Kitchen Project #102: Jammy Coffee Cake
by Natasha Pickowicz, from 'More Than Cake'!
Hello,
Welcome to today’s edition of Kitchen Projects. It’s so wonderful to have you here.
Today, it’s one of my FAVOURITES: It’s a cookbook special! I have the pleasure of delving in to the world of Natasha Pickowicz to celebrate her debut book ‘More Than Cake’ which is out now! I got to sit down with Natasha and I’m thrilled to share a bit more about her journey to writing this book along with one of her favourites from the book - the adaptably gorgeous Jammy Coffee Cake.
Over on KP+, I’m beyond excited to be sharing a second recipe from Natasha that is SO very her: Olive oil cake with crispy capers. I KNOW!!! Click here to read it. I’m also giving away a copy of ‘More Than Cake’ to a subscriber - check the post for more details.
What’s KP+? Well, it’s the level up version of this newsletter. By joining KP+, you will support the writing and research that goes into the newsletter and get access to an amazing community, extra content, the full archive, and more. Subscribing is easy and only costs £5 per month. Why not give it a go? Come n join the gang!
Love,
Nicola
More than cake, incoming!
Every now and then, an utterly distinct voice in the world of pastry appears. Sometime during lockdown I started seeing a series of wondrous things appear on my feed: A cake covered in salad leaves. Marbled cookies. Watercolours of Sherri and Terri from the Simpsons. Tie dye semi freddos in gastro pans. Sandwiches and tarts stuffed with greens. Rectangular wedges of fantastical layer cakes - black sesame! Green tomato! Merkut Limes! Parsnips!?! But what did it all mean? What force connected all of these things?
The force is, of course, Natasha Pickowicz, the three-time James Beard nominated, NYC-based pastry chef and author of ‘More Than Cake’. Flicking through her debut book, it’s clear that Natasha is one of those rare things in the food world - a true original.
More Than Cake is breath of fresh air - the layout, which intersperses useful step-by-steps with illustrative strokes, along with atmospheric images of the bakes being enjoyed in situ (the subtitle of the book that promises recipes ‘built for pleasure and community’ is apparent) and helpful diagrams. It’s a baking book that treads the line between fantastical and technical, inspirational and practical, with an air of ease. The San Diego sunshine that dapples the photographs helps, too.
If you are someone who enjoys reading cookbooks in bed, like novels, then you’ll love More Than Cake. It’s a bit like being inside a pinball machine - Natasha flings you from flavour to flavour. This means it’s also an ideal book to have on your shelf for drumming up inspiration.
Natasha’s recipes read like flashes of lightning; Pinging from shiso chips to rosewater & mezcal flan, half-moon pie to sunchoke custard, the recipe headers are like jolts to the senses, a creativity lull defibrillator. As well as this, all of the recipes are written clearly, with unique and specific cues, like seeking a dough that is “like a thick linen curtain” along with reminders to “admire the pattern” on your bakes.
There are, of course, smart ‘cheffy’ touches that are a nod to her extensive kitchen experience, like the use of agar agar to bring a compote together, or a pinch of malic acid here and there, but there’s nothing that feels unapproachable. It’s the perfect marriage of back-of-house-training with make-at-home sensitivity, drawing attention to the time in Natasha’s life that this book was born. Yes, More Than Cake *IS* a pandemic baby, and it is here to stay.
I sat down with Natasha to learn a bit more about her journey, the writing of the book and her life as a pastry chef, so far.
Date for your (London) diary
Right now, Natasha is embarking on her US book tour, bake sale-ing as she goes. I’m SO thrilled that she will be coming to London and popping up at Leila’s Shop (15-17 Calvert Avenue, E2 7JP) with the fabulous Stroma Sinclair on Saturday 10th June for a pastry and lunch takeover! Think veg galettes galore, big salads, and plenty of cakes and sweets. SEE YOU THERE!!! For all the details, check Natasha’s instagram for announcements (coming soon, I’m sure): https://www.instagram.com/natashapickowicz/
The origin story
So, we know where Natasha ended up… but what about where she began? I’m always fascinated at the way people end up in kitchens - you often find it’s a twisty turny road that clearly informs their writing or cooking today.
I love full circle moments, so I took a lot of pleasure in learning that before Natasha went into kitchens, she studied literature. After graduating, Natasha stayed in Ithaca (upstate NY) and took on a role at a local newspaper editing the arts section and calendar listings. This led to her “producing and curating experimental music concerts”, born out of her own desire to see these kind of events in her small town.
She explains, “If you ask [creative people] why they're making something, the answer is usually because they're making the thing that they want to see … I think the most genuine work comes from a place of not catering to others, but really answering that question of what you want to see.” It’s an ethos that has stayed with Natasha, from the articles she writes, to the pop-ups she produces, to the bake sales she hosts, to the community events she puts together.
Alongside all the nuts and bolts - ticket promotion! Hiring equipment! Selling tickets! - Natasha had a big question: “What are they going to eat?”
She explains, “That was really the first time that I was like, how can I cook large meals for people that I care about, that feel nourishing, that feel delicious?”. This “DIY punk ethos” of her early twenties, gathering, organising (and feeding!) touring musicians, still runs through all of her pop-ups and bake sales. “They're more rough around the edges than a flawless service at a restaurant where I may have worked, but I think they also feel more true to who I am and the way that I want to connect with other people.”
A few years later, Natasha moved to Montreal and it was here that she first went into a kitchen as a part-time baker at Dépanneur Le Pick Up. Natasha admits that she “100% lied about having had kitchen experience.” Here, Natasha baked classics like lemon bars, iced brownies, cupcakes and apple pies. Realising that she wanted to dive deeper into pastry, find a mentor to progress her skills and knowledge, she took on a role as a pastry cook at Lawrence, another restaurant in Montreal. “That was where I learned absolutely everything and not just the technique side of pastry” Natasha explains, “but also how to work service. How to set up your station, you know, fine dining plating, deep cleaning a kitchen, all the camaraderie.”
Lawrence has an English owner which means the dessert menu took inspiration from classic puddings. “Summer pudding with fresh berries was my favourite thing to make. But we’d also make more esoteric stuff like Sussex pond pudding. I would thinly slice an entire lemon, line a ramekin with suet pastry, fill with the lemon, brown sugar and butter and then steam it for hours and hours. The scariest part was unmoulding it!”
From making marzipan by hand, to whipping egg whites without a mixer (“too loud!”) for souffles, Natasha tells me she “just threw myself into that work”, figuring it out as she went. After Montreal, Natasha moved back to New York, but this time to NYC, where she specialised further into pastry and suddenly had access to ingredients she had never seen before: “I felt like I was Dorothy coming into Oz” she says.
Natasha eventually ended up as the executive pastry chef of ‘Estela’, ‘Altro Paradiso’ and ‘Flora’, a dynamic role that earned her three James Beard nominations (2018, 2019, 2020), which she held until the pandemic had other ideas.
In the wake of the heartbreak of the industry shuttering, Natasha sprung into action and launched her pop-up series ‘Never Ending Taste’, a roving pastry party which moved around NYC and, eventually, other cities in the US. For each of these pop-ups, Natasha shopped at local markets and produced pandemic friendly pick-up only events where she could fully express herself through flavours, textures, colours. No longer confined to Italian-only ingredients, Natasha had complete say on the menus and could draw from her Chinese-American background, producing dishes like brown butter adzuki bean pie and yuzu semifreddo with chinese celery leaf oil. You’ll see this proudly represented in her book with recipes like black sesame fortune cookies, too.
A strong believer of ‘protesting with pastries’ (and has written articles about ‘how to bake sale’ yourself. There are also pages dedicated to it in ‘More Than Cake’), Natasha’s events always have a charitable element, supporting local community programs in whatever city she is visiting. She also produced major bake sales in 2017-2019 in aid of planned parenthood, raising over $125,000. In response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, last year Natasha immediately put together a bake sale and raised $22,000 for Brigid Alliance. To celebrate the launch of ‘More Than Cake’, she hosted ‘More Than a Bake Sale’ in April and raised another $30,000 for the organisation.
West coast to East coast to West coast
The best cookbooks are transporting and you really do feel like you’re in Natasha’s world when you read her debut. Although Natasha is decidedly a NYC resident, ‘More Than Cake’ was shot in her childhood home in San Diego, California.
Though I’m rarely thankful for how expensive NYC is, I’m actually thrilled that Natasha was priced out of shooting her book in a “fancy NYC studio”. After making a few enquiries, it became quickly apparent that a NYC shoot was not on the cards. So it was on to plan B: “I was so lucky that my parents were like, come shoot in the house” she explains. “It’s the house that I grew up in, it's the house where my mom's studio is.”
Open Natasha’s book and you’ll immediately notice the beautiful illustrations drawn by her mother Li Huai, an accomplished artist that she has collaborated with on all of her bake sales and pop-up posters over the years. These drawings are interspersed with Natasha’s lyrical text and warm, vivid images of sheet pans, picnics, plastic quart containers, bunches of flowers. “I think the intimacy comes through in the images because the entire crew stayed in the house the weeks that we were shooting. It was so much fun.”
Natasha explains, “I recognise props in the book that are knickknacks from around my childhood home that are artworks that that the photographer found in the bathroom that she wanted to use. I think those little details like gives the book a texture that feels very sincere”
The way that Natasha approaches everything, whether it’s her pop-ups, fundraising, running a kitchen team, shooting this book or working on any of her many, many collaborations, there’s a clear focus on community. “There were so many aspects of the book that were intensely collaborative and I think that's the dynamic that I really like to create in is sort of working with other people.”
How to write a book
The actual writing of the book, a decidedly solo activity, was “difficult” for Natasha - she signed her cookbook deal in summer 2020 and worked on it for the following 18 months. Like all of us, the pandemic threw Natasha into the unknown. When the hospitality industry was suddenly and completely unplugged, she was let go from her job. “I was coming off of having lost my job, working in restaurants where I was used to working with a large pastry team and feeding tons of guests. The intensity of being around people all the time is definitely a state that I thrive in.” Fortunately for us, Natasha “willed herself” to finish the manuscript and More Than Cake was born.
She admits that finding a balance between “technical writing” that didn’t feel “too stiff and removed” with writing that wasn’t “overly indulgent with anecdotes that take away from the recipe at hand”, but kept some of her favourite non-cookbook authors, like Maggie Nelson, as north stars. This results in a rich text that is “still bursting with little sidebars and pop-out tips” that are fun to bounce around.
Throughout the book you’ll find Natasha weaving her personal stories into the recipes, as well as tracing back the history of the dish. “If I had an incredible chocolate and olive oil sauce on an ice cream at Superiority Burger, and I developed my own recipe, I want to recognize that and give that credit.” She explains, “I think that attribution is so important to the storytelling of the recipe. Also ethically I think it's important to give that context but I also love how a recipe can move from place to place through people and time.”
More than a baking book!
‘More Than Cake’ really is the perfect name for Natasha’s book because this ‘more than’ attitude sums her up so well; Natasha is more than an activist, more than a pastry chef, more than a writer, more than an organiser. And with her, cake represents so much more than cake!
It is only fitting that I get the joy of sharing TWO of Natasha’s cake recipes (it’s more than cake, it’s two cakes! groan) with you today. Below you’ll find her recipe for jammy coffee cake. Spoiler alert for anyone reading this *not* in the US - coffee cake is not coffee flavoured, rather a crumb topped cake you can enjoy with coffee (confusing at first but I think you’ll love it). Natasha uses cocoa powder as a seasoning, rather than a main flavour component, which is incredibly deft and a reminder that flavour is a multi-piece puzzle.
Over on KP+, I’m honoured to share a recipe that is SO Natasha - an olive oil cake with crispy capers. How often do you see a cake recipe with a vinaigrette soak?! I’m obsessed.
Alright. I’ll now pass you over to Natasha. More Than Cake is out every where now, so check your favourite in person or online retailers. Make sure to keep up w Natasha’s adventures via instagram @Natashapicowickz and London, see you at her pop-up at Leila’s Shop on 10th June.
Jammy Coffee Cake
Excerpted from More Than Cake by Natasha Pickowicz (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2023.
A classic coffee cake has two essential components: a fluffy cake and a decadent crumb topping. My coffee cake adds a sticky ribbon of raspberries racing through the center. In the oven, the macerated berries thicken, and the sweet-and-salty oat topping collapses into the fruit, forming a buttery, crisp crust. Try playing around with equal amounts of other fruits, depending on the season-finely diced rhubarb or sour cherries in the spring, or roughly chopped cranberries in the winter. Just look for a tart, barely sweet fruit for the proper amount of acidity.
Makes one 10-inch (25 cm) loaf coffee cake
Serves 6 to 8
35 minutes active time
1 hour inactive time
Ingredients
1 pint (about 150 g) raspberries
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (75 g) granulated sugar
8 tablespoons (4 ounces/115 g)unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
¼ cup (60 g) light brown sugar
1 egg (50 g), at room temperature
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon (75 g) sour cream or yogurt
¾ cup plus 1 tablespoon (100 g) all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons (20 g) spelt or whole wheat flour
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
Sweet-and-Salty Oat Crumbs (recipe follows)
Flaky sea salt
Method
1. Preheat the oven and prep the pan. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Mist a 10-inch (25 cm) loaf pan with cooking spray and drape a sheet of parchment inside, like a saddle, so that it comes up the long sides of the pan.
2. Macerate the berries. In a small bowl, combine the raspberries and 1 tablespoon of the granulated sugar. Use your fingers to crush the raspberries, pressing in the sugar and releasing the fruit’s juices.
3. Cream the butter and sugars. In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle (or in a large bowl using a handheld mixer), cream together the butter, the remaining granulated sugar, and the brown sugar on medium speed until fluffy and lightened in color and inching up the sides of the bowl, 4 to 5 minutes.
4. Add the egg, vanilla, and sour cream. Add the egg and paddle for 2 minutes. Add the vanilla and sour cream and paddle until smooth, another minute (the mixture may look curdled, but this is fine).
5. Add the dry ingredients. In a small bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, spelt flour, cinnamon, and kosher salt. Sift the cocoa powder and baking soda through a tea strainer into the bowl and whisk well to combine. Turn the mixer off and gently tip in the dry ingredients all at once. Using the lowest speed on the mixer, mix until the ingredients are halfway combined, about 10 seconds. Turn the mixer off, remove the bowl from the stand, and finish folding by hand, with a spatula.
6. Add the toppings. Spread the cake batter in the prepared pan. Spoon the macerated raspberries over the surface of the cake. Scatter the sweet-and-salty oat crumbs on top.
7. Bake the cake. Transfer the pan to the oven and bake until a small knife inserted in the center (see tip) comes out clean, 40 to 45 minutes. Let cool before slicing. Cut into thick slices and sprinkle with flaky sea salt.
tip—It can be tricky to test a cake for doneness when the top layer is a sticky, wet jam. Try sliding the knife in at a sharp sideways angle, count to three, and then remove the knife. If it’s dry, the cake is done.
Sweet-and-Salty Oat Crumbs
You can keep a pint container of raw oat crumbs stored in the refrigerator; a spoonful pressed into a cookie or a scoop of muffin batter before baking is an easy, tasty upgrade.
makes 1½ cups (205 g)
5 minutes active time
20 minutes inactive time
Ingredients
½ cup (100 g) light brown sugar (see tip)
¾ cup (90 g) rolled oats
¼ cup (30 g) all-purpose flour
1⁄8 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
3 tablespoons (45 g) unsalted butter, cubed
In a small bowl, combine the light brown sugar, oats, flour, baking soda, and salt. Pinch in the butter until it has disappeared into the crumbs and the mixture feels slightly damp. Refrigerate for 20 minutes to chill. The crumbs, held in an airtight container, can be stored in the freezer for up to 3 weeks.
tip—One cut-up apple magically rehydrates rock-hard sugar. Bury the apple chunks in the sugar, cover tightly, and wait. It will be plush and damp the next day.
Can I just say how much I value "inactive time" being listed up front in a recipe - I keep getting caught out by that so it's brilliant idiot proofing!
“A creative lull defibrillator”! Lol. We’ve all been there! It does feel fresh and exciting.