Baking with the Spirit (if not the skill) of the Cake Boss

All right, let’s be honest from the get go. I didn’t even use a hand mixer. The recipe instructs the baker to add ingredients to a standing paddle mixer, and, if that isn’t in your kitchen, to just go ahead and use a hand mixer. In my case, I had a wooden spoon. That might be the first reason why my Black-and-White Cookies, while sweet and tasty in their own funky-shaped right, might not be exactly what you would find at Carlo’s Bakery.

Let’s back up a second. Buddy Valastro, New Jersey man and star of TLC’s show The Cake Boss, will be here on Thursday, November 10, 12:30pm to sign his new book, Baking with the Cake Boss. (He’ll also be at the Paramount that same night at 7p, doing a full show for the good folks of our fair city, tickets available at the Paramount website.) Being a total sugar fiend, I jumped on the chance to have an excuse to bake up one of his recipes.

The recipe: Black-and-White Cookies.

As a young girl growing up on Long Island, I was unaware that the rest of the world is not covered in Italian bakeries the way Strong Island is. As it turns out, my favorite black and white cookies and seven-layer (or rainbow, as I called them in my squeaky little girl voice) cookies are not the dessert table staples they are up north.

I was drawn to this recipe not only because it afforded me the opportunity to relive my childhood cookie frenzies, but also because it did not seem so challenging for a novice baker such as myself. This is one of the things I appreciate about this new Cake Boss cookbook – while there are plenty of truly impressive creations to be made from its pages (if I were a pro, I’m sure I’d be going nuts decorating cakes right now), there are also recipes which are easily accessible for someone like me, who doesn’t even own a mixer.

This is a basic recipe, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, pinch of salt, dash of vanilla extract.  I already had most of the ingredients in my cupboard (including a sack of chocolate I had left over from all of those adorable little Night Circus mice we created) and made happy use of the bulk section at Central Market to pick up the cake flour the recipe called for in addition to all-purpose flour.

In my (meager) defense, I will say that I did peruse the shelves of kitchen appliances at Central Market in search of a hand mixer. Salad spinners, slicers, owl-shaped salt & pepper shakers, they had everything but; I was undeterred. Italian women have been making cookies for centuries, I told myself, and they sure as heck didn’t always have a standing mixer to help them do it. A little elbow grease and my own two hands and I’d do just fine.

I gave up quickly on the spoon when it came to creaming together the butter and sugar and just mashed it all together the old fashioned way, with my hands. Then I added the rest of the wet ingredients and went to town stirring up a storm. Already, I could see I was making something more like cake batter than cookie batter.

Here, I think, is where I went wrong – I stirred way, way too fast. Thinking that my puny muscles were no match for the power of a machine, I skimmed right over Buddy’s instructions to start on low speed and gradually increase to medium. I stirred the heck out of that batter. Look at me go!

The next wrong turn came with the flour and sugar. Lacking a proper sifter, I did what I could to shake the dry goods together with my hands. I know, I know. If The Cake Boss is reading this (which I pray he never, ever does), I’m sorry. Baking is both an art and a science. Let’s just say I was just a little too artistic with this recipe.

But taste tests proved that the batter turned out all right! (If a bit lumpy….)

Using a measuring cup, I scooped out about a quarter cup of batter for each cookie and popped those puppies in the oven to bake for just under 20 minutes. Voila!

Biscuit-like, yes, but only in appearance. Early nibbles proved the cake-like cookies were seriously delicious, sweet and light.

Then came the part I’d been looking forward to all night – icing these babies. If you haven’t already been able to tell, I’m not much of a baker, so you can believe I was absolutely floored to discover how easy it is to make icing. Boiling water + powdered sugar = delicious, smooth white icing.

And for the chocolate icing? Well, all you have to do is add chocolate.

So here’s how they turned out:

Not exactly worthy of being showcased in the window of Carlo’s Bakery, maybe, but certainly tasty. You have to love a recipe that can stand up to some novice bookseller mangling. I’ll definitely be making these cookies again. I may even buy a mixer next time.

~

Buddy Valastro will be here at BookPeople this Thursday, November 10, 12:30pm to sign copies of Baking with the Cake Boss. He will also appear at the Paramount the evening of Thursday, November 10th, at 7pm. Tickets for the Paramount show available via their website.