 Thank you. Thank you. I was going to start by asking, who reads cookbooks in bed in the bathtub? Probably not in the bathtub these days. We don't have enough water, right? Anybody collect cookbooks? Who cooks? Who bakes? I guess I'm in the right room. I am a huge, huge fan of national public radio since I don't have a shop anymore or a bakery. A lot of my work happens at home, and it could be product development, or it could be working on a cookbook, or it could be writing. When I'm not writing, and I'm in the kitchen, the radio is usually on. I'm not saying this because the things I enjoy the most are, anytime an artist or chef or a writer or a scientist is interviewed, it could be Terry Gross, or it could be city arts and lectures. What I love is tying the story of the person from childhood to what they are privileged to do and what they love to do. I even remember enjoying watching Mr. Rogers when my daughter was a toddler because he would always ask the famous artist, what did you like to do when you were little? And I for years thought my entire career was accidental. But if I go back and look at my family and my growing up, I see that it all makes total sense. So I thought I'd just give you a teeny piece of that and leave enough time for a lot of questions at the end. I know there's a ton of you students here, and we might want to talk more specifically about things. But I grew up on Hershey Bars and Hot Fudge Sundays in the 50s in a suburban part of Los Angeles. And in my family, what was important was books and music and getting a good education. That was valued a lot and verbalized, I think. What wasn't spoken of, but what was amply demonstrated was the importance of being able to build or create or make something with your hands. And this was demonstrated and lived in a way. My mother kept us a wash and crayons and pastes and craft things. And we sewed and we cooked and we did all the things that are called DIY today. And my father was a self-taught electronics engineer. This is back in the 50s, mind you. He did not finish college. He was in his spare time. He built furniture. He was a wonderful woodworker. He was a gifted black and white photographer. In our eyes, he could make or fix anything. And there was a summer when he decided to build a small cabin cruiser. And we lived through his learning process. And we lived through weeks of itching because the fiberglass got into the laundry. And two summers later, he built a wooden sailboat with no fiberglass. But anyway, we watched. What we learned from my parents is that not only could you be anything you wanted to be, but you could learn or figure out how to make or do anything you wanted to do. So I think that's been the thread for me. I've never been afraid to try to figure something out. And I've never been afraid to look at something differently than other people look at it. And I think that that's been pretty much the story of my life and my career. When I was 20, I was married and had the good fortune to move to Paris, where my husband had a job. And I didn't. So I roamed the streets. And I went to cooking classes. And I took French. And I chatted with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker. And I cooked. And I tasted things I'd never tasted before. It was a year of revelation, strawberries that tasted like nothing I'd tasted ever before. Chicken that tasted like chicken, tomatoes that were amazing. And it was also a year when we lived in this very, very quirky private home. It had been a really grand home. And by the time we moved in, the land lady was living there herself with her dog. And she'd carved up this magnificent house into a couple of little flats. And the two of us lived there. And from her, when we first moved in, she gave us chocolate truffles for our fall birthdays. And by the time Christmas came, she felt comfortable enough to invite me into the kitchen to sit at the table and roll these truffles into rounds. How many of you, this is a young crowd. Anybody remember Coca-Cola? Good, great. So the house truffles of Coca-Cola were Madame Lestel's original little chocolate truffles. And on the eve of coming home from Paris, I asked her for that recipe. And I spent the first couple months at home applying to graduate school and trying to figure out this recipe that was scrawled down there. And how many of you remember the pig by the tail in Berkeley? It opened up, I think, while we were away in France, right across the street from Chez Panisse. So I walk in there one day to probably the only charcuterie in the country, run by a couple of American women with this little, I remember it as a handful, but I'm sure I didn't go in with a handful of truffles, a small quantity of truffles. And said in this very small voice, I make these chocolate truffles. Maybe you would like to buy them. And they did, and they were interested. And I found myself making hundreds of dozens of chocolate truffles in the next several months at home. And I think the statute of limitations is up on that, so I don't care who you tell. They were all made at home. And it got me a repu- it certainly increased the reputation of the pig by the tail and got me some reputation as well. Chuck Williams called me out of the blue one day about those chocolate truffles. And at a certain point, I decided that maybe I would expand my repertoire a little bit. I had gone back to Paris a couple of times to do a stag at the Ecole la Note. And in those classes, I was the only person who'd never worked in a commercial kitchen before. I was one of, usually I was the only woman, sometimes the only one of two women, or the only American, or the only one of two Americans. And I held on for dear life. And a lot of things went right by me. And a few things sunk in. I came back and decided to increase my offerings at the Pig by the Tail. And what I would do is every Monday I would go into the Pig by the Tail, the charcuterie, and post a sign with some elaborate French layered cake. And I would describe it elaborately. And it would either be something I tasted or something I sort of learned at La Note or something I kind of made up from all the elements that I had then learned, right? And I took sign-ups. And these cakes were to be delivered on Friday or Saturday. And I had a limit. I could only take up to six orders, because these were happening in my kitchen at home. And what this really meant was that I had, from Monday evening till Friday morning at 10, to figure out how to make the damn thing. And it also meant that sometimes at 3 in the morning on Friday, I'd finally gotten it and was making it all over again. Because I finally figured out how not to have the buttercream curdle and how not to have the genoise sink in the center. And so, you know, I'm very much my father's daughter in the sense that I have had some training and I know where to go for resources, but I feel pretty comfortable jumping in and figuring these things out. So after a couple of years of doing that, I actually opened a shop called Coca-Cola. When I think back of it, it's frightening how much I did not know, but it was a time and a place when people were eager for something delicious and new and French and chocolate. And it was Berkeley and very forgiving. And what was thrilling was we were putting such amazingly good ingredients, such expensive, wonderful ingredients into cakes and selling them on the street. And we had to, of course, sell them for a great deal more than anything else being sold on the street, but people came for that quality. And what I remember, I mean, that went on, you know, I had Coca-Lovers 14 years or so. And one of the things I remember most fondly and most proudly is not only were we making these delicious things with wonderful ingredients, but the problem solving that it took to increase that production and scale things up, doing the kind of product that really wasn't being done at the time. You guys are all learning it at Second Nature. I mean, it's all part of vocabulary, but really people didn't know these kinds of desserts back then. Much less did they know chocolate truffles. But anyway, to figure out how to increase the scale and volume of that without diminishing the quality, that's something I remember really fondly and that I'm very proud of in that time. Arguably, we even got better at what we were doing over time. By the time I sold Coca-Law, there were seven stores. And chocolate truffle was a household word. And we'd introduced these really too big chocolate truffles that came to be called the American Chocolate Truffle, which were quite the rage for a couple of decades. And in those last few years, I inadvertently reinvented myself by writing my first cookbook, which was also called Coca-Law. And at that point, I found that what I loved about writing a cookbook, you couldn't go and learn to be a cookbook writer at that time. I mean, there weren't workshops and that sort of thing. You just sort of plunged in. I mean, who knew how to do that? I don't know. So it was another kind of plunging situation. But after starting that whole dessert thing, plunging into cookbook didn't seem like a big thing to me. What I found that I loved doing then and has served me well in the years since is that I loved taking what I knew how to do with ingredients and with my palate and with my hands and put it in words on a page in a way that somebody who really wanted to learn could learn and could replicate those recipes. And that was actually quite thrilling. And I was incredibly encouraged by getting a James Beard cookbook of the year award for that book. And in addition, and this is really wonderfully bittersweet and cherished, I also got the Julia Child Award for the best cookbook by a first time author that year for that book. So I mean, since then, there have been about nine cookbooks. And as I look at the pattern, which always seems accidental, it certainly isn't accidental. What I find is that I always like looking at a topic differently than someone else looks at it or looking at a topic that someone else hasn't looked at. And the couple of examples I can get, well, I don't know. I could go back and say that the second cookbook I wrote came quite organically after being invited to teach a cancer education dessert class at Summit Hospital in Oakland. And I did that three or four years in a row. And I realized the first time I was invited to do this, it was all about less fat. Cancer education was about eating with less fat at that time, which it still is in part. But I realized that when I was invited to do that, I could, because I was a dessert person and we were trying to cut down fat and make eating more smart, that I could have gone in there with a poached pear. And it was my husband at the time who very smartly said, they don't want a poached pear from you. They want chocolate. And it just, I realized then that really the challenge of doing a cancer, doing desserts with less fat and less calories and doing it really well was to stick with really good chocolate, stick with all the delicious ingredients and juggle them in a way that the person eating them still felt indulged, that they were still eating dessert, that they weren't giving something up. And I don't know how many of you remember this era of low fat, when low fat was all about substituting prune puree and or applesauce for fat, using egg whites instead of whole eggs, what else? And a lot of low fat chocolate and really awful stuff. So of course, with my background, what I wanted to do was use all the good stuff, the best chocolate with the most flavor, butter when I needed it, cream when I needed it, all those good things that make up dessert and just juggle it. So you felt like you were being indulged. And you all remember the famous cookie, the low fat cookie back then that was so unsatisfying. I won't say the name, you can say it down there, Amy. So unsatisfying that the person who bought it would end up eating the whole box and still feel unsatisfied. So that's exactly what I wasn't going for. And I found this whole project to do desserts. It was called Chocolate in the Art of Low Fat Desserts. I found it so difficult, so thrilling and so challenging and so difficult, so much so that I'd wake up at night and say, God, why did I say I would do this? But so satisfying that, and I learned so much about fat. I learned so, everybody at the time, chefs especially, were saying, well, you know, dear, at a dinner party once a colleague of mine, a well-known colleague of mine, whom I love, asked me what I was doing. And I said, well, I'm working on chocolate desserts with less fat, such and such. And he said, well, dear, he said a lot of lovely things can be done with cocoa. And right then, just because he said that, it became really important to me to not just use cocoa, but to use chocolate in these desserts. Anyway, I learned so much. I've almost never learned so much in a project as that. And the payoff was the book did really well, but also another cookbook of the year and not cookbook of the low-fat year or cookbook of the diet year, but cookbook of the year. So it was quite thrilling. So I think that my best projects since then have always been look at something a different way or pull something apart and put it together in a different way. I think the other book I could talk about before I get up to what I've just done is the book Bitter Sweet and now seriously Bitter Sweet. In about 2,000 chocolates started to change in this country, we were starting to see a lot of European chocolates with less sugar and more cacao in them. And all of those chocolates had percentages labels on them, which we hadn't seen in this country. And about 2,000 Scharfenberger comes along, the first American company to make a 70% and the first American company to start putting percentage labels on there. And meanwhile, since I had sold my company and I was somewhat at large and freer to experiment in the kitchen than I had been in a way, when I was kind of more on the line, I had been experimenting with a lot of chocolates and realized that these new and better chocolates could easily ruin a dessert if the dessert had not been developed in the first place with a chocolate of that level of cacao in it. So I started looking into this and experimenting and noticing that no one was talking about it, no one was writing about it, as though no one was noticing it. I mean, everyone was having a good time nibbling these chocolates and eating them. But I wasn't seeing any professional advice from chefs that were talking about what happens when you put these chocolates in a recipe. And I certainly wasn't seeing it being written about for the home cook. And so that was Bitter Sweet. That was the book Bitter Sweet. The real challenge of that was that while I saw all these changes happening in chocolate, and I knew for a fact, and I said it in the book, that within five or 10 years, every chocolate in this country would be labeled with a percentage. Now we've got origins too. And now it's about blends and all that. That's a whole part of it. And that did happen eventually in not too long a time. But at the time that book was published, my book was published, most of the chocolates in the market were not labeled with percentage. So I had to talk myself into a pretzel trying to explain what I was even talking about in this book. And it was complicated. It was a wonderful collection of recipes with a sidebar that told you how to alter the recipe if you were using a chocolate other than what was called for. So there was a ton of information in it. But a short 10 years later, my publisher came to me and said everything you said would happen has now happened. Now all the bars have percentages on them. Now is the time to revise and update this book. So it reads a little bit more simply and add a few things and just sort of catch us up with it. So the book at the table out there called, what is it called? Seriously, Seriously Bitter Sweet is that very book. And it reflects an incredible change in chocolate in just less than a generation. And it still has a sidebar that tells you how to use the different chocolates if you don't want to use the one that's in the main recipe. And it has an enormous geek section in the back with formulas that I kind of derived myself and charts and explanations, mostly in language that non-scientists can understand because I'm totally not a scientist. And I still don't see. I still don't see this being addressed very much in books. And so I still think this is really a valuable resource for people who cook at home, because it's usable for people who cook at home and certainly for students. I'm sure these topics are getting covered at school now a lot. But I also know that it's in schools you guys don't get a whole semester on chocolate probably, right? You get an introduction and then you're kind of on your own for a while, ultimately. So that was another project that I sometimes, as much as I love what I do, there's moments of abject terror, which I understand are a good sign for a writer. You're supposed to have those. It means you're doing a good job because it was such new information. And I was worried about the formulas. I was worried about the theory. I was worried that somebody had been trained more scientifically than I would would come along and say no, no, no, no, and no. That hasn't happened so far. And my most recent book has had that same kind of satisfaction of looking at something in a completely different way than has been. Is anybody doing any cooking or baking for the gluten-free world out there? And are we doing this at school? Are we doing anything at school? You guys so much. There's a growing community of gluten-free people and those people probably range from people who have decided, who find that they're sensitive and have different symptoms from gluten all the way to celiac. And in any case, there are a lot of people looking for gluten-free. And the way this has been handled in most baking, as you probably know if you've looked at any recipes, is that the idea is to put together a whole group, a whole blend of flowers and starches with a huge amount of starch that kind of behaves like wheat, and to use this as an all-purpose substitution for wheat. So it's all about the substitution, the sort of whole substitution mentality. And when I started to taste these things, I'm not gluten-free. I'm not gluten-sensitive that I know of yet. I didn't taste anything I liked, and I didn't like the idea that these non-wheat flowers were being treated as substitutions as opposed to viable, wonderful, flavorful ingredients. So the concept for this book, although it is gluten-free, was to take a set of what are called alternative flowers, non-wheat flowers, that my co-author and I found interesting and delicious, and just see where they would go, where we could go with them, taste them, look at them, try them, ask them what they wanted to be, if you will, sort of like a character in a book. And as a result, the collection is it's divided in chapters by that flower. Many of the recipes use that flower alone or with a small partnership. But there's no great all-purpose blend. The only blending that is done is when we want the flavors and textures of all the flowers in there to do something. So we've treated these ingredients like heroes, like a chef would treat a good ingredient. And we've created things that are both familiar, like a chocolate layer cake, that you would never need to tell anybody it was anything other than a delicious chocolate layer cake, unless you want to tell the celiac person that they could indeed eat the cake. Two things that have never been made before, as far as we know, and that we invented because we used these new flowers. So that, too, was a thrilling and difficult and sometimes terrifying project. And I think, to date, people are not yet looking at these ingredients in that way. And that, for me, was very thrilling and very challenging and very fun. And I'm going to stop because I'm hoping there's, you'll take me somewhere else in the conversation or ask questions. Do we have cards? Or raise your hand. I don't care. Have one card? These better be good, you know? What should we do to temper chocolate in hot weather without any air conditioner? Oh, dear God. I don't see how you can do that. You need a fan. You need a room with a fan. I don't think you can temper when it's hotter than what, somebody tell me. Can't do it. If there's a cold room anywhere where you're working, go there. I can't answer that. Advice for Basie and Chase Street graduates. I think for anybody graduating professional school, you're going to be working with a lot of different chefs. You're going to be working with a lot of different people who have different ways of doing things. Being open to those things is a way to learn, not assuming that everything you got in school is always the way or the only way. A lot of us came up. I mean, I would love to have had a pastry education in school, but I didn't. And I think that some great things about not having the formal education is that you're open-minded about some things and open-minded about different ways of doing them. I think travel is a good thing. I think tasting is a good thing, especially if you're young and you've just come out of school and gone into culinary school. There's just a whole world to experience beyond what you've just learned in school, which I think is a really good start. And I know that most of the good programs can help place you in places where you can learn the next thing. I think it's lifelong learning is what I think it is. I mean, I think it also, I hate to skip beyond the years of being totally fit and able to work in a kitchen, but it helps to develop some skills that you can use, maybe if you want to stay in the industry, but you can't necessarily work in that kitchen. Writing skills are good. Communication skills are good. Public relations skills are good. There's a lot of different things that can keep you in the industry, not just cooking. Will I be writing a vegan dessert book, especially chocolate desserts? I don't see that. And that I'm still interested in these flowers in a very big way. So if I have another project coming up, I don't think I would be going in the direction of vegan, but going more in the direction of savory with some of these flowers and maybe some of the other non-wheat flowers because there's so many flowers out there. There's the non-grain flowers, which I've barely touched, and there's the cricket flower and all of those other protein flowers that I'm still fascinated with. And I feel like carrying the flavor flowers theme into more into savory would be an obvious, sort of organic direction for me. That being said, I think, I don't see vegan. I see myself being more and more sensitive to dairy issues, which a lot of people are facing. I don't know enough about vegan. I'm not motivated in that direction, particularly right now. What about Fran Costigan? Do you guys have her book, Chocolate and Vegan? It's Chocolate and Vegan, I forget what it's called. Have a look at that. Oh, I love this one. This is an interesting choice of words. What is your decision process for picking recipes that go into your cookbooks? Decision process for picking. Well, when we say picking recipes that go into cookbooks, it strikes me that there is a feeling that recipes get looked at out there in the world and chosen to go in. Whereas I think we know it's a more developmental process than that, there's a huge amount of trial and error that goes into developing new recipes for a cookbook. It's not so much picking, but I think really maybe what this question means is what's the standard, maybe? Delicious, it has to, even if it's meeting some sort of special diet, whether it was the low-fat thing of years ago or this non-wheat thing, it has to be delicious. It has to make people feel happy and satisfied when they eat it. But also, I think there has to, ooh, okay. Shorter answers, shorter answers. I also think that these recipes need to be, if you're planning on doing this, especially if you're in culinary school right now, sometimes it takes a lot of iterations of a recipe, not just to make it taste good and feel good, but to make the instructions rational. I mean, even recipes of my own that I come back to, I think, gee, why did I do it that way when I could have simplified? In fact, there's a book in the back there called Sinfuleasy where I did actually take apart some recipes and simplify them hugely, just to prove I could, and because the book was called Sinfuleasy and I needed to streamline things a little bit, but really, I mean, it's a communication skill. You want somebody to do something in a rational way, and if you're creating a book or a recipe for somebody who's gonna cook at home, you need to step out of that pastry shop mentality and figure out how they're gonna do this in their kitchen and whether they want to. My first book was filled with the recipes of a professional pastry shop. Some of those recipes had several parts to them, which in a bakery, you can wander over here and grab the genoise and go over there and get the buttercream, and if you need praline, it's over there in a bucket that you've made, or not, but we did. And you can put it together, but somebody cooking at home, unless they're a big project baker, is not gonna wanna make five elements for dessert. So maybe thinking about your audience would be, I'm rambling away from this question a lot. Thinking about your audience is good, and learning those communication skills to that audience, you can't write like a chef. I mean, chefs are notorious for not writing well, and that's something that probably could be addressed. That's why chefs have co-authors, that among other reasons is why chefs have co-authors, because they don't know how to write a recipe, they don't know how to communicate a recipe outside the professional kitchen. What do you think the next big thing in culinary industry is, honestly, I do not know. I do not know. I do not know. I do think more things will be done with these flowers, which is what I'm interested in. I don't know what the next big thing is. If I think of it while I'm talking, I'll come back to that. Oh, dear, oh my goodness, so many questions. How did you adjust the different type of ingredients you use, saying, because you moved from Paris to San Francisco, there's a different ingredients? Different types of flour. You know, when I moved back from Paris, I was pretty inexperienced, so I had to sort of learn it all here. I pretty much learned it all here. But today, if you're thinking about, honestly, I think you should read David Lebowitz, because he's cooked there and he's cooked here, and he has an eye on these things, you know, the exchange between flour and France, for me, that is so old. I mean, that goes back 40 years already. Well, okay, 35 years. So I don't remember the details of learning the difference between those things, but I mean, there are sources now, and people like David, who probably can't weigh in on those things. I make brownies. I learned the recipe from a friend. Why do we use oil in brownies? Can it be substituted? How can I keep the brownie moist or make it more gooey? You know, oil is the thing that keeps things moist and gooey. You know, you can try, you know, there's a, I suggest you experiment with brownies or find good brownie recipes from different people that have different characteristics. Sometimes it's hard to make those changes yourself. It's just like the difference between using unsweetened flour, unsweetened chocolate, and a brownie versus cocoa powder. You know, you get some different textures, and all of these experiences are useful because they give you a whole, you know, quiver full of tools to use when you want to manipulate a texture. Oil in a brownie, that's for moisture, and it also may be if the brownie is going to be served in some sort of frozen state or it be used in an inclusion in ice cream where you want it not to be rock hard. How to make a new recipe? Yeah, well, I like that question. How to make a new recipe? A lot of recipes get born from good recipes you already have. I mean, I kind of believe that if you have a great recipe, it can become 100 different recipes by taking it in different directions, substituting it for a recipe has nuts in it, substitute the nuts, or toast the nuts instead of use them raw, or don't toast them if they're already toasted. Those are the little things that can make a difference, or even baking it in a different pan or substituting the fat one fat for another using oil and part butter. These are all things that we do to create new recipes, staying pretty close to home with a recipe we're familiar with. One pit of advice is to not make too many changes at once because if you get something good, you don't know which change got you there, and if you get something bad, you won't know which change got you there either. Sometimes a recipe is a total new inspiration, but oftentimes it comes from something else, something you've found or something you've done yourself, and you've had an inspiration to change it. You know, I think rarely do things come out of thin air. Looking through old, old recipes sometimes inspires us of recipes that have fallen out of fashion that could become new again, tweaked with the sensibility of today, for example. I did a luncheon, a recipe from a 1990 something Sunset Magazine recipe. I was invited to a luncheon at Sunset, and we were all making different recipes from Sunset's history, and here was this chocolate recipe, and it was a mousse, and it looked like it was really delicious, but it looked like it was a little bit 90s instead of 2020, and I made it as written because I am respectful that way, and I wanna know what the thing is to start with, I wanna know what was in that chef's head and what they were aiming at, and I made it, and I thought, okay, this is good, this is good, but it's too sweet for the way we want our chocolate now, and I felt like with the professional experience that I have that I could rationalize the method too, and I tweaked it in several ways, and I modernized it, and it's a delicious, wonderful recipe, and it says nothing about the old recipe not being that, it's just a different time, a different sensibility about how we wanna taste chocolate, the new recipe needs a little bit of salt, it has a little salt, it's gonna be posted on Food 52 if you wanna see it, it's hazelnut chocolate mousse inspired by a recipe from Sunset, so that's another thing you can do for new recipes, is you can go back and pick something that was fashionable and wonderful at a certain time and look at it with today's palette. Am I still working with Scharfenberger? I just was at the Northwest Chocolate Festival for Scharfenberger chocolate, so I do sometimes still work for Scharfenberger, and the question is, do you feel the chocolate has changed since being purchased by Hershey's? I think that there are still a signature set of recognizable flavors there, we don't know exactly how this chocolate would be if it had not been sold, but I feel that it's recognizable chocolate and I still find it flavorful in baking and I still use it, I use other chocolates as well. Oh, favorite bakeries in San Francisco, I only recently, I'm embarrassed to say only recently went to be Patisserie and was knocked off my chair, I just unbelievable. I also like the little corner cafe called 20th Century Cafe, which has lovely desserts, and I had something very delicious at Neighbor Bakery in Dogpatch, I think. Oops, oh gosh. Oh, how many tries did it take to adjust recipes to the correct percentage of chocolate? Sometimes it took a lot of tries, but when I started to realize that it was all about the composition of the chocolate and I realized that I could figure, I could know or figure out what percentage of the chocolate was sugar, what percent was fat, and what percent was dry cocoa solids. I actually used a lot of math. I'm kind of a math girl, and the math will, it was unbelievable how quickly I could make those substitutions once I understood that I could do it with math. So that information is in the back of Seriously Bitter Sweet. That's what all the formulas are there, showing you how to take a recipe that you make with 60% chocolate and use a 70% chocolate instead. And honestly, it's all the math, and it just means adjustments in sugar, sometimes adjustments in fat, and the use of less chocolate or more chocolate. So it's actually much simpler than you think. I can't answer this question, but I'm gonna read it. What are some of the more complex and delicate flavors you found for use in pastry? For example, leach and rose. I mean, I love these lovely floral flavors, but I've been so focused on working with the flavors of the flowers themselves, that I've kind of been neglectful about the flavors that we add to desserts. But I love all the sort of almost Middle Eastern rose and orange flower water and all of those things. I think that they need to be used with a really, really, really light hand. But honestly, I've neglected that side of things for a couple of years now with focus on the flavor of flowers. One of the things that happened in flavor flowers is that, because I didn't know how these flowers would work and I was kind of starting with a blank slate, I did what came natural. I took a package of each of those flowers and decided to make one cake, the same cake out of each one of them, just to see what the structure would be like and what the flavors would be like, whether they would even work, whether they would taste good. And the cake I picked, because my training is so French, was a Genoise, partly because we're talking four ingredients and I could do it in my sleep and it's really easy. And because I guessed that, I guessed and hoped that the eggs would give enough structure to allow me to succeed with these cakes without using any xanthan gum or any of those added things that go into gluten-free baking. And I really got lucky. I mean, one after another, these Genoise were almost all pretty damn good and tasty and they had enough structure. Some of them needed a teeny bit of alteration of the amount of flour, something to keep them from sinking in the center, but they worked and as a result, I felt the whole book was gonna be really easy because I was able to make these sponge cakes. But what I learned was that each of these flowers had a most sort of a miraculous flavor and some of them were so distinctive that it was hard for me to pick the usual sort of butter creams and fillings and frostings to go with them because they either overwhelmed or were overwhelmed by the flavor of the cake itself. And so I ended up with an awful lot of things that just get this sort of fruit and whipped cream treatment because the flavor of the flowers was sort of important enough not to want to sort of overwhelm it. And I also found that when working with a flower, let's talk about oatmeal, whether you like it or hate it, we all know what oatmeal takes like, but it's very dominated by its texture, right? But if you take oats and you use oat flour instead, you have access to creating things with an entirely different texture. So subtract the texture of oatmeal as we know it and just consider a little sponge cake, a little genoise made of oat flour and it's soft and delicate and has this kind of toffee caramel flavor just from the oats, which I don't think that we really pay attention to when we're eating that bowl of oatmeal. So anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last three years. I haven't been paying attention to leachy and rose, I have to admit. Advice for people who like to experiment while working in a structured kitchen. Man, somebody tell me how to do that. It took selling my own business to be able to experiment a whole lot more for a few years. I don't know how you do. Somebody who's in a kitchen, tell me how you do that. I don't know. Don't know how you do that. What was your favorite childhood dessert? I always liked a hot fudge sundae and I still do. I like the juxtaposition between that cold creamy ice cream and that warm, bitter, sweet, fudgy, starting to become chewy chocolate sauce and I'm sure that fudge sundae I like today is quite different than the one I liked then but that's a kind of memorable thing to me, a hot fudge sundae or a bar of dark chocolate. Just a bar and I'm sure the bar, I know the bar that I was eating when I was a kid was nothing like the bars that we can eat now. My interest in all of the small chocolate manufacturing now is so great that I'd almost rather nibble some artisan bar than eat a dessert made out of it. Oh my gosh. Favorite item to bake, you know, that's just very mood related. Is that not true for you? I mean, sometimes you wanna bake a brownie and sometimes you wanna bake something really light and airy and spongy. I don't know how exactly to answer that question except, you know, sometimes it depends on who I'm serving and what I think will please them or interest them. Too hard to say, too hard to say. What do you consider your greatest failure and how did you learn from it? I, you know, these days people talk about failure as an important tool for success that you have to fail to succeed. And I, you know, looking back on my own, you know, business situation, I think sometimes when you succeed, you end up failing later because you didn't fail first. And when I look back at the history of my business, I see something that was successful so quickly that I failed to see the peril in expanding. And so if you don't fail, you don't think you can fail. So when you go too fast and you expand, you don't necessarily see what's coming down the road. So I think that for creative people, it's very, very important to have some business wisdom in a partner or an advisor because it can't happen all with pure creativity and good recipes. So I did learn that. I did learn that. Yes. I think it's, is it a good time to stop? I think it's been lovely. There are books in the back, if you'd like to purchase a book or if you'd like Alice to sign your book, they're in the back of the room. And I want to thank all of you. I want to have, I want to, I want to take one more question because I love this question. I just saw it. Okay, did you work with Joseph Schmidt on chocolate truffles? When I started my company, Joseph Schmidt was working for Fantasia Bakery. And his, and Fantasia, does everybody remember Fantasia Bakery out there in the avenues? Okay, we were the young, we were the little upper whippersnappers and they were the, you know, the well-trained, educated German pastry chefs and Joseph was one of them. And we did this bridal, we were at a bridal festival and they had these fabulous, classically decorated cakes and we had our very weird counterculture, oddball, Coca-Cola cakes. And Joseph came over to look at our work. I didn't know him and he didn't know me. And years later, he told me that because of Coca-Cola, he thought he decided that he could go out and open his own place. So no, I did not work with Joseph, but Joseph paid me this wonderful compliment of saying that when he saw Coca-Cola and he saw the sort of, the work that we were doing, he realized he could go out and be creative on his own. That's great. This is your inspiration. Thank you very much. And again, books are in the back. Please sign our mailing list. And if you could fill out your evaluations, we particularly wanna know where you found out about the program so that we can advertise more. And if you wanna be on our mailing list for more programs, please do. Otherwise, we'll keep advertising. Take good care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.