dessert recipes, writing for websites and writing cookbooks. Her first cookbook, The Sweet Book of Candy Making was published in 2012, and she writes for the About.com candy site and is a contributor to Better Homes and Gardens.

I am so pumped to have Elizabeth LaBau of SugarHero here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Elizabeth’s.)

On Discovering Her Passion for Baking:

My parents actually think it’s funny that I do this for a living because I would make a bee-line out of the kitchen whenever my mom wanted help. You would see the cartoon puff of smoke from Wile E. Coyote whenever she wanted me to do anything. So they still think it’s a little funny that this is my chosen career. But after college, I got married. I was working in a really boring office job. And I would just always be reading food blogs instead of working because that was how great of an employee I was, and I would print out recipes from these blogs and make them at home.

And so it was really the necessity of being out on my own, and having to cook, and then having all this extra time to really delve into the world of food writing and food blogs. They can have more adventurous or fun recipes than maybe your standard cookbook that I grew up cooking from. It really opened my eyes to all these people who were playing with food and making some fun things. Most of the blogs I liked reading were desserts because I have a huge sweet tooth.

That’s really where it started. It was just being out on my own in my own kitchen and finally playing with food instead of just making something my mom told me to make for dinner.

On Her Culinary School Experience:

I went in the evenings after work. I kept working while I was going to school. So it took longer, and it was a little hard to balance both things, but it was absolutely the right thing because I wasn’t committed to a culinary career. It was more like, “Well, we’ll see how I like it, and if I don’t end up wanting to do anything with it, at least, I’ll have some more skills.”

My primary teacher was someone who worked with Sherry Yard with various Wolfgang Puck restaurants. So she was really knowledgeable, and she really did a great job of breaking down the science of baking. Not just teaching us skills but really the theory behind it. So I found everything fascinating. I loved everything. I took everything we did in class, and I’d do it again at home on weekends trying to make it better, and I actually started a prototype food blog. It’s no longer existent, but it would just all be pictures of stuff that I learned in school.

It was so fun. I absolutely loved it. I actually get a lot of questions about going to culinary school, and in general, I don’t really recommend it unless you go to one that’s affordable for you. I think they are so expensive now. But the one I went to was pretty reasonably priced, and it wasn’t a huge financial burden. In that case, I absolutely recommend it because it was a blast.

On Working in Restaurants:

The first place I worked was a bakery in Los Angeles called Sweet Lady Jane which is still around. It’s an LA institution. It’s a very, very high quality bakery. And that’s really where I feel like I got my culinary education because there is the theory you learn, and then there is what actually happens in a kitchen, and I feel really lucky that I worked there. I worked there for about a year. I feel so lucky that that’s where I started because I just learned everything that I missed in culinary school. I learned how people actually do things in the real world.

I learnt to work fast and to work clean and to work in a tiny little space because you don’t have a whole bench of your own in the kitchen usually like you do in culinary school. It was a great bakery. They make everything from scratch which is very, very rare in bakeries, which is another thing I learned. I learned production work, high volume, fast-paced production work, and I also learned some cake decorating. So it was a little bit of everything. And it was really the best place I ever could have started. And then from there, I was able to find different places that would teach me different things.

On Deciding to Start Her Freelance Career and SugarHero.com:

It was really gradual. A few years after I started working in kitchens, I was at a job where I didn’t have full hours, and I was looking for something to supplement my income. And I on a whim applied for a job at About.com and ended up getting it.

I would just do that in the evenings and on the weekends, and as that took off, I was able to devote more time to it. And it was really over the course of about five years, I would work on About more, and then I would take on maybe a few other little projects. Eventually, I started my own blog, and then as I switched on, I would try to find a job that would be part-time where I would work maybe three days a week, so I could devote more time to my freelance stuff.

I didn’t end up going fully freelance until about four and a half years ago. By that time, I had been doing writing on the side for about five years. So it was nothing I ever planned. I didn’t know food writing was a thing in college. I didn’t know that was a career people had. People didn’t make money on the Internet when I was in college. It just really gradually developed, and I found that I really loved it.

On Her Book, The Sweet Book of Candy Making:

I was super pregnant when I wrote it. It was so stressful. I actually got contacted by the publisher, their acquisitions editor had been looking for someone to write a candy book. So it was really just being on the Internet in the right place, at the right time. I think she found me through the About site, and then she also got a recommendation from another person who had written a candy cookbook.

So it fell into my lap which I feel very lucky about because I know it’s not always easy to get a book. And it happened really fast. It was, I think, written in five months while, again, very pregnant. And actually, our apartment had a flood during that time, and we had to move out part of the time and live in a hotel with no kitchen.

So it is truly a labor of love. And I am hoping to write another one. I have an idea. I have an agent. It just has been a matter of carving out the time. But the book was really intended to be a one-stop shop for people who want to learn about candy making. So it has some basic recipes and then some more creative ones. But really, if you don’t know much about candy making, it’s intended to be your guide to getting started. That was the whole point, and I hope that’s what people take from it.

On Candy Making:

I think everyone thinks that about candy because you need a thermometer. It’s like as soon as you put a piece of equipment into the mix, they are like, “Oh no. This is too much. I’m going to buy a Snickers bar. I’m out,” and there are candies that are harder, but I think so many candies really are very approachable.

If you want to start making candies, start with truffles. You need cream, and you need chocolate, and that is literally all you need. And you don’t need a thermometer, and you need a whisk maybe, but everyone has one.

I think there are ways to ease into it before you’re having to pull taffy. You don’t have to start at the top. Start with something really approachable with a microwave fudge recipe. There are definitely things you can do to ease into it.

On Resources for Learning More About Candy Making:

Yes, so actually, I have a favorite candy book that I recommend to everyone. It’s by Peter Greweling. It’s called Chocolates and Confections, and there’s actually two versions. There’s a pro-version and a Chocolates and Confections At Home. He is an instructor at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, and it’s like the encyclopedia of candy.

It’s so thorough. There’s a million in process pictures. He goes over everything from basics to really complex layered candies. It’s so smart, and it’s a little bit scientific if you’re interested in that, but it doesn’t have to be. You can skip all the science and just get to the recipes. It’s such a great resource. The home version is maybe a little more what home cooks might want, but it’s such a great book.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I watch hardly any. The ones when I do catch them, I actually really am old school. I like Alton Brown. I think he’s great.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

I almost always read dessert blogs that these are all going to be sweet focused. I love Sprinkle Bakes. I think Heather is a genius. I really like The Sugar Hit. It’s so fun. Cleobuttera, she’s in Egypt hence the name. She just has the most gorgeous photos. I like The Cake Blog. They have a lot of contributors, so it’s like a compilation website, but they do really fun stuff. And then 10th kitchen, who I know, you’ve interviewed her. She is just the funniest, and I want to be her best friend.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

I’m actually just learning how to use Snapchat. I had a 20-year-old teach me how because I’m an old person. I’m still figuring that out.

I follow The Actor’s Diet, Lynn Chen. She does some food and then some LA stuff that I like. I follow Hey Natalie Jean who has chickens. She’s great. On Instagram, again The Sugar Hit just has the most fun, explosive pictures ever. She really makes me happy.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

Oh, gosh. I have a marble rolling pin from my grandmother that I got when she passed away. And that’s really special for me. I don’t actually use it but it’s just laying in the kitchen, so I can always think of her when I see it.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Lavender and flower flavors. I used to be, “Ehh,” and now I throw rosewater on everything and lavender and violet. It’s a sickness.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

There is a chain in Los Angeles called Lemonade. It does fresh salads and sandwiches. They have a cookbook that I actually love. They got me to eat Brussel sprouts all the time. It’s life- changing. The Lemonade Cookbook, I really like. For desserts, I have a really charming one called, The Bungalow Heavens Cookies cookbook. And it’s all cookie recipes from Pasadena which is where I used to live. Oh, and I just love the Barefoot Contessa. I think she’s awesome. I want to visit her house and have her cook for me. So I have a lot of her books.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Actually, I listen to my iPod all the time when I’m in the kitchen because otherwise, it’s really boring. I listen to Vampire Weekend a lot. I really like Kishi Bashi. I don’t know if you know him, but he’s a violinist who also sings, and he does some really amazing stuff. So I’d say Vampire Weekend and Kishi Bashi always get me in the kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with Elizabeth:

SugarHero.com, and I am on Facebook. Instagram. If you have questions about candy making or baking, send me an email. I try to respond generally promptly.

069: Danguole Lekaviciute: Being Adventurous and Playing with Food

August 19, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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10th Kitchen

Danguole believes in adventurous eating and drinking. And her kitchen is her ultimate playground. Although she appreciates the classics, she truly tries to bring something creative and original to her blog, 10th Kitchen.

I am so delighted to have Danguole Lekaviciute of 10th Kitchen joining me here on the show today.

(*All images below are Danguole’s.)

On Starting Her Blog:

What happened was that a good friend of mine moved across the country, and she had a personal blog that she was doing a project 365 on, which is where you take a picture everyday and write a little blurb about it. And it’s meant to get a good blogging habit going.

When she moved away, I jumped on board. I got my own blog, and I started doing the same thing. It was a fun way for us to keep in touch. I don’t think anybody read it besides us. But what I found eventually was that I was mostly interested in talking about food and cooking. So when that wrapped up, it was just a natural transition for me to start a food blog.

I pretty much immediately bought my domain and started taking some crappy pictures and telling awkward jokes. And about four years later, I’m still doing the same thing.

I had a personal WordPress blog before, just your basic template. I had no idea how a website works. Those templates make it so easy for anyone to put up their website without really having to do a whole lot of work. Since then I’ve learned a lot about HTML and CSS and all the intricacies with hosting and stuff like that. So I’m at the point where I put it on my resume now, because it is such a valuable skill that I never had before.

I think the most challenging part was trying to switch hosts halfway. And I just lost my website for a day and a half. And it was terrifying, even though at that point, not that many people read it. So I just went back to my old host, and was like, “Please take all my money. I’ll stick with you. Just make it work again.”

It’s a terrifying thing when your website is down for some reason. It’s like an extension of you. And even though you know it doesn’t matter, it feels so strange.

I think all of it felt pretty natural to me. I’ve always played with recipes a little bit and developed my own. I’ve written before. And I’ve done photography as a hobby before. I don’t know if you can tell from those early shots because they’re just not great. But I always dabbled in artistic things like that. So all of it made sense, except the technical part probably.

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

I cooked since I was a kid. And I remember trying to make things work from an early age. I definitely helped out in the kitchen a lot. And I definitely have memories of being 10 or 12 and just playing in the kitchen and seeing what happens.

In my family, it was more of a chore. And I actually really liked it. So my sister would always do the dishes if I cooked, so I always enjoyed that arrangement. To me, it was fun.

I love David Lebovitz. I think his style is so classic and so refined. And he has such a good way of connecting it to his life in France as far as blogging goes. Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni’s Ice Creams in Columbus completely changed my life with her method for making ice cream, which I do regularly. And I love Mark Bittman. I have his books. I’ve read his articles. I followed his podcast. He just has so many smart things to say about food and policy and connecting it to the everyday cook in the kitchen and how you can make small changes and work toward a more sustainable food system, which is the stuff that I find interesting.

On Adventurous Eating:

I’ve always been interested in just playing with things and seeing what happens. I think if I didn’t have an artistic streak, I think I’d be some sort of scientist because I just like to see how a dish changes if you use coconut oil instead of butter or more herbs or more this or more vinegar. So to me, that comes naturally. I think it’s important to appreciate all aspects of cooking.

I love ethnic food from all over the world. I’ve always dabbled in Mexican or Thai or Vietnamese. I don’t think there’s a particular cuisine that’s the good gateway. It’s more about playing with recipes that you know and love. Like if your family is from France or Russia or wherever, I think it just comes from mastering what you know and changing one thing here or there to see how the dish changes and to see how the ingredients interact with one and other.

Fish sauce, when you first smell it, is just so overwhelming and so different from what I’m used to. But it just makes such a difference in dishes. And it’s such a great savory base for crisp, clean flavors. They all meld so beautifully together in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine. It’s a thing of beauty. I love it.

On Being Fearless and Experimenting in the Kitchen:

I remember making tacos from this leftover roast chicken, and I mixed it with a bunch of sour cream and green onion. That’s not a taco. But it was one of those times right before grocery shopping that you had to make do with whatever you had. And my family appreciated that.

One thing I was trying to do was make buttermilk rolls, which I have eventually got to making through cultured buttermilk, with powdered buttermilk. I really wanted that flavor. But I was working with a recipe that required you to heat up milk. And so I was like, “Oh, I’ll just switch it with buttermilk.” And of course, I should have known that when you heat buttermilk, you just get a curdled mess. That completely threw me off my game. That’s something that I should have know but just didn’t think about. So that happens all the time.

On Making Cooking More Fun:

I think mastering the things you know and love is a good first step to where you don’t even need the recipe anymore. Then you can play with the proportions or add different ingredients to it. Simple things like switching out parsley for cilantro or basil or something like that is a good start.

If you view recipes as a template, if you see the part that’s starchy and the part that’s savory and the part that’s fresh and the part that’s acidic, it’s like a puzzle. You can swap out the lemon juice for sherry vinegar maybe and see what happens. Just see a recipe as a whole, and then take apart the components and see what we can do with them.

It’s a balancing act, and it also makes you more flexible. If you don’t have lemon juice, you can try a certain vinegar or lime juice, things like that.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I honestly don’t watch much TV. I used to watch Top Chef back in the day. Right now, I’m binging on Orange Is The New Black. There’s cooking in that show, a little bit, prison cooking.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

I think anyone listening to your podcast would probably know about Smitten Kitchen and David Lebovitz. Those are my favorites.

I also have blogger friends that I keep up with who are really talented, The Sugar Hit is fantastic, My Name is Yeh. Who else? SugarHero is a really fun baking blog. There’s tons. Any type of cuisine, any type of cooking you’re into, there’s a blog about it, which is fantastic.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook that make you happy?

I follow Take A Megabite. I think you’ve had her on your podcast before. She is just so colorful. It’s not my style at all, but it makes me very happy.

I follow The Sugar Hit, like I said. Sarah just has great taste for desserts and a great eye for photography. Tieghan from Half Baked Harvest, she’s really fantastic. She’s really visually oriented. Kelly Beall, who does Design Crush, is also really good. On Pinterest, she always posts interesting design, interesting food, interesting style.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I have a stovetop smoker, which I don’t break out too often because it makes your house smell like bacon for days afterward. But yeah, it’s fantastic. I love it. If you don’t have a backyard pit for barbecue, it’s a good alternative.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

I am really trying hard to like mushrooms. It’s the one food that I just never liked, never appreciated it. And I like the flavor of it. I do like mushroom ravioli if it’s all chopped up. I think it’s a texture thing. So I’m trying really hard, and I’ve done some things with it that I ended up liking a lot.

I actually smoked shiitaki mushrooms one time, put them on polenta, and that was actually enjoyable. So that’s where the stovetop smoker comes in.

It depends on what kind of mushroom. Big, slimy portobello, I’m still at like 1%. I’ll eat it if I have too. But yeah, shiitake mushrooms are great. I love chanterelles. So, I’m working on it.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I have a lot of cookbooks. I like Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. I’m trying to cook my way through it. Mark Bittman’s books are always a great resource. I have How To Cook Everything Fast right now. It’s focused on fast food, but it is also really inspirational. His combinations are really innovative. And I think the cookbook that I like the most isn’t actually a cookbook, but I literally sleep with The Flavor Bible. I’m always flipping through it at night when I’m looking for ideas. It’s like a dictionary of what flavors go together. And it’s fantastic. I use it for inspiration all the time, and I used to have it on my nightstand. It’s like the bedtime story for me.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I’ve been branching out a little bit with my taste in music. I usually listen to indie rock or stuff like that. But I’ve been into soul lately. So if I had to pick a song, I would pick Nothing On Me by Curtis Mayfield. I love that. It’s my jam right now.

On Keeping Posted with Danguole:

I probably use Instagram the most. I’m really visually oriented. It just makes it so easy to let people know what you’re up to and what you’re drinking, what you’re eating.

055: Liz Harris: Turning Food into Her Career

July 1, 2015 by Gabriel 2 Comments

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Floating Kitchen

Liz is a cook, photographer, and writer. And on her blog, Floating Kitchen, she explores and shares seasonally inspired recipes that are sometimes healthy and sometimes indulgent, but always fun and delicious.

I am so psyched to have Liz Harris of Floating Kitchen here on the show today.

(*All images below are Liz’s.)

On Her Career Before Food:

Before I started blogging, I was actually a research scientist. I went all the way in school. My undergraduate focus was biology, and then I went on to get my PhD in Biochemistry. That was five years of training, post undergrad degree.

Then I went and did a post-doctoral fellowship in Cancer Biology. That was another four years of training. I spent about thirteen years working towards becoming a research scientist, and then I was working in that field. It just wasn’t clicking for me anymore so I made a drastic change in my life.

Making the change was very hard, mentally, because I had committed so much time and you feel compelled to continue on this path.

I still love science. I find it really interesting. I love reading about it in my free time. I liked actually doing it, but at the end of the day, the lifestyle that I had created for myself around this career wasn’t very healthy for me anymore, and so I needed to change that.

On Her Introduction to Cooking:

My family is pretty into food. I come from a line of great cooks. My grandmother, my great aunts, my mom is a big cook as well. I was always just in the kitchen or around the kitchen with them. So I was always very interested in it. My family also owns a farm and a wholesale distribution business in New Hampshire, so food is just something that we think about a lot and have always been really interested in. It’s just what we do.

My great auntie, Dot. She was probably the best cook in the family. She also was always very patient with me and she let me help her. She didn’t get mad if you messed up or anything. Because I’m sure I messed up a lot when I was little. I owe a lot of my cooking abilities to her.

On Turning Her Hobby into Her Career:

About five years ago is when I really started doing it. It was still a hobby at that time, but I started being a lot more serious about cooking every day for myself, cooking for friends, having people over.

That’s when people started suggesting to me, too, “Hey, you’re really good at this. Have you ever thought about having a blog or doing something with it?” And I was like, “No. Computers hate me. I would never have a blog. I can’t even do email!” That just seemed really out of reach for me.

I was spending so much time on my career, so it was like, “No way I could do that on the side.” So that’s when I really started getting into it. Around 2012 or 2013 is when I made this choice to leave my career as being a scientist, and that was the obvious thing to do, is to pursue something in cooking.

I think whenever you make a really big drastic change like that, there is a fine balance between courage and sheer stupidity. You just have to say, “Alright, I don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m just going to do it and go for it.”

My parents obviously were really supportive. I didn’t feel like I was going to be letting them down. I also was giving up a paycheck and all these other practical things. They were encouraging me and telling me that it would be okay. It gave me the guts to do it.

I’m just a really determined person. Once I get something in my head, it does not escape my head until I do something about it. So I just decided to do it and now here I am.

When I first left science, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was mulling around for a few months, figuring it out.

I actually simultaneously started my blog and started working in restaurants. I had never had a restaurant job before in my whole life, so that was a really fun and eye-opening experience. So I started on those two paths; I had the blogging and I had the restaurant work. After doing both those simultaneously for about a year, I decided that I just wanted to pursue the blogging for now. Restaurant work is hard. I mean, it was fun but it’s a lot of work for not a lot of gain. And my blog was picking up and was growing, and I decided to put all of my energy into that.

On the Type of Cooking that’s Most Natural:

I think the savory dishes come more naturally to me. I’ve developed a style where I just like to throw things together. I cook mostly vegetarian food and it’s just easy to roast up a bunch of vegetables and make some grains, make a quick dressing. That is definitely more my everyday style. Although I do love the baking.

I think the enjoyment I get out of the baking is not the actual doing it but it’s the sharing it. Because that’s the stuff that’s easy to share, and that’s why I loved cooking to start with. I loved bringing people food or inviting people over.

Cookies and brownies are something I would take to work all the time, or bring to my neighbor’s house. So I like that aspect of the baking. But in terms of the following the instructions, I can do it and I’m great at it, but I just prefer to not have to think that much about it. Which is funny because being a scientist, all you’re doing is thinking about instructions all the time.

On Where She Finds Inspiration for Her Blog:

Mostly from other bloggers.

I read an enormous number of blogs. I have like 400 blogs on my feed. It’s insane. Because people are just doing so much great stuff, so I love just seeing what everyone else is doing.

I’m really inspired by cooking with the seasons. That’s something that’s important to me. Growing up in a family that has a farm, I’ve always been aware of that and try to follow that as much as possible. It’s better for your wallet and the environment. It’s good for your body. It tastes better when you buy food that’s in season. I love going to the local markets and looking for things that look great, and bringing them home and making something from them.

On Things Not Going As Planned in the Kitchen:

I feel like at this point, I’m pretty knowledgeable of what is going to work together, what flavors will go together, and what techniques are going to work.

I guess the only things for me, that it’s not actually the cooking part, it’s always something else that happens. I remember I made this huge tray of eclairs and they were glazed. And I dropped them and they went glazed side down on the rug, with dog hair stuck in them. It’s that kind of stuff.

I will finish a whole thing and then I’ll have some klutzy moment at the end and ruin everything, which is very unfortunate. But those things happen to me more than actually with the cooking part.

In the beginning, when I was in graduate school and during my fellowship when I was learning to cook, I was very strict about following recipes. I had to have a recipe or I couldn’t make something. Because I didn’t have that awareness of what things went together. But now that I have been cooking for so many years, it’s easy for me, just something that I’ve picked up.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I do like to watch the Barefoot Contessa.

A show I used to love to watch that’s not on anymore is Alton Brown’s Good Eats. Of course, that’s like a science-y cooking show, so you know I’m going to love that one. I don’t really watch any food competition shows because they kind of stress me out. I get nervous for the contestants.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

From the 400 that I follow, let’s see. One blog that I love is called Local Haven. Her name is Ashely, and she has really great photography and really authentic, unfussy recipes that just feel good when I’m on her site and look at her photos. So I think everyone should check out Local Haven.

I also really love Foodie Crush by Heidi. Heidi has great recipes and great photography, but I think the thing that I appreciate most about her site is that she spends a lot of time talking about other bloggers and other blogger’s recipes. It’s really refreshing in a job where you talk about yourself all the time. I mean, that’s really what we have to do, is promote yourself. So it’s so nice to see somebody who is talking about other bloggers so much. I’ve been introduced to a lot of new sites through her blog. So I think that’s a good one everyone should check out.

And I love How Sweet It Is by Jessica. Her stuff is just so over the top and fun, and it just makes you feel good when you read it.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook that make you happy?

On Instagram, I love Sweet Paul Magazine. He has a lot of not just food pictures, it’s food and crafts and gardening. All the photos are really bright and fun and whimsical. He has a great feed.

I also love, on Instagram, all the meta-sites, like Food 52 and The Kitchn. Great photography, great recipes, and again, they reshare a lot of stuff from the community. So it’s been a great way to connect and find new Instagram accounts and new food bloggers.

On Twitter, I love Sarah from The Sugar Hit. She is just hilarious. She has really funny tweets. I definitely recommend people checking her out.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I guess the thing that would be the most treasured, is I do have recipes from my great aunt. She was the one that was sort of the biggest cook in our family. And all the recipes from my grandparents and other family members, and I think those are probably the most treasured things, just having those cards with the stains on them and the handwritten notes. It’s just really fun. You feel like you’re cooking with them when you’re using them.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

This is a tough question because I used to dislike everything. I was that kid that only ate grilled cheese, chicken, and peanut butter and jelly for like twenty years. So it’s very surprising now that I will eat everything.

I think one of the main things is tomatoes. I used to hate tomatoes, raw tomatoes. I didn’t like tomato sauce. I would wipe the sauce off of my spaghetti, which horrified my parents. But now, I love fresh tomatoes. I love making sauces.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

I really like Vibrant Food by Kimberly Hasselbrink. It’s really colorful. I want to eat everything when I flip through the pages. It’s just a spectacular book that I think everybody should own.

I love Joy the Baker. She’s one of my favorite bloggers. I love Homemade Decadence, again, really fun and whimsical, and of course, totally makes you hungry when you’re looking at it.

I also love all the Ottolenghi books. I don’t cook from them that often, because all the recipes are really involved, but just such a great source of inspiration and great photography as well.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

I really like something upbeat when I’m cooking, like Stevie Wonder or Taylor Swift. Anything with a good beat deserves to be in my kitchen.

On Keeping Posted with Liz:

The best way, the first way is my blog, of course, floatingkitchen.net. I post new recipes two to three times a week. So you can check me out there. Instagram is my favorite, so that’s a fun place. I love connecting with people on Instagram.

012: Maria Siriano: How To Have Fun Baking and Her Top Baking Tip

March 13, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Sift and Whisk

Today we’re chatting about baking and for me the best part of any dinner, dessert.

Maria is a self-taught baker and dessert maker whose love of baking and sweet things shine through on her blog and in her photography.

I am so pumped to have Maria Siriano from Sift and Whisk here on the show.

On Starting Her Blog:

I used to work in textbook publishing and I actually started off as an intern, literally the day after I graduated college. So I was doing that for about a year and a half and they brought me on from intern to being a temp. The company went on a hiring freeze right before I was about to interview for a permanent job so that kind of sucked. I then was able to go freelance doing publishing stuff.

So I was at home doing textbook editing and I was baking all time because it’s stress relief for me.

In Ohio, which is where I live, we have cottage bakery laws so you can have a home-based bakery, sell stuff at farmers’ markets and that’s what I started doing. I did that for a year and half while I was editing.

Because I was selling stuff I had a website that I created for my bakery and I was doing a blog. So I would put some recipes on there of the stuff that I didn’t sell because I really only sold cookies and occasionally cupcakes but I really enjoyed the blog process and the photography process more than actually going to farmers’ markets and selling.

I was making the same thing every single day which didn’t really appeal to me. So I was like I want to experiment and try new stuff and take more pictures. I was really into photography in high school so then I kind of gradually shut down the home-based bakery and picked up full-time with the blogging.

It has been a little over two years now, it was two years in November and I love it. It is the best job anybody could ask for. Now that’s what I do entirely.

I want to share things with people.

I find that I get a lot more joy out of sharing with a broader audience than I do in a really niche market of just my hometown. So it’s a great way for me to connect with people.

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

I still don’t think that it comes naturally to me and whenever somebody compliments me on any of those things I’m like OK what do you want.

But it takes a lot of work and I can see improvement in myself. I’m still trying to improve everything I do because I have my own style of writing. I am an English major. I was really good at writing essays about literature, but I’m not a fiction type person and I always say I’m just such a narcissist and that’s why I can do a blog because I can just write about myself all day.

It’s like journaling. For me it is really cathartic, and I like to have a sense of humor about it and I hope that people appreciate that sense of humor. I hope that I don’t offend anybody ever. I am always worried about that.

Then the photography, I am obsessed with looking at other people’s photography. I always feel like I am almost there, and then somedays I’m just like this is just crap. I still struggle with it, and feeling like it’s good, but if somebody else looks at it and thinks it’s good, I’m over the moon.

But basically my blog is exactly how I talk but with less cursing because I try to keep it clean because maybe a fourteen year old will want a cookie recipe, and then I’ll feel really bad if their parents are like, “Oh, stop cursing.”

On Her Connection to Baking:

In my family growing up, we almost never cooked homemade meals. We did a lot of the frozen. We were like Stouffers‘ people. We did the lasagna. My mom made a couple different meals that she would do like homemade meatloaf, but homemade is in quotations because she would do the Hungry Man or whatever that is in the can.

Both my parents worked, and she was going to college when I was a kid so it was all very take out and boxed food and all that. Whereas my husband grew up in house where they cooked dinner every single night, they rarely went out to eat. So when we moved in together, I was like, “Oh my gosh, he is cooking me dinner every night. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” But it took some getting used to. Because we never cooked in my family.

The one thing that we did was bake. For a while we did a lot of boxed mix stuff like cakes like that. We weren’t really fancy about it or precise about it, but we did a lot of cookies, which is my first from scratch baking experience. We did molasses cookies which is a recipe I did on my blog and is still one of my favorite recipes because it is my family’s recipe.

I always want to learn how to cook so what I started doing a couple months ago up until the Holiday craziness set in, I was saying “I am cooking dinner every Wednesday night because I need to learn to cook.”

For awhile right after I got laid off at my publishing job, my parents were trying to kick me back some money so they were like, “Hey, come cook for us. Make freezer meals and we will pay you.” So I would cook everything for them and freeze it, and they’d give me a hundred bucks a week or something and I was like, “Thanks mom and dad.”

Everything I make always turns out really good if I follow the recipe but I can’t do what my husband does which is open the fridge and be like, “Oh, I will just throw all this stuff together and we have dinner.” I can’t do it.

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

Whenever people are like I want to get into more baking, I am always like buy a scale. That is my number one advice is buy a kitchen scale. It’ll set you back 30 bucks and it’ll change everything.

My husband has had relative success baking with his kind of free-form method. There are certain things I think that you can do if you like dessert and want to make dessert but don’t want to do all the complicated stuff, and it gets a little what I call “semi-homemade with Sandra Lee.”

You can go to the store and you can buy pre-made pound cake. You can dice that and put some strawberries in it and some whipped cream and that’s really easy. You can just pour sugar or whatever and just toss everything together and that’s really easy to do. You don’t have to do a lot of measuring and things like that.

Even pie, if you don’t make your own crust, the filling you can guesstimate and if it’s not thick enough you add a little more corn starch or you bake it a little longer and it’s not so daunting, but there are certain things that I would stay away from.

Cookies can flop miserably if they aren’t very accurate and cakes, so I think that it just depends upon how desperately you want something.

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

I did a black forest pie for my husband and I got the wrong type of liqueur for the filling and I just ran all over town. I actually literally have the bowl of the first filling sitting on my counter top just sitting out right now because I’m like, “Maybe I can put this on French toast tomorrow morning.” I don’t know what to do with it.

There was one time I made, a couple years ago, and this didn’t even make it to the blog because I was so over it, but it was a lemon zucchini bread. It tasted like rubber. I don’t know what happened. It was so disgusting. I made two of them because I am always really hopeful that it’s going to turn out. Instead of paring back a recipe, I just go all in. So I had two of these loaves of rubber, and I just threw them in the trashcan because I will rage eat the bad stuff. I eat it because I am like, “I hate you so much.” I don’t understand it but that’s what I do.

I had that with macaroons. I made those literally ten times before I finally got one that was blog-worthy.

I was like, “I will go to the bakery down the street.” We have a really good French bakery down the street and they make amazing ones. I’m like, “Why do we even bother.”

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

What I usually do is I start off with a seasonal ingredient and I do a lot research on that. If there is nothing seasonal then I go with chocolate, caramel, peanut butter, things like that, but I try to stick to seasonal because I am a big fruit person, and I know people are always like, “Make more chocolate.” And I’m like, “No.”

So I start off with finding something seasonal that I want to work with and then I have the book called The Flavor Bible. I will go through there and there’s a list of complementary ingredients and flavors and I will go through there and kind of get inspired by that.

Then I will just think of all the formats and I try to flesh out the categories equally so like pies, cakes, cookies, whatever, but I will say I tend to skew toward pie. I like pie. I will end up with so many pies and tarts that I am like, “Oh my gosh, I have to tone it down,” but I love making them. And then summer, ice cream, I’ll just do ice cream until my ears bleed.

And honestly, a lot of what I do is built off other people’s work because that is what’s great about making recipes is you can. A lot of the testing is done by other people for you so you can find a base or find something similar. Like the roasted plum, I knew somebody had done a roasted peach ice cream, so I said, “Okay, if she did it like this and used this method for peaches, I can do the same thing with plums,” and kind of build from there.

I always try my best to list my source because I’m not a genius. I can’t just make up scientific baking things in my mind.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

So this is embarrassing but I don’t have cable so I don’t watch a ton, but what I do have is some Alton Brown, Good Eats.

We actually have them downloaded and when we travel, we will put episodes on our iPad and watch those because they’re fantastic and full of science.

What are some food blogs or websites that we have to know about?

Everything.

I have a thousand in my feed. I am a huge fan of Serious Eats because again they do a lot of science so I love listening to all of that, reading all that.

Blogs, I love Bakers Royale, her photography is just ridiculous and I’m jealous. Also Half Baked Harvest, and my friend Sarah who does the Sugar Hit and my friend Elizabeth who does Sugar Hero.

Elizabeth does candy and she’s amazing because I cannot do candy to save my life.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter that make you happy?

Bonnie Tsang. I think she is the one that has the little daughter, and she is so cute and every time, she just posts really fun and brightly colored things. Every time I see a picture, it just makes my heart happy.

What is something all home cooks should have in their pantry?

All home cooks should have chocolate.

I can’t tell you how much you can make with chocolate but if you don’t have it, it kind of stinks.

So the great thing about chocolate is if you have it, you can just eat it. If you don’t want to just eat chocolate, you can make all kinds of stuff with it like pudding, whip that up really fast, or just add it to any other thing and it makes it better.

Name one ingredient you cannot live without?

Butter. It is very simple for me. I go through so much butter it is not even funny. Every time I do a vegan recipe, I am like, “Where is the butter?”

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Oh my god, everything. I collect cookbooks so I just love everything. My favorite cookbook is the Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook because it is just such a great reference. If you want to riff on something, they’ve got such a great base recipes.

I also really love, this isn’t baking but, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution book. We cook a lot out of there, and since I’m not very good at cooking, it is really easy for me to follow. It’s got a revolutionary way of making rice that is just fantastic and lots of Indian food which I love.

I love all of the Baked cookbooks, Baked Bakery in New York. I get all of them as soon as they come out.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

This is really embarrassing, from West Side Story, the song, I want to live in America.

I am a big proponent of singing show tunes while I’m baking, it has such an up beat, it’s just very upbeat so it really gets me going and on track, and the solid beat of it makes me do everything in a timely fashion.

Keep Posted on Maria:

I’m best at updating Facebook. I’m terrible at Twitter, so yeah definitely follow me on Facebook because you will always see the new recipes. Any other things that are a little bit personal, and maybe kind of funny, is on Twitter, but I’m not regular about it.

On Discovering Her Passion for Baking:

On Her Culinary School Experience:

On Working in Restaurants:

On Deciding to Start Her Freelance Career and SugarHero.com:

On Her Book, The Sweet Book of Candy Making:

On Candy Making:

On Resources for Learning More About Candy Making:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Elizabeth:

On Starting Her Blog:

On Her Curiosity Around Food:

On Adventurous Eating:

On Being Fearless and Experimenting in the Kitchen:

On Making Cooking More Fun:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Danguole:

On Her Career Before Food:

On Her Introduction to Cooking:

On Turning Her Hobby into Her Career:

On the Type of Cooking that’s Most Natural:

On Where She Finds Inspiration for Her Blog:

On Things Not Going As Planned in the Kitchen:

The Pressure Cooker:

On Keeping Posted with Liz:

On Starting Her Blog:

On The Process of Blogging and What Comes Most Naturally:

On Her Connection to Baking:

On Baking Being More of a Science Than Cooking:

On Things Not Going as Planned in the Kitchen:

On Getting an Idea to The Blog:

The Pressure Cooker:

Keep Posted on Maria:

Have Maria’s Special Recipe Sent To You Now: