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Then, Gay said, there’s “Ina Garten, of course.” Though Gay doesn’t concern herself with overly fussy techniques, she follows Garten’s lead in encouraging cooks to “use the good ingredients.” For this recipe, Gay said, “Use a really good mascarpone. There’s also the Instagram account run by a Los Angeles-based baker who has an affinity for cake pops. She particularly likes the website Sally’s Baking Addiction (“She always explains why she’s made some of the choices she has in the recipe,” Gay said). That’s partly why, when Gay needs baking inspiration, she turns to blogs and Instagram accounts sometimes run by casual home cooks who also like to experiment. “I’m definitely the kind of cook who respects the recipe, but doesn’t treat it as the be-all-end-all,” Gay said.
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For this cake, she prefers to up the amount of mascarpone and add to the standard buttercream recipe she learned from her executive assistant. And Gay is not afraid to add a personal twist or two. “I do think baking requires precision,” she said, “but I also think there are places where you can relax and not take yourself so seriously.” In this recipe, those include opting not to level dry ingredients, using a cake leveler on the baked layers(rather than obsessing with a knife) and placing chocolate chips on the cake’s exterior with reckless abandon instead of in the neat pattern Huff suggests. “There are lots of different steps,” she acknowledged. (For the video above, she made it to commemorate her younger brother Joel Gay, who died last year.) And novice bakers needn’t fear the recipe. Eat it whenever you want, she encourages. Hence,Gay does not limit cake creation and consumption to birthdays or special occasions. I think it’s just a very sane way of thinking about food.” That way you never feel deprived and you don’t overindulge, and you trust your body when it tells you what it wants or needs. And you only eat until you’re full, and then you stop. “Very broadly, it means you eat what you want. “She’s a big proponent of intuitive eating, which I find to be a very useful framework,” Gay explained. Jokes aside, Gay resists thinking of cake, or any food for that matter, as a “guilty pleasure.” The writer, who, with its subtitle, described her best-selling 2017 book, “Hunger,” as “A Memoir of (My) Body,” has worked with her nutritionist to “separate value judgments from food,” she said. “It actually tastes like milk and cookies.” “It’s such a crowd-pleaser,” Gay said of the confection, whose alternating layers of fluffy vanilla cake and chocolate chip filling are finished with a blended buttercream frosting. “Those are going in my imaginary cookbook,” Gay said.īut the cake she most wants to share with the world? An elegant but simple version inspired by the timeless pairing of milk and cookies that she found in the 2019 cookbook “Icing on the Cake” (Abrams) by the Vancouver-based baker and cookbook author Tessa Huff.
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She’s even developed a few of her own, including those for a “coffee/cake” (brown sugar layer cake, mocha buttercream filling, vanilla buttercream frosting) as well as a “blueberry pancakes” confection (vanilla cake, blueberry cream cheese filling, maple buttercream frosting). “But it’s fine because they taste great.”Īs for the cakes themselves, Gay has been studiously taste-testing different recipes over the past two years. “I cannot make a frosting rose to save my life and I have no artistic ability, so pretty much all my decorated cakes look the same,” she said. According to Gay, there is still room for improvement. So far, she has nailed base coats, florets and borders. “When the pandemic started, I decided to begin teaching myself,” the writer and critic explained recently. Roxane Gay is mastering the art of cake decorating.