Baking is a never ending learning process. I have been very pleased with the learning opportunities I have encountered both online and here in the Los Angeles Area. Teaching is an opportunity to share knowledge and hopefully inspire new bakers to come into the fold.
How do I learn?
I won't say practice makes perfect because perfect is the enemy of good. Or so I am told. However practice does make things come out a lot better as you go along, especially when it comes to a pie crust. I take detailed notes–temperature, time, if I added more of an ingredient the thirteenth time I made it, baked it longer etc. And keep the notes all in one place! A mistake I have made more than a few times : )
How do I teach?
If you have never weighed your ingredients for baking, you will be introduced to this process. When you take a class with me, you will have fun, go home with what you baked, a Recipe Handout and a Weight Equivalency Chart for the basic ingredients we use in baking.
Kid Learn
Beginning to Bake : One-On-One
Introductory baking lessons are taught at Camp Glen Green on an individual basis. Cupcakes, Mini Cakes and Cookie Classes will be offered. Parents are welcome to attend, hang out and watch or mingle and have some wine and appetizers.
KIDS | Individual Lessons:
$60 (3 hours)
Beginning to Bake : Group
Introductory baking lessons are taught at Camp Glen Green in small groups of similarly aged children. Cupcakes, Mini Cakes and Cookie Classes will be offered. Parents are welcome to attend, hang out and watch or mingle and have some wine and appetizers.
KIDS | Group Lessons:
$30 (3 hours)
Adult Learn
Bake a Pie Night
Would you like to make a delicious flaky pie from scratch in a super fun setting with a few friends? Learn to take the mystery and intimidation out of pie baking with a toolbox of standard tricks and see how wonderfully fun and easy it is. And yes, you get to take home lots of leftovers!
ADULT | Group Lessons:
$60 (3 hours)
How I Learn
Craftsy
The year I won the KCRW Pie Contest I took a Craftsy Class on Perfecting the Pie Crust. The Craftsy site is such a great method because you can keep the class forever, review when you need to and watch the classes on any device. The iPad in the kitchen works fantastically well. The Class Materials are beautifully designed. You can print them or download the PDFs and refer to them whenever needed.
Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories
In Santa Monica there is a wonderful establishment called The Gourmandise School of Sweets and Savories. It is run by Chef Clemence Gossett who started making homemade treats for associates at 20th Century Fox where she was working as an assistant in the feature film group. I have taken four at least classes at Gourmandise. They are thorough, perfectly paced, inspiring and fun.
KCRW's Good Food
A weekly radio show and podcast offers everything you wanted to know about good cooking, good eating, good food! From LA Chef, author, radio host, and restaurateur Evan Kleiman. It is astounding what I learn from this show every week. Stories about local chefs, bakers, farmers, restaurants, history and culture. It is fascinating how one thing effects another from the craft of food making to the science of the environment. The KCRW Good Food Blog just won a James Beard Award! So great. It even has a PIE category for the pie obsessed such as myself
THE VANILLA BEAN BAKING BOOK: Recipes for Irresistible Everyday Favorites and Reinvented Classics
by Sarah Keiffer
In 2014, her blog The Vanilla Bean Baking Blog won Reader’s Choice Best Baking & Desserts Blog in the SAVEUR Best Food Blog Awards.She published my first cookbook in November 2016.
READ & PRACTICE!
Find a book like this beautiful nugget, full of inspiring, delicious recipes. Dive in and bake a few. Nothing I have ever made from this book has come out the least bit off. Enjoy!
I discovered The Vanilla Bean Baking Book about a year ago and I love it. Fantastic recipes, excellent process directions and the ingredients are listed by weight. So much easier than cookbooks from which you have to do the conversions before you get to work. I can't say enough about how beautiful the photographs are. All shot by the author!
The Vanilla Bean Blog is a great resource for recipes from Sarah and other recipes she has tried and adapted. Thoughtful poetry throughout the blog as well.
SWEET: Valerie Gordon's first cookbook, was a James Beard Award Finalist!
A labor of love years in the making, SWEET contains the recipes to many of the most popular items from Valerie Confections, developed since the company was founded in 2004. Beyond sharing her favorite recipes, Valerie uses SWEET to share the way she approaches baking, incorporating unique ingredients and techniques that will allow you to use the recipes as a starting point to create your own memorable desserts.
Every recipe works beautifully!
Valeries’s brownies are so easy and always a crowd pleaser.
We are SO lucky to have Valerie Gordon and Valerie Confections so close by in Los Angeles. She is a lovely person. I have yet to be able to take one of her cake decorating classes, but I keep my eyes peeled for them.
This is one of the books I go to time and again for pie, cake, brownies, pastry cream and frosting recipes. SWEET is a beautiful and delicious book. Again, all ingredients are listed by weight and the photographs are gorgeous and inspiring.
THE NEW PIE: Modern Techniques for the Classic American Dessert: A Baking Book
CHRIS TAYLOR and PAUL ARGUIN are doctors by day and pie contest winners by weekend. Self-taught and incredibly motivated, the two direct their creative energies to baking and have won more than 500 ribbons for their baking, including Best of Show in the 2017 National Pie Championships. They live in Atlanta, Georgia.
Get this book!
Go to Amazon or your closest cookbook store right away!
In 2020, I am modifying my pie crust recipe to adapt to a Cuisinart + hand method. I am also adding more butter per the ratio in this book. It is coming out pretty great so far! Also, their method for blind baking is so simple, you will kick yourself that you didn’t learn how to do it this way before.
CAKE PORTFOLIO: A detailed, personal look at making cakes
I bought this book for myself and my BBFF for Xmas. We recently took a class with Amanda at Maker’s Mess. I learned more in two hours than I did in classes that lasted a series of weekends. Plus we had some wine and a super great time.
Amanda’s approach to making cakes has developed over time and from her experiences on The Great American Baking Show, running a custom cake business, hosting on the Flour Hour podcast, and instructing cake art classes. The process section has techniques for planning and decorating cakes. In the designs section, there are 26 unique cake designs that include all the instructions needed to recreate them. The recipes are written by weight. There are 4 cake, 13 frosting, and 20 topping and filling recipes that can be used to make the cakes throughout the book, or readers can create their own original cake combinations.
The Frosting Color Palette!
Is reason enough to buy this book. I have used it extensively over the last few weeks.