Cake Pro Duff Goldman Gives Heaps of Advice to Beginning Bakers in ‘Duff Bakes’

Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week is Duff Bakes: Think and Bake Like a Pro at Home by Duff Goldman and Sara Gonzales (William Morrow Cookbooks). For 10 seasons, Goldman starred on Food Network’s Ace of Cakes. He’s also the founder of Baltimore’s Charm City Cakes and Los Angeles’s Charm City Cakes West. Gonzales is Goldman’s trusted head baker and kitchen manager at Charm City Cakes West.

As the star of Ace of Cakes, Goldman is famous for one very specific skill: building and decorating mind-blowingly elaborate cakes. For 10 seasons, Goldman and his team turned flour, sugar, and eggs into edible roller coasters, motorcycles, King Tut, R2-D2, and the Hogwarts Express, and it’s his well-televised career that makes Goldman’s new cookbook, Duff Bakes, rather surprising.

Duff Bakes does include cakes, though most lean classic — think angel food cake, carrot cake, and cheesecake — and there is a chapter called “Making Cakes Pretty” that details cake assembly and decorating essentials, such as how to cover a cake in rolled fondant. There are even three cake projects that, while certainly impressive, are still nothing like the creations from Goldman’s Ace of Cakes days.

Atha’s Peanut Butter Cookies (Photograph: Caren Alpert)

In writing this cookbook, Goldman knew he would ruffle some feathers. “If I’m on TV doing anything besides a cake, people are almost offended,” he reports. But, the truth is that Goldman has been baking for a long time, and while he’s known for cakes, he can, and in fact really likes, to do other things. Plus, with his experience and expertise, Goldman believes he can teach home cooks a lot about baking, which is what he sets out to do in Duff Bakes.

The first step is convincing people to give baking a try. Throughout his years in the public eye, Goldman says that the most common thing he hears from home cooks is that while they love to watch him bake, they don’t bake at all, because it’s too precise and too scientific. “Baking has been made out to be some mysterious alchemy,” says Goldman, and he’s eager to change that.

“It takes a little more presence, a little more thought, and a little more patience, but baking is not that different from cooking.” To help rebrand baking, Duff filled his book with easy, approachable recipes — he estimates that about 80 percent of the book comes from the recipe box he’s been keeping since he was 17 — but he also has some guidance to offer nervous newbie bakers.

Vegan, Gluten-Free & Raw Chocolate Macaroons (Photograph: Caren Alpert)

“Mis-en-place is so important,” says Goldman. This fancy-sounding French expression simply means to gather all your ingredients, measure them out, and have them ready before you begin. Next: “Read the recipe. Read it again.” It’s basic, but even a pro like Goldman knows that reading the recipe through completely — preferably twice — is crucial to success. And that goes for whether you’re making something simple like banana bread or a cake that looks like fries stacked on top of a hot dog stacked on top of a burger, which is something Goldman has made. Lastly, when you read that recipe, ask yourself if there’s anything you didn’t understand. Goldman stresses the value of looking up or asking an expert about any ingredients or techniques you don’t know. If you were curious enough to want to make a recipe, you should be curious enough to want to know what everything means, so never skip this step, warns Goldman.

A good place to start is the first few pages of Duff Bakes, where Goldman breaks down essential information on the ingredients, equipment, and techniques used throughout the book. There’s lots of solid information here, and not just for these recipes. Plus, Goldman avoids being too scientific or serious, which should help convince the skeptics to actually give baking a try.

Visit Yahoo Food throughout the week for recipes from Duff Bakes by Duff Goldman and Sara Gonzales (William Morrow Cookbooks).

Check out other cookbooks from Yahoo Food’s Cookbook of the Week:

Simply Nigella by Nigella Lawson

Grandbaby Cakes by Jocelyn Delk Adams

Oh, What a Treat by Sandra Denneler