Maker in Residence Feature- Erika Bruce

Ani Steele

In support of CRAFT’s mission to foster a more robust regional food system, the center launched the Maker in Residence program a year ago to support local food entrepreneurs as they work on rolling out new business ideas and regional products. While in residence, local makers have the opportunity to work on their own product and business development, as well as host a variety of workshops for the Chatham and larger community in Pittsburgh and Gibsonia. This fall, we are working with two amazing makers. A couple of weeks ago we introduced you to Jayashree Iyengar. Today, we’d like to introduce you to local baker Erika Bruce!

(Note: Interview transcription was edited for clarity and brevity)

Q: For those who don't know you very well, can you tell us a little bit about who you are in and outside of the world of pastry and baking?

Erika: Well, I’m a mom of two kids, 8 and 11, and they certainly keep me busy, especially with the current state of affairs. Let's see— I'm a total animal lover. We have three cats, and we got a COVID puppy, and we have a bearded dragon and a fish and a snail. So yeah, it’s like having your own zoo. I play soccer too. It's a mom’s group over 30, and I love it. It’s the highlight of my week.

CRAFT: Did you grow up playing soccer?

Erika: You know I didn't really. I remember trying out when I was really young, and I was terrible. All the other kids had played from a really young age, and I didn't.  But it's a sport that I've always enjoyed watching and playing. I just love everything about soccer. We have coaches, and we do drills. We learn new skills, and then we play, but we play with an attitude toward safety. We always joke that there are no scouts at our games, so we don’t need to get hurt. We all have jobs, and we’re all moms. It’s a fun way to exercise.

Q: Do you have a story or a moment that you can identify as the moment you knew you wanted to be a pastry chef?

Erika:  I've always loved food and eating. When I was young, I wanted to be an artist, and I feel like that somehow ties in with what I do now. I had worked in restaurants when I got out of college, and I thought maybe I should check out this culinary school thing. It was in culinary school that I kind of realized that baking was my forte. It was kind of a joke, because it was a really small [culinary] school, and the instructors knew how squeamish I was. They would always give me the really daunting job of breaking down a rabbit or cleaning the squid, or whatever would make my skin crawl. Now nothing would gross me out at all, because I've been cooking so much for my family that it wouldn't even phase me.

Yeah, I just knew that I would much rather be baking breads, and right out of culinary school I started working in bakeries. And it was in bakeries that I learned how to decorate cakes.

Q:  How did either your personal or professional experience lead you to starting Le Beau Gateau?

Erika: I had worked in a lot of bakeries, and I wanted a challenge and became a pastry chef at a pretty busy restaurant. I was definitely in over my head and burned out pretty quickly and realized it was not the lifestyle I wanted. That's when I started working for Cooks Illustrated magazine. And the appeal of that was holidays, weekends off, working regular hours, and it wasn’t so physically demanding. And I forgot to mention— when I first went to culinary school, I was  really dreaming that I was going to become a food writer. This is back when Ruth Reichl was writing for the New York Times, and it was the highlight of my week, and I thought she was the best thing ever. So, this seemed like a really exciting job. I worked there for about five years, and the writing part never got easy for me. It was very challenging. So, I think that's when I realized I wasn’t in the right field, as much as I loved the job.

At the time, I was working extra jobs to make extra money. I had a friend who started a hand-iced sugar cookie business before everybody was doing it. Her company is called A Dozen Eggs, and she does vegan cookies. She’s pretty awesome! She had just started out and was featured on the Food Network, and her business just blew up. I would help her, and we would spend hours icing cookies and talking. She gave me the inspiration to be like, “Well I can do this.” So, I just started. I started out of a commissary kitchen in Boston when I was living in Boston. I had my cake business for a couple years, but when we moved to Pittsburgh and had my daughter, I put the business on hold.

Q: Is there a story behind your bakery name?

Erika: Yes, at the time I was taking French classes, and that’s actually where I met my husband. I was really interested in all things French, and I was working out of a French bakery in California. It felt natural to me. I liked that it rhymed, and when you stack the words on top of each other, it forms the perfect wedding cake. And that was my original logo— made to look like a wedding cake, and I thought it was super clever. My dad told me, “You can’t have a French sounding name, no one’s going to remember it.” And I was like well, I’m gonna do it anyway (laughs).

But I’ve changed my logo for this new version of my business, because I want to convey that I'm doing all kinds of cakes and other types of baked goods— not just wedding cakes.

Q: What was the original reason of just focusing on wedding cakes and now wanting to expand beyond wedding cakes?

Erika: Originally, I was doing wedding cakes, because it was a skill that I had and could market. I loved designing and making cakes, so there was the artistic aspect of it.  When I first started, my hook was custom designed wedding cakes. I would sit down with every single person I made a cake for, and I designed a cake just for them based on what was meaningful to them. I had a lot of fun creatively doing that, but I realized that I would spend so much time and energy trying to get the client, and then you made this cake, delivered it, and that was it; that business was over. I was kind of limited, because I didn't have a retail space to make all kinds of cakes. It just makes more sense from a production and profitability standpoint [to broaden my selection]. I’m trying to figure out an online bakery where I can offer a selection of cakes on an ongoing basis. If people have an occasion to go to, or if they are having a party, I can fit the specialty cake orders into my existing production model.

CRAFT: So, as I was trying to learn a little bit more about you for this interview, one thing that I find interesting is your experience with recipe development.

Q: Is recipe development a very technical skill that you have to go to culinary school to learn, or is it something college student Amy can also figure out?

Erika: I think that’s a great question, because it’s gotten so popular due to food blogs and people putting recipes out there. It was not a skill I learned in culinary school at all. I certainly learned it when I was at Cook’s Illustrated magazine. They took such a rigorous and scientific approach towards getting to the end point of a recipe. We would spend at least a month on one recipe, making it over and over and having all of our colleagues taste and weigh in on things, and we would literally test every component, like the baking powder, baking soda, types of fat you used, the type of sugars, and the combinations of sugar. And then you would make 45 versions, and whatever was the winner was what you used to test the next thing and so on. That certainly was an education. It’s very experimental. That said, I don't think that's required if someone wants to come up with a recipe!

 When I was working in a restaurant and coming up with my menu, I would give myself three tries and move on to another recipe if I couldn’t make it work. For the past 10 years I have been working in a freelance capacity developing recipes for Cook’s, Cook’s Country, and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Magazine. I have been doing freelance for the last 10 years, but now I’m totally focused on my business, I’m at the point that I’ve built up my repertoire of recipes and know enough that I can take a recipe and tweak a few things to get where I want. If you like to cook and/or bake, and you feel comfortable with your skills, anyone can take that scientific approach to build off your own knowledge. “I want this cake to be a little more moist- should I add more sugar, an extra egg?”

Q: Can you walk us through what brought you to CRAFT?

 Erika: I think I heard about it on accident. Something popped up, I believe, on my Facebook feed. I knew about Chatham and had fantasized about joining the Food Studies program, but this was the first time I had heard about the Maker in Residence program. I wondered what it was but, of course, then talked myself out of it and was like, “Oh yeah, no that's not for me; they wouldn’t want me.” I ended up  reaching out to Cassandra (CRAFT manager), and I didn't know her personally at all, but we’re both in a food Facebook group, so I knew her virtually. She was awesome. She met with me over coffee, and I told her what I was thinking, and she encouraged me to apply. I was really ready to take the next step in my career, and I couldn’t quite figure out what that was. Finally, I was like “You know what? I’ve saved all my cake pans. I know how to do this cake business. I’m going to do what I know and see where it goes.” I needed to justify working for myself and see how that feels with my family life and having a balance. I feel incredibly fortunate to be in the program. I’m in heaven! I feel like I’ve found my people. That’s what I miss. There’s a comradery when you are around people that are into food as much as you are. That’s something that I’ve been missing since I’ve moved to Pittsburgh for sure.  

CRAFT: When you find your people, you realize, “I’m not weird! There are other people like me!”

Erika: Yes! I know a lot of people who eat to live, and they don’t live to eat, and I just can’t get it (laughs).

Q: Can you give us a little sneak peek of the workshops you have coming up?

Erika: I have cake decorating workshop coming up. I feel like people are baking a lot right now, and I just want to give them some tips and tricks to bring their cake up a notch or two. Make it a little more professional or polished looking. And that’s going to be more demo-based, but we are going to send out kits, so if some people want to practice their piping in real time with me, we’re going to do that. We’re going to send out little canisters of shelf stable icing too.

Lastly, we’ll do a pie dough workshop. I can’t tell you how many times people have reached out to me right before Thanksgiving totally freaking out about making pie dough. It’s going to be cooking in real time, and we’re going to walk people through the process until you chill it. Then I’m going to show how to roll it out and the different designs you can do.

CRAFT: So these next questions are just for fun and to get to know you a little better.

Q: What do you make to impress your family? Your friends? Other professionals in the business?

Erika: So, for my family, my kids love pasta, and they love it when I make fresh pasta. So, I would say that's probably like a special thing. And then when my more extended family gets together, I usually always have to make a deep dish apple pie and a lemon tart. Oddly, no one likes to eat cake in my family, so that’s what I make for special occasions (laughs).

When I cook for my friends… I personally love to grill pretty much anything, and I love to make pizza, but not grill pizza! I’ve never been successful in grilling pizza, because I like the top to get color, and I feel like you can’t really do that on a grill. I like both of those things, and there's a social aspect too. It's okay for people to gather around and kind of get involved. It doesn’t stress me out like when I’m making cakes!

CRAFT: Is the pizza oven on campus your happy place on campus?

Erika: It is! I was in heaven! When we did our demo, I was so upset when I didn’t get to bake in it (laughs). I went home and thought, “What would it take to build one of these things in the yard?”

I totally have visions of having pizza baking parties.

CRAFT: Well let me know how I can get invited to these pizza parties!

Erika: Just find me someone to build my pizza oven!

For other professionals, I would probably make a cake. I say that because when I was doing a freelance project for the Cook’s Country Magazine, they would fly me in from Pittsburgh to make the cake and decorate it for the photo shoot, because that’s how much people hate to make cakes! It was an awesome gig for me though. It would be so interesting, because I would be decorating or frosting, and it would get really quiet. When I’d look up, every single person in the test kitchen would be watching me, and I would get nervous (laughs). I feel like I know so many that can cook circles around me, but cake is the thing that I can do.

Q: You can choose to answer both or one of these questions- A favorite food memory that brings you comfort OR a lesson that baking or cooking has taught you.

Erika: I have answers to both. This one particular food memory is about Dungeness crab with my aunt, when I lived out in California. The bakery that I worked at was right next to a nice, old school butcher shop. Since we knew them, we would do favors for one another. They would crack them [crab] all up for us, and we would lay out newspaper, and then we would have the crab and drink Prosecco. We would just sit there for hours talking and eating crab. I love it, because of the food aspect of it, and it reminds me of the time when I lived out there.

A lesson I learned is that I should not be so hard on myself. The imperfections that I see in what I do, very few other people see. And I feel that’s an important lesson, because we shouldn’t beat ourselves up as much as we do. I love the quote from Julia Child, and I’m going to paraphrase, “Never, ever, ever admit your mistake! Just act like you did that on purpose and no one is going to know.” And there is proof to that.

CRAFT: Yes, and there’s freedom in that too.

Erika: Absolutely. I think as professional cooks, it’s easy to get caught up in that perfectionism.

And there’s another thing that I thought of when you asked about what you cook for professionals. Often when people invite me over for dinner, they say, “Oh, you’re probably not going to like it,” or “it’s probably not going to be as good as yours.” They just seem really nervous to cook for you, because you’re a professional, and I think it’s ridiculous, because I’m so appreciative and happy when other people cook for me. I know what’s involved in that effort, and I think most cooks feel that way. I feel people need to know that. Don’t worry, don’t stress! We’re not going to come in and review you like a restaurant! We’re just so happy that you’re cooking for us.

CRAFT: Good, because I’m one of those people to be like, “Don’t judge me. It’s not going to be as good..”

Erika: Right?! No, never have I gone to someone’s house and been like “Ohhh…” Never ever.

CRAFT: Okay, so you don’t come with your own cake decorating tools or extra food in a bag (laughs)?

Erika: Sometimes I will bring my own wine, but that’s where I draw the line!

CRAFT: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me about your work and the workshop series you have coming up. It was so nice to speak with you.

Erika: Absolutely! It was a pleasure.

If you want to learn more about La Beau Gateau, please visit her website at http://www.lebeaugateau.com/ and on Facebook and Instagram @lebeaugateau.pgh! Also visit www.craft.chatham.edu/events to sign up for her upcoming workshops.