Whisk Takers: Recent Episodes
Fiona and Roxanne
Whisk Takers is a show about baking and friendship, hosted by Fiona and Roxanne. We're lifelong bakers here to tell you what we've learned and what we're learning about baking. Want to know what wheat flour is best for cookies? Want to know the French names for the different types of pie crust? Want to know what exactly cocoa powder is? We're the show for you!
This is our first episode discussing gluten free baking. Unfortunately, the baking audio for this episode was lost and couldn’t be recovered, but we hope you enjoy our discussion of Jessie Sheehan’s incredible Flourless Hazelnut Nutella Cake nonetheless. We go over what gluten is, what ingredients it’s found in, and some easy approaches for GF baking newcomers.
https://www.jessiesheehanbakes.com/2017/10/31/flourless-hazelnut-cake-with-nutella-whipped-cream/
It's the middle of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and we could all use a little hygge: the Scandinavian concept of convivial and contented coziness. In this episode we make a Swedish cinnamon roll, or kannelbullar, and discuss all our favorite bakes for filling your home with coziness.
All about one of our favorite baking ingredients, citrus fruits! We adapted Sophie Faldo's (Great British Bake Off) Ode to the Honey Bee entremet into an Ode to Citrus.
In this episode, we discuss how we develop recipes, something we’re now doing for work! Plus, we practice recipe building by making a cake that came to Roxanne in a dream.
Chocolate ft. Sohla El-Waylly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXnlVlkkkxM
Chocolate Fudge Blackout Cake:
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chocolate-fudge-blackout-cake-recipe
Sweet Tart Passion Fruit Curd:
https://www.garlicandzest.com/sweet-tart-passion-fruit-curd/
Disclaimer-laden and high on sugar, we’re coming at you with our first episode about plant-based baking. We cover the basics of vegan bakes and make a plant-based pavlova!
Article on militant white veganism from Lakota Law: https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/2018-12-12/veganism
Cupcake Jemma Recipes mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QECjltYhwYg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj9wbbPKMIU
Sourdough part two of who knows how many! This episode features an interview with our dear friend and sourdough enthusiast Toby. We also made the Sourdoughnuts from Bon Appetit’s “It’s Alive” youtube series - twice!
Check out Toby’s work! https://www.sartorialsquonk.com
Brad & Claire Make Sourdoughnuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzDwiw7xIHE
Reddit recipe: https://www.reddit.com/r/bon_appetit/comments/cm08w3/sourdough_donuts_the_recipe/
Let’s blast the past! In this episode we discuss mid-20th-century American recipes and bake Jessie Sheehan’s incomparable and high femme silver cake. Sources:
https://www.jessiesheehanbakes.com/2018/05/19/silver-cake-with-pink-frosting/
COOLEY, A. (2015). To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. University of Georgia Press. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt17573sg
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-enslaved-chefs-helped-shape-american-cuisine-180969697/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/3/140301-african-american-food-history-slavery-south-cuisine-chefs/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/eating-jim-crow/
Happy Halloween & Blessed Samhain! This episode is all about our relationships to food and sacred rituals. We discuss Hoodoo offerings, Samhain, Día de los Muertos, and Shinto buddhism. We also made funnel cake, a traditional dish of Finnish Mayday celebrations. For patreon subscribers, we’ve released some bonus footage about the Hungry Ghost Festival and bread-loving faeries.
Sources:
https://www.hoodoofoundry.com/the-ancestor-altar/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(spirituality)
http://missionaryindependent.org/conjurecookoff.html
http://missionaryindependent.org/hoodoo-heritage-festival-workshops.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead
https://spiritspodcast.com/episodes/dia-de-los-muertos?rq=day%20of%20the%20dead
http://www.theafromystic.com/blog/2017/11/4/a-veneration-prayer-to-invoke-the-ancestral-spirits
http://blackyouthproject.com/how-learning-to-work-with-my-ancestors-created-a-relationship-of-reciprocity-and-parental-support/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/msf-podcast-05-hoodoo-black-southern-spirituality-conjure/id1506840626?i=1000472248624
We're back! Thank you to everyone for tuning back in for season 2. We recorded this episode and the following one remotely at the beginning of the COVID19 outbreak, so apologies for the audio quality. It will greatly improve starting with the episode 3 of this season! In this episode we catch up with some exciting updates, discuss Roxanne's fraught sourdough experiments, exalt the glory of the savory bake in all its forms, and bake a bacon and venison pie together.
In our Season 1 finale we discuss our families' Christmas baking traditions, Roxanne quizzes Fiona on various culture's traditional winter baked goods, and we rhapsodize over the lovely panettone we made!
Chrusciki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_wings https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-chrusciki-1135581 Makowiec: https://culture.pl/en/article/makowiec-the-most-scandalous-cake-in-the-world Laufabrauð: https://forvo.com/word/laufabrauð/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laufabrauð https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Christmas_folklore Yule! https://theherbalacademy.com/celebrate-winter-solstice/ https://wicca.com/celtic/akasha/yule.htm Judith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah Lebkuchen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebkuchen https://germangirlinamerica.com/what-is-lebkuchen/ Panettone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panettone
It's the beginning of our sourdough journey! Join us, won't you? In this episode, we offer an overview of sourdough and describe our experience following Brad Leone’s & Claire Saffitz's sourdough tutorial on the Bon Appétit youtube page. Spoiler alert: at the end there's bread.
Roxanne very rudely forgot to introduce her dad in their interview, as if everyone should already know his name! Presumptuous. His name is David, or Doctor Be. This episode we share two of our fathers' specialty bakes with each other, and celebrate our appreciation for spending time in the kitchen with our dads! Apologies if the audio is somewhat crackly in places, we couldn't figure out how that one happened. Thank you for listening!
This is merely the beginning of our chocolate-centric episodes. We discuss our favorite chocolate bakes, bake Nadiya Hussain's decadent Chocolate-Peanut tart, and dive into what exactly cocoa powder is and how we get it from a darn bean! It's a good reminder that we are bakers but not chemists.
It is established Whisk Takers canon that we learned a lot about baking from our Moms. This week we interviewed them for you! We also talk about some of our personal favorite family bakes and what we MUST HAVE for the holidays.
What has flour and fat, and isn't a cake or pie? Her name is Pastry and she's got the secret key to flaky, buttery, cream-filled, honey-soaked goodness. For this episode, we baked Kouign Amann (pronounced Queen-Ahmahn), a sweet puff-pastry-muffin much easier than it seems.
Book Turn Lamination Technique:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnOxkNH-GLs
Kouign Amann Video showing Letter Turns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CiS6LSNGfI
Y'know those ingredients where when you hear they're in a cake or a brownie, it ruins your whole day? We're here to talk about those! First we discuss our personal no-go ingredients, then we do an arbitration on controversial baked goods submitted by listeners, and finally, we baked Chetna Makan's Mango Coconut Cardamom Cake, which is rife with controversial ingredients!
Chetna's Cake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0naZ3lrv4Y
Travis's Mango Cult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhDDwvAhfGw
Patreon, if you want us to eat Marmite! https://www.patreon.com/whisktakerspod?alert=2
Roxanne got married recently, and we thought this would be an opportune time to talk about wedding desserts. What were the best wedding desserts we've had? What is the history of having desserts at weddings? And what did we have at our weddings? This episode includes an interview with Engineer Dan about making Fiona's wedding desserts.
The Sweet Praxis: https://www.thesweetpraxis.com
Lulu: https://www.everythinglulu.com/menus
As a bonus this week, we have a preview of the sort of episode you'll get if you join our Patreon! This is the live audio of our first baking session, making Puits D'amour and lots of silly jokes. This bonus content is for all of our listeners, but future baking audio will be reserved for Patrons only, so if you like it, please become a Patron at https://www.patreon.com/whisktakerspod
Yes, baking disasters are hilarious, but it's nice to be successful sometimes! This week Fiona and Roxanne talk about some of the times they've had spectacular baking triumphs, some of the cookbooks where they get their ideas, and the time they casually made a Beef Wellington with homemade puff pastry.
Our Patreon is here! patreon.com/whisktakerspod
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We're good bakers, but no matter how good you are at baking there are times when the dang thing just doesn't do what it's supposed to. We're starting this episode with a very raw sharing session about some of our personal baking disasters, but then we get to make fun of old-timey people and the way they approached food, featuring bird crimes, pudding crimes, and poisoning people with sawdust crimes. We also made a Bakewell Tart to prove that even though we completely failed at that the first time we tried, we are capable of redemption. Just like Mad Max.
Live birds in pie: http://www.thousandeggs.com/gretepye.html
Pudding throwing: https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/world-black-pudding-throwing-championship
Yorkshire puddings down the toilet: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yorkshire-pudding-sewer-blockage
Our listeners know that we love The Great British Bake Off, and we particularly love Mary Berry. On this episode we talk about our great love for Bez (and why she's nicknamed Bez!) as well as some of our other baking heroines. We also made Mary's Brandy Snap recipe, and we have a lot of good ideas for what to do with them!
Note: Since this episode was recorded, Nadiya Hussain has released another cookbook, bringing her total up to 4, not to mention various picture books, a novel, and a memoir!
It's our second episode! This episode covers: What are our least favorite parts about one of our favorite activities (namely, baking)? How many different types of pie crust have the French named? And is a caramelized honey and apple pie as nice as it sounds? (Spoiler: It's pretty dang good.)
Welcome to Whisk Takers! Fiona and Roxanne are lifelong bakers with a decade-long friendship who want to tell you what they've learned and what they're learning about baking! This episode covers: Who the heck are these two ladies, and why do they have a podcast? What are all the different types of wheat flour you can name, and which ones should I be using for my cookies? What on earth is Puits D'amour, and can I eat one now?
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