Rose Levy Beranbaum celebrates 35 years of divine cake inspiration

Rose Levy Berenbaum is a legend among bakers who rely on her recipes, which are backed by detailed research and innovative ideas. The books she has written on pies and cakes are referenced standards. One of them, The Cake Bible, was first published in 1988. After 35 years, Rose was itching to update the book. The new edition, like the old, is a brick of a book that contains all the encouragement and knowledge you'll need to tackle any cake. 

Evan Kleiman: So much that has changed when I think about it. You've been at this for so long, both developing recipes and consulting. You are an OG blogger and, of course, all the books. How have you seen your audience, the American home baker, change in these several decades?

Rose Levy Beranbaum: The first thing that comes to mind is, "Thank God they're willing to weigh rather than use the volume method," which does so much to ensure success. I also think that they're wanting more simple things. I don't mean simple as far as not as good, but things, for example, like bundt cakes, that get their beauty and design from the shape of the pan, rather than having to load it with buttercream. They're more open to trying things.

I think I am also one of those bakers who really doesn't want to make a very fancy cake. I've never been a fancy cake person, but I'm not so much a cake layer person. I definitely prefer loaves and bundts when I'm making them myself. Maybe it's because I'm not a frosting person. Is it difficult to change a recipe from a layer cake to a bundt?

Actually, not at all. And we give information on how to do it. I mean the proportion and leavening has to be changed slightly, but it's all there. Also, I don't like mostly two layer cakes. I prefer to have either a bunch or a single layer. But when it comes to showcase cakes or wedding cakes, that's an exception. Of course, we have a separate chapter for that.

It's really an amazing chapter. You not only increase the volume of the batter to accommodate several layers, you have so much detailed information on how people can stabilize their cakes and different ways of dealing with fillings and icing.

Evan, I've gotten so much wonderful feedback through the years of people who've used those charts for making wedding cakes and succeeded, and I made sure in the first Cake Bible, I dictated the entire thing (it was a 1,000-page manuscript, and now it's even larger) into a tape recorder and played it back against all the different versions to make sure. Because especially when it came to a wedding cake, I didn't want somebody to wait until the day before the wedding and suddenly find the cake didn't work. There could not be a single mistake.

A baking pioneer, Rose Levy Berenbaum is said to have invented reverse creaming with butter. Photo by Matthew Septimus.

Sell me on a frosting that I might actually like. Most are way too sweet for me.

The simple solution actually is ganache, because chocolate prevents it from being that sweet. But the interesting thing is that when people don't want it to be too sweet and they use a higher percentage of cocoa chocolate, like 70% and they don't adjust the cream, it's like a brick. You can't cut through it, so it comes off the cake. That's why, in the ganache chapter, I have all the different proportions of how much cream you need to add depending on the cocoa percentage. Thank goodness, chocolate now lists that so you can do that. 

As far as a non-chocolate frosting, I think that a mousseline. We change the way it's done so that we're adding the Italian meringue to the butter, which makes it much more foolproof, really. And if you add things to it to keep it from being too sweet, like a passion [fruit] curd or a lemon curd or even a jam that's not sweet, that's how you can adjust the sweetness level. But basically, I don't think people want to have the sensation that they're eating solid butter. That's why you want to aerate it, and you want to have other elements in it that take away from that feeling.

Going back to ganache for a minute. I'm a milk chocolate person. Can you describe your custom Rose blend milk chocolate ganache? 

Yes, because I feel that milk chocolate is so delicious that you can really make your own and not make it as sweet as it might be by using a blend of dark chocolate and white chocolate to provide the milk quality, because it has a lot less sugar and a lot more cocoa butter. It requires less cream, and I say that it could be the most luscious of all ganache, perfectly balanced, rich and creamy. 

I also love white chocolate for its various uses. It gets a bad wrap because in the past, people didn't know the difference between white chocolate that had cocoa butter and white chocolate that had palm kernel oil. I think the reason people didn't like white chocolate is because it's 1/3 sugar, and when people were adding it to recipes and not taking away the sugar from the recipe, it made it hideously sweet. But the benefit, and I think you've probably noticed that I have cakes that have the white chocolate incorporated in, like the Pavarotti, the white velvet whisper cake, it has a whisper of chocolate because of the white chocolate, and what it does is it gives you a finer crumb and a melt-in-the-mouth quality, because cocoa butter melts closest to body temperature than any other fat. 

I have an ingredient question. Many of your cakes call for bleached cake flour. What if, for example, I wanted to make the Whipped Cream Cake on page 50, but I didn't want to run to the store for that specific flour. Am I out of luck? Or can I do something to all-purpose flour to make it more cake flour.

First of all, you're talking about one of my absolute favorite cakes. 

The new edition of "The Cake Bible" updates Rose Levy Berenbaum's magnum opus after 35 years. Photo courtesy of William Morrow.

That cake sounds so good. First of all, describe it, before we get into the details. 

Well, the crazy thing is that it doesn't have any butter added to it. But when you analyze how much butter is in the cream, it has more butter than most butter cakes do, and it just is a melt in your mouth, light and airy, delicate, flavorful cake. 

The thing is about cake flour, or any flour, if you especially a bleach flour will keep forever. Just keep it airtight. So don't run out of cake flour. Put it in a storage container, and it's always there for you. 

But okay, say you don't have it and somebody else doesn't have it and wants to know what to do. Well, luckily, a pan that has a centered tube doesn't have the middle to fall. And usually, by using unbleached flour, you will have it fall right after baking. It starts falling in the center. It has a slightly coarser texture. 

I always say if you have to use unbleached flour, then use a tube pan, because there's no center to fall. If you have to use unbleached, don't keep it from making the cake. But do make it with cake flour the next time, because it's so good with bleached cake flour. And there are only two in the country. There's SoftaSilk and Swans Down. Anything else that says cake flour is going to be unbleached and will not be the same at all.

I want to talk about this groundbreaking technique that you created — reverse creaming — for people who aren't as in the weeds with baking as we might be. Can you talk about what creaming butter and sugar is normally and then how you came upon this idea of changing that up and why it works?

Well, people recently have been telling me, "You didn't invent that. I have a cookbook from the 1940s and '50s where they were doing that exact method." I wrote back right away saying, "What kind of fat were they using? It wasn't butter, was it?" And they said, "No, shortening." Well, yes, it existed with shortening, but all the textbooks and common wisdom said it cannot be done with butter. That was what I created — a way to do it using butter. 

So you had the flavor of butter as well as this wonderful technique. It's faster, it's easier, it's better all around. But the thing is, the butter has to be between 65 and 75 degrees. If you're making a cake in the summer and your kitchen is 85 it's not going to work. That's the only downside. 

Basically, what you asked me to start with, what I'm ending with, is that the standard method of creaming sugar and butter and then adding the flour, alternating with the liquid ingredients, does not give you as even a cake or as fine a texture, and it's a lot messier to do. You use a lot more equipment. But by doing the reverse creaming, what you do is you put all the dry ingredients. I don't believe in sifting them together, because that's not going to mix them evenly. I put them in the stand mixer and then whisk them together, or beat them together about a minute to blend, then I add the butter and maybe a third of the liquid ingredients, say milk, and beat that for, usually a minute-and-a-half, and then the rest of the liquid, combined with the eggs and the vanilla get beaten in two or three parts, depending on the size of the batter. 

It's just so quick, easy, reliable, and infallible. That's how I mean. On Wikipedia, you'll see I invented reverse creaming. I can't quite take claim for that entirely but I did invent something equally important, and that's a way to do it with butter.