When the winter holidays roll around, many of us are struck by a desire to tuck a bit of alcohol into, well, everything. Mulled apple cider spiked with a bit of whiskey, perhaps? Certainly egg nog and hot chocolate benefit from a nip of rum. Another seasonal tradition: Baking with booze.
Incorporating alcohol into baked goods can happen a handful of different ways, says our latest podcast guest, Jessie Sheehan, a food writer, recipe developer and the author of cookbooks including Snackable Bakes, The Vintage Baker and Icebox Cakes. Her latest cookbook, Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes, made its debut this past September.
One might fold alcohol into whipped cream, or let it soak into cookies or cakes. In both instances, the booze isn’t added during an active-baking phase, meaning the alcohol doesn’t burn off. Unsurprisingly, incorporating the right amount is key to ensuring a tasty, and texturally-pleasing final result.
Quantity, of course, must also be a consideration when adding alcohol to a batter that’s baked. Add too much liquid and you’ll get a cake with a watery consistency (yuck), but add too little and you won’t taste it at all (another tragedy).
To help us make sense of this tricky territory, Sheehan shares three wine and spirits-spiked recipes: a flourless red wine chocolate cake, a spiced pumpkin snacking cake with chocolate bourbon buttercream and a classic Kahlúa-soaked tiramisu. Listen through the episode to get her thoughts on each—and pitfalls to avoid.
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Episode Transcript
Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.
Speakers: Rachel Tepper Paley, Jessie Sheehan
Rachel Tepper Paley 0:07
Hi, I’m Rachel Tepper Paley, digital managing editor at Wine Enthusiast Magazine. Today we’re talking with Jesse Sheehan, a food writer, recipe developer and the author of cookbooks including snackable bakes, the vintage Baker and Ice Box cakes, her latest cookbook, salty, cheesy, herby, crispy, snackable bakes made its debut this past September. Since she in is the queen of all things baking, we wanted to know what are her feelings about baking with booze. Turns out she’s a fan, especially around the winter holidays. But it’s not always as straightforward as dumping a few glugs from a bottle into your batter. In this episode, Shein shares how she uses alcohol in three wine and spirit spike recipes, a flowerless red wine, chocolate cake, a spice pumpkin snacking cake with chocolate bourbon buttercream and a kalua soaked tiramisu. Hop over to Wine enthusiast.com for all three recipes, but not before hearing all of Sheehan’s healthy boozy baking tips. Hey, Jesse, thanks so much for being with me today.
Jessie Sheehan 1:08
Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. This is so fun.
Rachel Tepper Paley 1:12
So today we’re talking about boozy baking. Is that something that is fun for you? Do you like to cook with booze?
Jessie Sheehan 1:21
Oh my gosh, I love it. I particularly love it around the holidays. I will say I’m not so much reaching for booze, let’s say in the middle of the summer, but I absolutely am at like, Thanksgiving and, like, you know, Christmas holidays, or all of the holidays that happen in December, Hanukkah, etc. And, yeah, it’s just like a really, in my opinion, just like a really fun way to add like, new and different flavors to, maybe bakes you already have, or bakes that you want to create. I’m a recipe developer, so I’m creating bakes a lot, and it’s just like a cool way of adding like different flavor profiles that’s not like adding spices or not, like adding herbs. Do you know what I mean? It’s a liquid ingredient. So it can be like a little trickier, just because you could add a ton of cinnamon, and probably it might not taste great, but it’s probably not going to screw up your bake, but if you added a ton of booze, you know, just thinking about the amount of liquid that you’re adding is something, it’s something to pay attention to. But what’s cool about it is, even though you have to be like, a little bit careful about the amount of liquid that you’re adding to a recipe, you can also really, like, play with the amount of booze and the type of booze that you add, dial it up or dial it down exactly. And what’s funny is, this is, like, an admission, like, I hope there aren’t too many haters listening, but I am somebody, even though I’m a recipe developer, and recipe developers are supposed to be like, Oh my god, I love it that you subbed out like this for that, and you’re amazing. And I love you added those spices, and I love that you changed that, and that I’m like, one of those weirdos who’s like, oh my god, you changed my recipe. I’m really sad. I don’t want you to change it. I worked really hard to make it that way, but that’s not a popular opinion. You’re really not supposed to say that. So what I will say that is true about booze is I actually don’t feel that same kind of ownership. Like, if somebody is like bourbon, why’d she use bourbon? I want whiskey or bourbon. Why she’s bourbon? I want rum. Like I kind of that does not bother me at all. Same with amounts, whereas I might be sad if someone was like, oh my god, there was so much salt I had to tweak it, or, oh my gosh, there was so much, you know, dill I had to pull back on it. I kind of love that. With booze, I can be the person that everyone wants me to be, which is that person who says, Oh my gosh, I used a cup because I love it so much, I be like, Oh my god, I love you. Or I changed it up and I used blank, and I be like, Oh my god, I love you. So I tend to be a lot more flexible as a recipe developer when I think about booze and my recipes. And that’s kind of liberating. In a way.
Rachel Tepper Paley 3:57
I love that, and I feel like, especially in holidays, you can dial up or down the merriment depending on your your taste preference.
Jessie Sheehan 4:09
100%. and sometimes it’s nice and fun. Like, if your recipe, we’re going to talk about a few of my recipes, but let’s say your recipe calls for red wine. It also can be kind of fun to like, have that red wine on the table, or at least tell people about the wine that you used and the two you know, because it’s a little different when when you cook with alcohol, as opposed to some of the other recipes we’ll discuss, which the alcohol is like in its, you know, you’re in its, um, what would I Say, uncooked state, I guess, but it can be nice, I think, to play on it’s in here, and also you can take a sip of it. And obviously, for some in the instance where you’re actually baking with it, the flavor is really different, but it’s kind of fun to bake with it and then be like, Well, what does it taste like, not baked? And that can be fun to do as well. I mean. I’m not sure. I know we’re going to talk about my tiramisu. I’m not sure I would like serve kalua with it, but you could,
Rachel Tepper Paley 5:07
I definitely like the idea of, if you’re like an after dinner drink kind of person, that this kind of like a boozy dessert, sort of like combines, like the after dinner drink and dessert courses.
Jessie Sheehan 5:20
100%. and I like for one and not whole. I feel like, I don’t know if it’s a if it’s a European thing, I’m not sure, but I feel like boozy after dinner, drinks are not necessarily my jam. Like I’m the kind of drinker that like, if I was drinking like white wine, which is my fave, through the entire meal, I would probably be drink. And we were still like you, it was festive, and you were still partying, I would probably still be drinking that even during the dessert course and after. Do you know what I mean? I’m not the person that necessarily wants, like, a little bit of port or something else. Um, with that said, what’s fun about boozy desserts is I almost feel like you’re giving your guests or, you know, the maybe you brought the dessert with you to somebody else’s house, their guests, the boozy drink, course, but it’s inside the thing, the baked good, which I kind of love, yeah, definitely, like,
Rachel Tepper Paley 6:10
it has sort of that we keep saying celebratory, but it just, it just, it’s, it’s
Jessie Sheehan 6:15
just, it’s totally festive. It’s totally festive, yeah, and it’s fun, whatever. It’s just fun to kind of peek into the liquor cabinet when you’re not, like, at the stage of the dinner party, let’s say, or the hosting the event, the cocktail party, you’re not dipping in, like, in the beginning to, like, get people cocktails or make sure that there’s, like, wine and booze for everybody who’s coming. It’s like, you already went in there and kind of were, like, what would taste yummy in my chocolate cake? Or like, what could I dip those lady fingers in? Or like, what’s nice in a frosting, like, that kind of thing.
Rachel Tepper Paley 6:49
So you’re you’re hinting at the next part of what we’re going to talk about. So today we’re going through three of your recipes. Love it. You’ve adapted to include booze. They illustrate different ways to cook with with booze to bake rather and I thought maybe it’d be fun to start with your flourless chocolate red wine party cake. Would love that. So you showed me this recipe, and it immediately caught my attention, because it sounds, I mean, chocolate and and red wine, that sounds just divine together. And this is a cake that the wine is actually in the batter and it’s gonna be baked in the oven. So tell me a little bit about that. What is the wine add, and what kinds of wine do you gravitate towards in this cake? And tell me all about it.
Jessie Sheehan 7:38
Totally, totally. So this is, this is my like, kind of go to like, flowerless chocolate cake. I’ve been making versions of this cake for many, many years, and it is in this the flowerless chocolate cake without wine is in my third cookbook, which is called snackable bakes. And in that book, I call it the weeknight dinner party cake because it’s the it’s so easy to make. It’s flowerless and it’s but it’s not flowerless in a my whole jam is like easy peasy recipes. So it’s not flowerless in a separate your eggs and whip your egg white kind of way. Those kinds of cakes are delicious, but I am not a separate egg and whip your egg white kind of gal, because that’s a little too fussy for me. So this is a flowerless chocolate cake, where literally all you do is melt chocolate and then add some sugar, and then add a whole lot of eggs and a lot of vanilla and salt. And what’s what? This is a really adaptable recipe in terms of adding flavor. And when I was tweaking it for you guys and sort of redeveloping it with wine in mind. I wasn’t exactly sure how much wine I was going to need to add, how much wine I would need to add, and I also wasn’t exactly sure, honestly, what it was going to taste like. And I went with a very kind of like fruit forward Pinot for this. And oh my gosh. It was so unbelievably delicious. The finished product, not necessarily in a oh my god, there’s wine in this cake kind of way though, I think you’ll be able to tell, I always joke that I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palette, so it is possible that somebody with a more sophisticated palette would know right away. Instead, for me, it was just this unbelievable kind of like dark, like red berry fruitiness that I was getting within the within the cake that I just absolutely adored. I mean, people say that chocolate and red wine go really well together, but oh my gosh, they are absolutely telling the truth. And although I think you could make this cake with a variety of different kinds of red wine. I just fell in love with this idea of, like, this red berry situation with the chocolate. So a wine that is like red berry forward, as it were. It’s funny, because I am not like a chocolate and fruit person, you know, I don’t think that that’s delicious. I’m not like a black forest cake. A gal, it’s just not my jam to mix fruit and chocolate. But in this instance, I mean, I don’t know, maybe this cake has converted me, like there was something so delicious about the different level, like the different taste that the wine brought to this delicious cake. I mean, the cake is just very chocolatey because, literally, that’s the main ingredient, but adding that kind of fruitiness to it, I just found to be absolutely delicious. And it’s usually served with like, a dollop of creme fresh, which I which I also, which I’ve always loved because of the tang that that brings. And I just think there’s something really special about like, it could be the tang of the creme fresh, the kind of bright beriness of that wine that’s in that cake, and then the chocolate. It’s like a literal, like match made in delicious, boozy bake heaven.
Rachel Tepper Paley 10:51
As you’re saying, this like, I’m I just imagine. I’m just imagining, like a chocolate and like raspberry combination, is it sort of like adjacent to that flavor 100%
Jessie Sheehan 11:00
maybe a better example of a cake that I don’t love. When I was talking about black forest cake, yeah, like chocolate and raspberry, people are putting that together all the time. Um, that is just not necessarily my thing. I love chocolate and I love raspberries. Not particularly interested in having them together. Same thing with like, people eating like, dip chocolate dipped strawberries, not necessarily my jam, but this, oh my gosh. Can I tell you how delicious it is and how much it spoke to me in a really surprising way? And speaking of that, that now that you bring up raspberries, my guess is, for people that are very fruit and chocolate forward, that this would be delicious served with some raspberries on the side, or, sir, I love that, yeah, with some like bright Berry, maybe even strawberries, but raspberries, it’s weirdly, I’m kind of hungry while we’re recording, so maybe that’s why. But that is sounding really delicious to me.
Rachel Tepper Paley 11:51
What is the texture like?
Jessie Sheehan 11:52
The cake is incredibly fudgy and and maybe the inside of a really fudgy brownie, teeny bit softer than that, like not quite as dense as that. Though this cake is very dense. I highly recommend when making this cake, once you’ve cooled it for about 10 minutes, flipped it out of its pan. And you don’t want to keep it in the in the pan for much longer than about 10 minutes, because it’s really hard to remove as it cools, you get that out of the and this is all obviously in the recipe. You get it out of the pan and you want to freeze that baby. There is something about this cake that’s been frozen and then defrosted that really elevates the texture. Highly recommend that it makes it really easy to slice it makes it much fudgier. So don’t sleep on the freezing of the cake after you make it.
Rachel Tepper Paley 12:46
I love that. And I imagine too, you can then stock your your freezer with just like party cakes, to just pop at it on a moment’s notice. Yes, yes. I love that. And because this is a recipe that involves baking the wine. It’s not really an alcoholic recipe. Yeah, correct. Because,
Jessie Sheehan 13:07
very good point, because the alcohol does bake out as you and honestly, I wish this is the problem with being an empty nester recipe developer. I mean, maybe I wouldn’t have given this to my children just because it had wine in or they might not have liked it, but I used to have all these testers living with me, and what was so easy to just be like, does this taste good? Does this taste like wine? Does this taste and my husband, he’s still around, but, but he wasn’t here when I was developing this, this cake. But sometimes it’s hard when you’re developing recipes, if you’re not like I developed this, and nobody else has tasted it but me, and so it’s funny how sometimes you I mean, and I obviously, like, I know I joked and said that I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palette, but I will say it’s not a bad palette. And this cake is utterly delicious, but it can be nice when you have other people around to sort of help you determine how much, how much red wine. Yes, it tastes really boozy. No, it doesn’t taste boozy. Et cetera, et cetera.
Rachel Tepper Paley 14:04
So you’re saying it’s good to bake when you have a bunch of people in your house, and you can just go around feeding people little, little bites of things exactly, exactly. I love that.
Jessie Sheehan 14:14
100% lots of licks off the spoon.
Rachel Tepper Paley 14:16
Exactly. No, I love it. And it feels, you know, like this is a recipe that you know, even somebody who might it seems like they it might pique someone’s interest who isn’t usually into this sort of flavor combination, like yourself. So I think that actually says, says a lot about that.
Jessie Sheehan 14:36
What I think, too, yes, like this was not a recipe I already had on my website because it had never that just wasn’t the way my mind thinks like, Oh, I love wine and I love cake. They should go together. I just don’t think that way. And I was so pleased with the results. I mean that it’s really special.
Rachel Tepper Paley 14:52
I love that. So moving on to another way to bake with alcohol, i. I love your recipe for pumpkin snacking cake, which you’ve anointed with the quote, fluffiest chocolate bourbon butter cream. So in this recipe, the alcohol is in the frosting. Tell us a little bit about that. What does it add? And how is that different from the recipe that we just talked about? Sure,
Jessie Sheehan 15:24
so even though, again, I’m just like gonna, I hope I don’t annoy too many listeners, but I am not a pumpkin pie person. It is just not my jam. I will never, ever, ever say yes to a slice of pumpkin pie. I will say yes to like, a pumpkin chiffon pie, which is like, made with gelatin and egg whites and is very fluffy that. And it’s not that I don’t like pumpkin I don’t love pumpkin custard, the pumpkin custard that is a pumpkin pie. So when I want to please the pumpkin lovers in my life, or it’s Thanksgiving, etc, etc, I am not going to make you a pumpkin pie. I might make you a pumpkin chiffon pie with a ginger snap crust, and that’s very delicious. But what I’m really going to give you is pumpkin cake, because I adore pumpkin cake, and I love snacking cakes. That’s like a thing of mine, which are just small cakes, and like eight by eight by two inch square baking pans, or nine by nine by two inch square baking pans. And they are exactly what they say, what what their name implies. They are very snackable. And I also love the combination of chocolate and pumpkin, which people don’t always like. People sleep on and all the time. Like, that is, yes, cream cheese and pumpkin is delicious, just the way a cream cheese frosting a carrot cake is delicious. But oh my gosh, chocolate and pumpkin like, next level, like I have pumpkin whoopee pies with chocolate filling. Like I go to pumpkin and chocolate town all the time. So there that was, there
Rachel Tepper Paley 16:49
was that a place that you could visit? Can you get?
Jessie Sheehan 16:50
Yes, you can.
Rachel Tepper Paley 16:53
great. I love that. I also love how then we’ll get to the frosting. But I think that it’s funny that you know, people who are maybe not in, like, the food business, they tend to think of like food world people as like, oh, you eat everything. But it’s like, no, we’re very particular people. Oh, we’ve got opinions.
Jessie Sheehan 17:13
I totally agree. I totally agree I eat most things. Yes. Like, I’ll be really sad if I go to your house and you’re like, I made a pumpkin tart, I’ll be like, you did.
Rachel Tepper Paley 17:24
I think it’s because we eat a lot of things and so and we’re good at, like, thinking about, like, why you like something versus something else. So you develop, like, a lot of these, like, thoughts and feelings about the ways you like to eat these things. And I think it comes across, like, you know, you you tell people like, oh, I don’t like this. I like that. And they’re like, oh, wow, you’re very particular. But it’s like, no, you spend a lot of time thinking about it. And this is the what you come to find is the ideal way to consume these flavors. Yes, I identify it with this very close.
Jessie Sheehan 18:01
So this cake, to me, it’s a no brainer to put a chocolate frosting on a on a pumpkin cake, and then it is also absolutely a no brainer to put bourbon into a chocolate frosting. To me, obviously, yeah, that is just heaven, and I have done so previously with chocolate cake, because chocolate and bourbon is a match made in heaven anyway, and so why not add bourbon as well? What’s lovely about well, there’s nothing that’s not lovely about this cake. I mean, the cake, it’s like, you know, fluffy and more. I know people don’t like that word, but I don’t mind. It is fluffy and moist and very pumpkiny, in a good way. And then the frosting is incredibly fluffy, incredibly chocolatey. And then that bourbon, I think, is just a brilliant kind of marriage between the flavors of the kind of the more like fall forward, warm flavors of the pumpkin with that kind of, I don’t want to call sharp chocolate sharp, but they’re kind of the slightly sharper chocolatey extreme, that kind of more extreme flavor that you’re getting from that whipped cream. Plus, I mean frosting, plus the frosting is so fluffy that it just like texturally is really nice with the moist cake. Like this is not like a dense frosting, and I love it with bourbon. The other thing you could do is, if you are very bourbon forward, or any alcohol forward, and you are preparing a cake with a frosting, let’s say that has that flavor in it, you can also brush the cooled cake or the warm cake with some bourbon before you frost it, that would be like an extra layer, like if you had some very bourbon forward peeps in your crowd. That would be another way to get even more alcohol into the cake. Or you could brush with the bourbon and leave the chocolate frosting. Bourbon less interesting. So. A lot of room with cake to flavor with booze, because of, like the you know, to make an extra moist cake, people will also will often make like a simple syrup, and they will brush that on their cake and that just, and that’s just sugar and water, and that just helps their cake stay more moist. Or it can be a little trick if you’ve over baked your cake. So I love this. I love the idea of doing that with the bourbon. Well, I like that, right? And it’s just like, it adds, even if you really want, like, if this was like, all about like, peeps, this is a bourbon experience, then I would recommend brushing and putting it in your frosting. But you could do one or the other,
Rachel Tepper Paley 20:39
gotcha and the the recipe, as it calls for it, like, it says about three tablespoons of bourbon. Is that like? Do you? Is that enough to like, really? Does it feel alcoholic? Do you get like, kind of like, the broad flavor of it? For me, that
Jessie Sheehan 20:53
feels like a really good amount. If that, I recently made a chocolate bourbon pecan pie for Thanksgiving. And that, I think that pecan pie called for about three tablespoons of bourbon, and that was baked. And, wow, you tasted that bourbon in that pie. That was like, no joke. So I would say that three tablespoons that’s not even baked at all, you know, because it’s in this frosting is definitely going to give you a lot of bourbon. The other thing I would say, the beauty of a frosting is, add two tablespoons, taste it. Add three tablespoons, taste it. Add three and a half tablespoons. Taste it like you can also Gage. It’s a little harder to do that obviously with red wine cake, although you can taste the batter, but, um, but definitely, with a frosting, you should play with the amount you like.
Rachel Tepper Paley 21:40
So it’s like, very fluffy. If does that like adding more or less change the texture at all, or do you find it doesn’t
Jessie Sheehan 21:47
less, definitely not more. I mean, if you put in a cup of of bourbon, you would have trouble getting that frosting to stay together. But I think you could still do it with a quarter cup. If you went a quarter cup, wow. Order cup is four tablespoons. So if you didn’t like that three tablespoons and wanted to do one more, I think you’d be okay.
Rachel Tepper Paley 22:06
I think that that definitely is like on the boostier side. Would you? Would you serve that to kids under an under 21 crowd?
Jessie Sheehan 22:14
Very, very good question. I mean, it’s not that I wouldn’t, because I would worry they’d be drunk. It’s too little an amount. It’s that I wouldn’t I don’t feel like kids love that flavor. My kids are now like, 21 and 19. So they’d be like, what is booze? Bring it on. Like they would not be sad. But younger kids, I feel like booze can be hard on the palette of a younger child,
Rachel Tepper Paley 22:36
right? It’s, it’s definitely a grown up cake after the kids go to bed exactly. Mine are very young, so maybe this would be like they go to bed and then the grown ups have their exactly combined after dinner, drink, dessert course,
Jessie Sheehan 22:51
exactly, exactly.
Rachel Tepper Paley 22:54
I’m already planning my dinner party.
Jessie Sheehan 22:56
I feel like any kind of whiskey that appeals to you like, there are other kinds of things. You could put in a frosting. I happen to be very I’m happy to love bourbon, so that’s what I’m going to put into it. But you could put a little dark rum in there. You could put a different kind of whiskey in there. Can also play with how you want to flavor your pumpkin pie.
Rachel Tepper Paley 23:15
I imagine, like a spiced rum would also work really well here, right,
Jessie Sheehan 23:19
right, playing with the spices of the of the cake totally,
Rachel Tepper Paley 24:19
moving right along to the third recipe, and yet another way to bake with booze is tiramisu, a very classic boozy dessert. This, in this recipe, it includes, you know, iconically crisp lady fingers that are soaked in Kahlua. Yeah, the soaking is that you sort of alluded to it in the last recipe, where you could, like, sort of brush on a little bit of bourbon. But this is kind of like leaning into that kind of aspect of cooking with booze.
Jessie Sheehan 24:49
100%. this. This recipe is funny because I it’s in my second it’s in snackable bakes, my last book, my third book, just like the chocolate cake is as well. Actually, they all are. They all are featured in that book without without booze, except the tiramisu does have the kalua and it’s called Oliver’s tiramisu in the book, because my son, Oliver, is obsessed with tiramisu. So the the booze that I choose to make when I’m making this for Oliver is Kahlua, because it doesn’t. It doesn’t really read boozy. It reads like creamy and coffee espresso E and delicious, if you ask me. It marries beautifully with the cocoa powder that you that you sift over the cake, and it also marries beautifully with the espresso that you are, because the lady fingers are dipped in a combination of espresso and Kahlua, with that said, and with this cake, when you’re dipping in booze and not baking anything, like the tiramisu, doesn’t get baked. It’s like a icebox cake, like a cake that essentially bakes as it were, and I’m doing air quotes in the refrigerator. You know the flavor of that booze is going to be strong, but when you dip, one thing to be careful of is the is how long you dip your lady fingers in the booze and the espresso powder, because they will disintegrate. You want them wet. It’s flavor. It’s part of the recipe. But you don’t want them so wet that after you pull them out, they break in your hand, and like half of the lady finger falls back into your Kahlua espresso coffee mixture. The other thing I would say about Tiramisu is there are so many amazing, different boozy additions. Like I said, I love the Kahlua because of Oliver fortified wine. That’s not my jam, but you can use a, you know, Marsala or Madeira. There a bunch of different, you know, fortified wines that you can use, you can use rum, you can use brandy. I mean, I feel like the tiramisu. World of booze is very inclusive. There are many different things that and again, I think, I mean, this is maybe obvious, but for all of these recipes, it’s like, use what you like. You know, I mean red wine. The only thing I would say about red wine is, yes, use what you like. But as I kind of mentioned earlier, I am more of a white wine person than a red wine person. And when I do like red wine, I like something really light and spicy, not really fruity, with the red wine cake. I really think you want fruity, because that and again, the reason I know every, every single listener is going to love this cake so much is because I’m not even like, that’s not my jam, necessarily, as I said, like a fruity, big red wine, but it is so delicious with this chocolate, with the chocolate in that cake, with the other recipes, I think you can be much more like, Oh, I like bourbon, so that’s what I’m going to put in my frosting. Or for the tiramisu. I’m kind of a wimp. Like, I mean, or not, I’m not a wimp, but like, I love Kahlua. Like, it’s like, really delicious to me. So I’m going to use kalua because that’s what feels good to me. If you are 100% like Marsala wine or go home, then that’s what you’re going to use.
Rachel Tepper Paley 27:54
I shouldn’t even say this out loud to public audience, but my toxic trait is on. Now, that’s huge coffee person. So I love the idea of using a fortified wine or something like that, 100 like, because, like, that’s like, my thing with Tiramisu is that, like, it’s, so it’s, it’s a coffee lover dessert. Yeah, it’s just like, not totally my thing. I shouldn’t even admit that to people, because we were like, That’s okay. I say that, but I don’t love coffee, and people are like, What is wrong with you? Who hurt you?
Jessie Sheehan 28:25
Yeah, this is a safe space.
Rachel Tepper Paley 28:29
But I love the idea that of kind of like swapping things in and out, that, you know, these are all recipes that you’ve adapted. I think that’s interesting, because, like, I think of baking as something more precise than, you know, other forms of cooking, and so I’m always kind of reluctant to off road it with baking recipes. Is what is different with these and do you think that just my impression that’s a, that’s a that’s not the right way to view it in general, well,
Jessie Sheehan 29:03
I think you’re right. There is a precision attached to baking, or inherent in baking. And I also think that in general, there is like a movement to encourage people to be a little more flexible. And as I said before, I’m kind of like the outlier who hates the movement, but I’m like pretending that I love it, fake it till you make it. Yeah, exactly. The beauty of the booze is that you really do get to play. And it’s a great opportunity for me as a recipe developer to be able to say and really mean it. This is how much I used, and this is the kind I use. But if that’s not your jam, go for it. Put less, put more. Choose a different beverage, boozy beverage that you like, and use that instead. Like you can you have, like, let your, let your, you know your booze flag fly, let your freak flag fly. Just like, go for it with with what makes you feel good, or what you think is really tasty. Okay, and that’s really nice with boozy baking. Like you said, All all three of these recipes already existed. I mean, in Oliver’s tiramisu, I do have Kahlua. So that one, there was already Kahlua. But all three of these recipes are from my last cookbook, and they all who knew that they would be so flexible when it came to booze. I had no idea that I could, you know, next cookbook, I will say. And here’s a variation, add, you know, a quarter cup or a third a cup of red wine to this cake. Do you know what I mean, if this cake is featured again somewhere, same thing with the bourbon buttercream. I don’t think I said in a variation, like, hey, peeps, please add bourbon to this if you really want to have a good time. Ah, but I should have so yes, I do think booze is a place where people can play a lot more than in other areas of baking.
Rachel Tepper Paley 30:48
Is that, because, like, you get like, a lot of flavor bang for your buck in terms of like, because I, in my mind, I’m like, Okay, you’re adding like, liquid or like, that’s changing the consistency, and that’s where you get into trouble. But is it because then tell me, if I’m wrong here, that, like, it’s you, you get, like, a lot of flavor from a relatively small amount
Jessie Sheehan 31:12
of yep, I think that that is exactly it. I was worried about that with the chocolate cake. Like, what will this wine do in this chocolate cake, and it didn’t turn out to be a problem. Maybe the fact that I’m really recommending freezing it before slicing it is part of the effect of the extra liquid, or the liquid. There was no liquid in this recipe. I also pulled way back. I might have even taken the vanilla out completely. I did kind of look to the places in these recipes where they’re not the tiramisu, because that was already written with kalua, but with the frosting for the pumpkin cake and the chocolate cake, looking for ways to pull out liquid that was already there, since I’m going to be adding liquid with the booze. So yes, I think you’re exactly right that it we’re not talking about a tremendous amount of this ingredient. And frosting is funny. I mean, you know, a butter cream frosting will often have, like, some milk or some cream in it, and you can substitute some booze, just like you can make a lemon whipped cream. And you’d be surprised how much lemon juice you can get into that cream and still have it be okay. That was the other thing I did want to mention is whipped cream as an accompaniment to dessert is an excellent way to bring some booze into your life, like maybe you want the chocolate frosting on this pumpkin cake to be okay for everybody at the well, maybe that’s not a great example, because maybe you wouldn’t have whipped cream. I mean, I would, but you might not have whipped cream plus frosting plus cake, but definitely I think it is nice. Let’s say you wanted to make that, that chocolate cake, but you actually didn’t want to put the red wine in side of that cake. I wonder if you could make, like, a red wine, which would be beautiful whipped cream, or you could add a little bit to your creme fresh and see where you got with that. Like, I think that booze can also be added. Or, like, let’s say you have like a lemon tart. You put a little bit of limoncello in the whipped cream and serve it with that like there are nice to get, right? There are nice ways to get booze on the table and in people’s mouths without saying to every single person at the table, we’re all about to drink red wine because it’s in this cake, or we’re all about bourbon because it’s in this frosting. So I think that can be fun, too. The other thing I’m thinking of is, you know, with that pumpkin cake, you could make the pumpkin cake and make a bourbon whipped cream, and for people that didn’t, and, you know, people that maybe don’t frost the cake at all, although that makes me sad, because, because frosting is so good. So maybe I won’t say that, but I’m just saying that there are different ways. Definitely, with pie, I could like that bourbon pee camp pie I was talking about, you could 100% make a bourbon whipped cream and not put the bourbon in the pie, if that’s going to freak out or not be tasty to some of your peeps. I feel like booze in general, a great carrier of booze can be whipped cream.
Rachel Tepper Paley 33:57
I love that. And then you can sort of make it a choose your own adventure situation,
Jessie Sheehan 34:02
exactly, and like rum, whipped cream is so delicious. Like beyond what’s amazing. I think I developed. I wish I could remember what the recipe was, maybe for a bundt cake, for a book that I worked on not my own, a black pepper rum whipped cream. Wow. It was so delicious, so delicious. So yes, I do. I encourage people to play with with flavoring whipped cream. I
Rachel Tepper Paley 34:25
love that. That’s a wonderful tip. Well, I certainly want to get baking now. I have a lot to think about going into the holidays this year. So thank you so much for for sharing all these wonderful recipes with us.
Jessie Sheehan 34:39
Thank you so much for inviting me to share course
Rachel Tepper Paley 34:43
and our readers can find all of these recipes online at Wineenthusiast.com.
Jessie Sheehan 34:47
yay!
Published: December 11, 2024
