Baked interview part 2 and Contest!

Renato Poliafito and Matt Lewis, Baked co-owners, authors, Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

First I want to say that I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and had been to Baked for our meetup there, but really had no idea how to get there. I was a little intimidated by it, but then I wound up making two visits within one week. I went there one evening to interview co-owners Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, but I was running late, so I have Renato and Matt on video, but did a solo interview with Matt below. See my full Baked photo set here.

On my way out, Matt gave me several goodies and I was hard-pressed to save some for my friends. The s’mores bar, made with their homemade marshmallows, is really amazing. The cupcakes are small, not bite sized, but not oversized at all. The frosting is very rich, and perfectly complements them.

In two weeks I'll be testing out their banana cupcake recipe, and will post again. I went back with Sandy, the Milwaukee Cupcake Queen, and tried treats such as the Oreo cupcake, whoopee pie, macaroon and, one of my favorites, the mini apple crumb pie which is SO worth the $5.

But beyond the treats, which were all amazing they also have a few savory snacks), the decor and entire setting of Baked is welcoming. It’s the kind of place I could see parking myself for a good portion of a day. They also have some amazing teas; that first day I had one with bits of chocolate in it that was amazing.

To sum up, if you’re in New York City, it’s well worth taking a ride over to Baked. If you’re not, check out their brownies and marshmallows and other treats on their site, and do catch Matt and Renato on their book tour. Upcoming dates posted below.

As for
Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, it’s a gorgeous book, a coffee table type book. The photos alone are simply mouth-watering. There are three cupcake recipes (Banana Cupcakes with Vanilla Pastry Cream, Almond Green Tea Cupcakes, and Coconut Snowball Cupcakes), along with little cupcake-decorating tips. There’s also recipes for drinks, the peanut butter/rice krispie bar, brownies and many other really mouth-watering delights like Milk Chocolate Malt Ball Cake, Vanilla Bean Caramel Apples, Sweet and Salty Cake, Root Beer Bundt Cake, and so much more. It's

And guess what? As part of our Contest Week, we have one to give away! There are two ways to enter, for a maximum of two entries: leave a comment in this post (with your email address as a way to contact you) and/or link to this post from your blog and let us know about the link (cupcakestakethecake at yahoo.com). we’ll do the same setup with the next 4 contests, so please stay tuned.

How did you come to start Baked?

I owned a space in New York called Chocolate Bar, and I wanted to do more of the creation. Chocolate Bar was about selling the best chocolates from all the chocolatiers in the United States; we called it the Barneys of chocolate. While I was doing that, I met Renato. He did the website for Chocolate Bar. He always wanted to open a coffee shop, and I always wanted to open my own bakery. That was four years ago, and it’s becoming more and more equal parts coffee and equal parts bakery.

It started out mainly about wholesale baking, but now it’s more about the retail side.



How has being in Red Hook affected the products you offer or the way you run the bakery, because it’s kindof out of the way?

Opening in Red Hook was really great for a couple of reasons. It gave us time to get started. If you open in Manhattan—and I had this experience when I opened Chocolate Bar—bam, the doors are open, reviewers are on Yelp…It gave us a rampup period of six months, and that’s when O. magazine printed a full-page thing about our brownies, and after that it was just insane. Now we have people coming from Manhattan, or tourists coming from Manhattan. On weekends, it’s crazy. They’ll bring in the pages from O. Magazine or they’ll say, “I saw you on Martha.” And it’s realy good because the bus and the subway to me are the same. A lot of people have that reaction of “how in the world am I gonna get on a bus?” You get on the subway all the time.

It’s been good because Fairway is down here, there’s a lot of really great retailers. They’re small, and there’s not a lot of us, but that’s been the perfect part of being in Red Hook. We’re here because we want to be here.

In terms of what we make, I’ve noticed it’s all tried and true stuff. Anything weird, like a thyme-basil tart, is not big here, but peanut butter, caramel, chocolate—which are my favorite things anyway—those are huge here. But the wasabi tart, which we did at one point, anything off the beaten path, is not big here.


Baked's marshmallows

How did you go about selecting which of your products to put in the book?

The book is kindof our greatest hits. That sounds cheesy, but it’s every recipe that’s most requested, or something we’ve done on a TV show or magazine. And everybody from the Internet will write in and say, “How did you do this and how did you do that?” And the rest of it’s our backgrounds; both of us have Italian backgrounds so there’s a lot of weird Italian influences, but they’re really Americanized in the book. So there’s tri-color cookies, which I think are terrible outside of certain bakeries, so we made our own version of it.

We don’t have anything to hide; every recipe is what we make in the back, except it’s been toned down a little bit for the conventional oven vs. the confection oven. We do 100 cakes at a time, and in the book we do one.

And do you have any concern that people will stop coming in to the bakery because they’ll be making the stuff at home?

No. It’s funny, because a lot of restaurants and bakeries are very worried about giving away their secrets. To me, though, we make it for you, what you’re paying for is something already made, you can come pick it up. I’m totally happy with people doing it at home and I think they should be able to. There’s not a lot of secrets left in baking, except we use really great ingredients. I’d hate for somebody to take my recipe and use a Nestle cocoa powder in it; that would drive me bananas. I try to say, “Use this ingredient; use this brand.” People don’t have to, it’ll still come out okay. But if you want it to taste like Baked, you have to use those ingredients.

Who’s your ideal audience for the book? Is it the experienced baker, the novice baker, or is there something for everyone?

We don’t take any shortcuts, so it’s really somebody who enjoys baking. I don’t think it’s a beginning book, I would say it’s probably intermediate. There’s also a lot of steps. When it’s winter, I love to bake at home, so I’ll go from here, where I’m baking all day or overseeing baking all day, and I’ll go home and bake at home, cause I love to make pie crust. We’re not telling people to buy a frozen pie shell; in fact, we tell people not to.

So it’s somebody who enjoys baking and doesn’t mind putting the time into it. I always get shocked when I see these cake mix doctor books, cause it’s like, why even bother? It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s scary stuff.


Milk Chocolate Malt Blal Cake

This might be like asking you to pick your favorite child, but do you have a favorite recipe from the book?

I have a new favorite recipe and sometimes it changes. Lately, it’s been our flourless chocolate cake. It has a chocolate ganache glaze, and I don’t know why, but I’m completely obsessed with it. It’s one of those things that even if we don’t do it here at the bakery, I ask the bakers to make me one, because it’s so dense and so moist and I just love a nice glaze on it. It’s also a really great recipe. Our editor said it was her favorite one in the book, which is funny, cause she’s a great baker too.

I want to talk about cupcakes in the book, and then more generally. What I thought was interesting about the cupcakes in the book is that all of them were unusual. I’ve had a coconut cupcake before, but there are interesting flavor combinations, like the white-chocolate-covered fortune cookie on the green tea cupcake.

I think we made a conscious effort not to do just the general cupcakes because there are so many cupcake books out there. In general, we tweak everything we do. We use a lot of malt powder, brewer’s malt….we’ll use root beer and Coca-Cola in strange places. With the whole book, including the cupcakes, we try to do something completely different. I think what you don’t see a lot of in cupcake books are really interesting toppings. Like pastry cream on a cupcake; it’s heaven on earth. It’s not really easy to sell, because it goes bad so quickly and you have to keep it in the refrigerator, but it’s the most amazing thing and I want everybody to experience that.



I have an embarrassing confession for someone who runs a cupcake blog. I don’t actually know what pastry cream is.

You can find it a lot in the French desserts. It has to be chilled.

It didn’t look complicated.

It’s not complicated. It’s not as sweet and it melts in your mouth, without any aftertaste. With French desserts, they use it as a filling a lot of the time. The flavor and texture are almost like a whipped cream. You see a lot of fruit tarts covered in a vanilla pastry cream but when you put it on a cupcake, it’s life-changing.

We only do the green tea cupcakes for special occasions, but everyone loves them. It’s an almond cupcake with green tea frosting, and it’s phenomenal.

In terms of running the bakery, what are your favorite and least favorite parts of it?

My favorite part is smelling cookies baking in the oven. It’s the one thing we eat almost daily. I’ve gotten really good about saying, “I’m not gonna eat this today.” Being in Red Hook, you don’t have a lot of lunch options, so you’ll nibble on what’s in the bakery. But I can’t resist the smell of a fresh pie in the oven or a fresh cookie. I also like to talk to the customers and find out what their favorite things are.

Probably my least favorite is that the hours are really long.

What are your hours here?

We open at 7 a.m., and that’s our busiest time Monday through Friday. We close at 7 or 8 depending on the day. I wasn’t used to long hours, and I love to work and I love working on my own business, but every once in a while you’re like, “I did another 80-hour work week.” And we’re opening one in Charleston, which just blows my mind. I don’t know how I could do much more.

Is someone else is going to run it?

We’re sending one of our chefs and one of our managers there to run it. They just wanted a change of pace, and Charleston’s really cool.

Why Charleston?

I have family down there. Also, the Southern dessert thing skews really really sweet. Think of a cupcake here and a cupcake there, I swear to God it’s ten times sweeter down there. The whole sweet tea thing…we’re gonna try to take a little bit of sugar out of their desserts and show them how it can still taste really good, and we hope it goes over well.

Let’s talk about cupcakes in general. I love all kinds of other desserts—I’m excited to try the s’mores bar—but I do feel like when you say cupcakes or see a photo of cupcakes vs. brownies., people like brownies, people love brownies, but they’re not in headlines. People put cupcakes everywhere and there are so many cupcake-specific bakeries. Why do you think they’re so popular?

A couple of things. They’re a good grab and go item. But I think the biggest reason is you can do them in so many different flavors. We consistently do five or six flavors, but we bake 20 different ones. I know you go to a lot of the cupcakes shops, and it’s like, on Mondays we’re serving these 12 flavors, and on Tuesday these 12. It’s cool because you can’t really do that much with brownies. Once you go beyond the basic dark chocolate brownie, you can do a couple different flavors, but you can’t do 12 and if you’re doing 12, it’s a real stretch. But it’s not a stretch at all to do 12 or 100 cupcake flavors. And it gives you a chance to try it without ordering a whole cake.

We didn’t open with the whole cupcake thing in mind, as you can see, and they’re by far some of our bestsellers. On a weekend, we’ll go through 1,000 cupcakes.

I had no idea it was still like that. We were blind to the cupcake craze when we opened. We knew it was out there, but I didn’t get that people were that into it. And people would come in and order 36 and I was like, don’t you just want a cake?

It saves the slicing up too; we do a lot of kids’ birthday parties too.

This might be a little sacrilegious, but if you’re not here, where would you go to get a cupcake? Where’s your favorite cupcake, not necessarily in New York?

Oh no, I tell people all the time. I love Almondine for dessert. It’s a bakery, not necessarily for their cupcakes. It’s very French. It’s the best of the best. People in Dumbo know it, but a lot of people outside don’t, and he’s really super talented.

Sprinkles—I hate to say it, I kindof love Sprinkles. It’s not about standing in line, it’s not about the flavors. I think they actually do a nice job on their frostings. Some of the cupcake places gross me out because it’s just butter and confectioner’s sugar, and I can’t eat that stuff, I just can’t. I know for some people, it’s their favorite thing, but it’s not our favorite thing at all. And Sprinkles does a nice job of that, and it’s super adorable too.

For someone who’s on the fence, maybe they’re in Manhattan or another part of Brooklyn, and they’re thinking, “That place is so far away.” What makes you guys special and worth coming out here?

If you have a nice weekend planned and it’s not super cold or super hot out, Red Hook is kindof this undiscovered place. It’s not trying to be cool, it’s not trying to be hip. It’s got this beautiful waterfront property a block or two away. There’s true artists who live here, there’s a gallery next to us, there’s Fairway, unfortunately now there’s Ikea (which I like Ikea fine). The best views of the Statue of Liberty in all of New York. It also has great views of Manhattan, there’s a water taxi, so I think it’s a great day to come out and see us.

What we do well, we do really well. We have a couple of clients who are tourists now who come in to New York once or twice a year and they will only eat our cakes. So we drive their cakes to the W or the Holiday Inn or wherever. That shows that we really pay attention to our ingredients.



You guys do catering; what’s been the most interesting or wild or fun even that you’ve catered?

We’ve done some strange catering situations, but the weirdest was a wedding themed as the astrological signs. You think, how theme-y could it be? It was really, really theme-y. They were dressed as astrological signs for their wedding outfits. It looked like a movie set. A lot of effort went into it.

We divided the cake in half; half was their astrological side and half was his. Their faces were painted. I’d never been to that kind of wedding before. I wish I’d been there for the whole thing. It was over the top.

You’re about to go on a book tour for Baked. What do you have planned?

We’re making stuff all along the way. We’re doing cake and cocktail events at a lot of small hotels in Portland, Seattle, Charleston…

Drinks from the book, wine that goes along with the desserts. It’s not about giving a speech. We’re making stuff in other people’s kitchens. We want to make as much stuff from the book as possible so everyone has the chance to taste it. We feel really strongly about the book and if people get a chance to taste it, maybe they’ll be interested in the book, but even if they’re not, we just want to have a good party.

When you’re not eating sweets or baking sweets, what are you up to?

When I’m not here, I’m a big foodie. I’m obsessed with restaurants, and I go to as many restaurants as possible, but I also like to watch a lot of reality TV. It’s terrible. I’m watching Project Runway, and I ended up watching The Rachel Zoe Project.

Would you do a reality show set here?

We were asked to do one and we initially said no. If we could do something that wasn’t as silly as some of them, we would do it. But some of them…

They want drama?

Yeah, they want drama. And we did one on the Food Network, which was supposed to be a documentary, but it became this weird drama thing. It’s actually on our site. We think it was so silly, but people loved it.

Baked: New Frontiers in Baking tour dates

October 25th : Seattle, WA : Ace Hotel
October 28th : Portland, OR : Ace Hotels
November 1st - 2nd : Austin, TX : Texas Book Festival
November 13th : Brooklyn : Brooklyn Heights Barnes & Noble
November 2008 : Baked Charleston SC

And they will be on The Today Show October 9th and The Martha Stewart Show October 22nd. See their official book page for more info.

CONTEST!

Win this:



Okay, and now for the contest to win a copy of their cookbook, which kicks off day 1 of Contest Week here at Cupcakes Take the Cake. Instead of having each day's contest end at midnight, they will all run through Friday, October 10th at 11:59 pm.

That means that to enter (U.S. addresses only, sorry!) you can do one or both of the following (each gets you one entry):

1. Leave a comment on this thread with your email address telling us what your favorite item from Baked is, or which of their recipes/desserts you'd like to try. You can use the convention name at domainname.com if you'd like.

2. Link to this post from your blog/Twitter/website and then email us the link at cupcakestakethecake at yahoo.com so we know to include you.

That's it! Good luck and thanks to Matt and Renato and their publisher Stewart, Tabori & Chang!