Chef Chat: Hobby baker writes cookbook.
Growing up in St. Louis, Irvin Lin didn’t have a mother who baked cookies, and neither were there Hostess cupcakes in his house. He got his first taste of snickerdoodles in a summer school cooking class at age 9. He was forever hooked on the magic of baking.
Baking became his escape, the thing he did when he didn’t want to do other things. He even coined a term for it, “procrasti-baking.” Still, he never considered baking as a career. Even when he started blogging about food in 2010, his blog, Eat The Love, was just escape from his day job as a graphic designer. One year later, he became a full-time blogger.
Now, he offers lovingly detailed recipes for 150 beautiful cakes, cookies, pies and other desserts in his first cookbook, “Marbled, Swirled and Layered” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30). While playing up flavor combinations with different flours, sweeteners and spices, Lin also works in tips for converting recipes to gluten-free and for how to become a better baker with visually appealing treats that pack in a lot of flavor.
He lives with his partner, A.J. Bates, in San Francisco. Q. What are your baking roots? A. My parents are from Taiwan and they immigrated ages ago. I was born here in St. Louis, and growing up there wasn’t a lot of baking happening in my family. I got super excited when I went to my friends’ house and they had cookies or Twinkies. I never had that in my house.
Between third and fourth grade, my parents signed me up for a cooking class. I learned how to make snickerdoodles. I’d never had them. It was like Play-Doh, with cinnamon and sugar. Put it in the oven and like magic, these cookies come out. I’ve been hooked ever since.
Q. How did you go from hobby baking to blogging and cookbook author?
A. I was a senior designer at a company where a lot of clients are restaurants. I quickly realized the clients were chain restaurants. I was designing the packaging for a burger company and I had this epiphany. I was literally designing garbage: packaging people would throw away after eating the burger. It was soul crushing.
I was going home and watching hours of TV. A friend said maybe instead of vegging out at home, you should do more work. Have a passion project. I was like, I’ll just start a food blog, it will give me a focus. It was just a way for me to share recipes. That was in 2010.
Q. Tell us about the blog and the name.
A. It is called Eat The Love. I had a running joke with my friends about this phrase I got from a friend. His diet, the best way to describe it is vegan paleo.
I met him while working at a book store in St. Louis in 1996 or 1997, way before all these diets had names. He told me how he’d go back to his grandma’s house and his grandma would make the fried chicken, collard greens, pecan pie with lard, all this rich traditional soul food he grew up eating. Even though he had this strict diet, he’d eat all this food when he went home.
He said, “My grandma made this food for me, so I have to eat it. It is like eating the love.”
When you make food for other people, it is about sharing the love.
Q. Tell us the concept behind “Marbled, Swirled and Layered.”
A. There’s an inherent beauty in marbled, swirled and layered desserts. I am not necessarily a big decorator when it comes to my desserts. There are people out there using ombres and big decorative flowers. I’m not that person. I can barely pipe a ruffle.
So those techniques were an easy way, a lazy way, to make beautiful desserts. The swirling or marbling doesn’t take much longer, but a marble cake looks beautiful and is super easy.
Q. What’s your favorite sweetener for baking?
A. Anything with molasses or turbinado or muscovado sugar works well with chocolate and heavier winter fruits like pears and apples, as does honey. I have nothing against white sugar, it is what it is. It just tends to be a one-dimensional thing when it comes to flavor, same with white flour. There are so many other things you can use to bring forth the flavor.
Q. What cookbook, other than your own, would you grab in an earthquake or fire?
A. Sherry Yard’s “Secrets of Baking.” That was the first book that made me start thinking of baking in terms of components. Now I can come up with my own recipe and desserts.
Q. You’re not a big drinker, but alcohol still plays a part in a number of your recipes?
A. I don’t drink much, but I do love to use alcohol in my baked goods. It lends a beautiful flavor, like in the beer brownies.
Q. What’s your favorite thing to introduce to novice bakers?
A. A kitchen scale and oven thermometer are really useful. People are very oddly resistant to kitchen scales, which always baffles me. They’ll say they have a $300 Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but not a scale. You can use a hand mixer and get a better cake with a kitchen scale, because measuring ingredients is a huge deal.
A kitchen scale gives you a better shot at achieving the recipe.