Switching from law to baking was life-changing, gratifying
Every major event in Gesine Bullock-Prado’s life has come with a hefty dose of butter and baking. It is her meditation, her joy and her refuge. But it wasn’t something she saw as a career.
She went to law school, and when she was supposed to be studying for the bar exam, she baked. (Don’t worry, she still passed.) She helped found Fortis Films with her older sister, Sandra Bullock. Yet, in her spare time, she found herself baking. When their mother died, she re-evaluated her life. She wanted to bake.
She packed up, and in 2004 moved cross-country to Vermont, where she now runs her own cooking school, Sugar Glider Kitchen. The author of four cookbooks also teaches for King Arthur Flour and Stonewall Kitchens. She’s working on her next cookbook, “Fantastical Cakes” (Running Press), to be published at the end of 2018.
This month, BullockPrado launched “Baked in Vermont,” a Food Network series that airs at 11:30 a.m. Saturdays through Jan. 6. The entire series was filmed at her farmhouse, a former tavern. To view episodes of “Baked in Vermont,” go to foodnetwork.com
(search baked in Vermont show, then click on “episodes”). Look for recipes and more at gbakes.com.
Question: What is your background with food? Answer: My mother was a health food nut. She was vegan, macrobiotic, all the things that a child with my predilections would just hate. And I did.
She was German, my father is American and from Alabama. In the summertime we’d go to Germany and be with family. They were, to my mind, “normal” in their eating habits with all the pork and sugar, and I got to go crazy. Even with my mother’s very healthy attitude, come Christmastime and birthdays, she’d pull out the stops.
She was a really wonderful baker. It was very sad knowing this about my mother and knowing it only came out at specific times of year. I took it upon myself to teach myself.
Q: Do you remember the first thing you made on your own?
A: The first thing I ever baked was from a Winnie the Pooh cookbook, a birthday cake. It was for my mother.
Q: When did you start thinking about baking as a career?
A: When I went to University of Virginia and law school, in times of stress I would bake more and more. That should’ve been an indication that my passions were elsewhere. When I was supposed to study for the bar, I baked instead…
It took my mother dying, and dealing with that. I was with her when she died. I realized I didn’t like what I was doing for my day job.
Q: What are the things you love to teach? Is there one thing everyone should learn?
A: What I love to show people who claim they aren’t bakers and then come to a class anyway, they say they have only failed ... I love to show them the different methods of mixing, to show how different ingredients interact when mixed. They immediately leave with a huge amount of baking knowledge.
For people who are experienced cookie and muffin bakers, I love doing laminated doughs and puff pastry. It is magical and distills the alchemy of baking in one recipe.
Q: What have you learned from baking failures?
A:One thing I tell all bakers, you have to have a one-on-one with your oven, essentially a therapy session. You have to tell your oven, I know you’re lying to me. Just put a thermometer in your oven. It is usually running way too high or way too low.
If you are deciding to be adventurous and try laminated dough and your oven runs low, what you find is that your pastry will leave a lake of butter in your oven. It starts smoking and it is awful.
That is one lesson I learned early on. Ovens are big liars. Trust your equipment, but put in safeguards like thermometers.
Q: What’s the thing you’ll be making this holiday season to remind yourself of your mom?
A:Butterzeug, it translates literally to “butter stuff.” It is an incredibly good butter cookie that keeps its shape. She would put them in our screened-in porch. I would steal out there and stupidly grab a lot of cookies, thinking she would never notice.
Q: What do you want people to get from this new program?
A: Baking is such a wonderful and meditative thing. … I want to be there for the people who are scared of approaching that first step of getting their hands dirty and baking. I love to help people on Facebook. I love to answer questions, like the Butterball hotline.