Snackable Bakes | Jessie Sheehan
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Jessie Sheehan: Hi, I'm Jessie Sheehan, and my new cookbook is Snackable Bakes: 100 Easy-Peasy Recipes for Exceptionally Scrumptious Sweets and Treats.
Suzy Chase: Today is the best day. It's the day we've all been waiting for. It's the follow up to The Vintage Baker. I am so happy to have you back on the show, Jessie.
Jessie Sheehan: Thank you so much, Suzy. It's so wonderful to be here.
Suzy Chase: Let's get into this. What exactly is a snackable bake?
Jessie Sheehan: Such a good question. A snackable bake is an easy-peasy recipe. It does not have to be a baked recipe. I use the word bake, snackable bakes, very loosely in the title. What I just mean is a sweet or a treat, the recipe for which has a very short ingredient list, has very few easy-to-follow instructions, does not require any more equipment than maybe a bowl and a whisk and a spatula. The recipes can be assembled in 20 minutes or less. Sometimes they take a little longer to bake. But the idea is sweets and treats whenever the craving hits no matter the day. There's no need for a special occasion to eat a snackable bake. We eat a snackable bake when we have a craving for something delicious.
Suzy Chase: I love that these are easy recipes because this season on the Cookbook Podcast, I've been unapologetically drawn to cookbooks with a minimal amount of ingredients. It's taken me years to get to this place, I guess, because we're brought up to be a Julia Child in the kitchen, making complicated, time-consuming recipes. But in Snackable Bakes, you talk about how there wasn't much baking from scratch, Julia Child-esque in your childhood home. How did you learn how to bake?
Jessie Sheehan: That is 100% true. That was not happening when I was growing up. I grew up in a home where there was a deep appreciation of sweets and treats. I feel very grateful to my parents, and I dedicate my book to them for putting dessert on the table every night of the week, otherwise known as raising me right. So I certainly grew up around a lot of sweets, but I didn't grow up around a lot of homemade sweets. Neither of my parents baked or really cooked. I had a paternal grandmother who baked, but I honestly wasn't all that interested in learning how to make the things that I love to eat. That is until I'd actually worked as a lawyer for a while, had two children. I actually left my job as a lawyer when I had my first son. I joke that I'm still on maternity leave, and that would be almost 19 years now.
Jessie Sheehan: But long story short, it kind of took me to having these little boys in the house and reevaluating what I might want to do professionally outside of the home in addition to being a mom. That 100% led me to a bakery in my neighborhood in Brooklyn where I just basically said to the guys who run the bakery, "Please teach me what you know. I want to be your intern, your apprentice," whatever the term would be. "I'm dying to figure all this out." At the time I didn't even really have a sense of what I would do with it. It's not like I went there thinking, "I think I might want to write cookbooks." It was literally just, "I like eating sweets. How about if I learn how to make sweets?"
Suzy Chase: That brings me to this line in the cookbook that you wrote. "I adore snackable bakes due to my voracious sweet tooth and my impatient nature."
Jessie Sheehan: That is me 100%. I say this in the intro to the book. I totally understand project baking: very complicated, big layer cakes and croissants and croquembouche and different things that you can make in the kitchen that take a long time to put together. I totally get that. I'm happy to come to your house if you're making that for me. But that is just not how I want to spend my time, if that makes sense. People are always talking about baking being meditative. For me, any kind of meditative vibe I'm going to get from it is going to happen because it took almost no time to make. Do you know what I mean?
Suzy Chase: Yes.
Jessie Sheehan: I'm not feeling very meditative if I'm a half an hour or 40 minutes into the assembly of something.
Suzy Chase: Who are those people? What is that? I mean, God love those people.
Jessie Sheehan: Right, exactly. Yeah, no judgment, no judgment.
Suzy Chase: No judgment. You're the queen of easy-peasy baking. I love that you have a full list of what you won't make us do. You will never require us to cream to soften butter, rest cookie dough, chill pie dough, or perform any other time-sucking task. Amazing.
Jessie Sheehan: 100%, even though I make it clear that all of those activities certainly have their place, and I'm not advocating that people make pie dough without resting it. But I'm advocating that you try making pie dough with melted butter rather than cold butter. For instance, my recipe for pie and galette in my book call for a melted butter crust just for that reason, so you can throw together the crust, put it into the pan, and you're done. There's no chilling of the dough. There's no kneading of the dough over a certain period of time. It's easy-peasy.
Suzy Chase: What is extremely special whipped cream?
Jessie Sheehan: Probably what will be on my gravestone. It is my absolute favorite way to make whipped cream that actually is stabilized. My first cookbook is called Ice Box Cakes. In that book, a lot of whipped cream was made in the testing and developing of that book. I was always struck with the fact that you make an ice box cake and maybe you're going to be popping it out of the pan after it rests in the fridge, or maybe it's going to need a little touch up with the whipped cream after sitting in the fridge. You can't make a big batch of cream and then put it into the refrigerator along with that ice box cake, let it sit for six hours or overnight, and then pull out that whipped cream and use it to fix up your cake because the whipped cream is going to have gotten very loose and watery.
Jessie Sheehan: So I was always wondering about how to make this stabilized whipped cream, but I didn't really want to use gelatin or something like that. It seems too... I was going to say, it seems too fussy. It doesn't seem too fussy. It is too fussy for somebody like me, for a snackable baker. So I stumbled upon a recipe, honestly I can't even remember where, for an easy way to stabilize whipped cream, which is melting a large marshmallow for every cup of cream or a handful of minis for every cup of cream or a big tablespoon of marshmallow fluff. If you add one of those three ingredients into your whipped cream while you were whipping it, that marshmallow or marshmallow cream will stabilize the whipped cream and flavor it really beautifully for at least a week if not... I mean, it's really crazy. I probably shouldn't say it lasts more than a week, but honestly I think it might.
Jessie Sheehan: It's a crazy, amazing hack. The marshmallows have gelatin in them, so you're essentially using the gelatin technique to stabilize the cream, but you're doing it in a very unfussy way. Then marshmallow cream, I think, is egg whites. So the cool thing about using marshmallow cream is that it's vegetarian. Marshmallows are not because they have gelatin in them. So either one works. The marshmallow cream has the egg whites; the marshmallows have the gelatin. The other nice thing about the marshmallow cream is you don't have to do anything. You can just put it straight into the cream, whereas the marshmallows need to be melted before being added to the heavy cream. But it's just an excellent way to make a stabilized whipped cream that's tasty and easy.
Suzy Chase: Speaking of marshmallows, I know you love marshmallows. Now aren't marshmallows your favorite food?
Jessie Sheehan: I'm embarrassed to say it because it makes me sound like a seven-year-old, but, yes, I really do love marshmallows. My love for marshmallows came a little bit late in life. I wasn't like a kid who was obsessed with marshmallows, but I was a kid who was obsessed with Rice Krispie Treats, and I remained a kid who was obsessed with Rice Krispie Treats right up until today. I am still that kid who loves Rice Krispie Treats. It was developing a recipe for Rice Krispie Treats, which made it into my book, that first got me kind of hooked on just the casual eating of marshmallows. Because my recipe not only calls for a bag of mini-marshmallows, but it calls for an extra cup of them because I like to put in that extra cup right at the end of the mixing process just so you get slightly gooey pockets of marshmallow. Then I would have this bag of marshmallows where one cup had been removed. What are you going to do then but binge watch television and eat mini-marshmallows? That's how it first became a thing that I might want to just snack on.
Jessie Sheehan: But then there were just so many amazing ways to use them, like in my whipped cream. I have a mousse in the book. You melt marshmallows, and they help to set the mousse for you rather than having to use gelatin or whipped egg whites. I love to throw them in... I have a fudge in the book called a Sparkle Plenty Fudge, which is a peanut butter... In that fudge, I'm trying to mimic a sandwich I loved as a child, which is called a fluffernutter, which is Skippy peanut butter and marshmallow fluff preferably on Wonder Bread. So in this fudge, I'm trying to kind of replicate that flavor profile, so it's a peanut butter fudge with mini-marshmallows in it. I think there are probably other ways in which I use marshmallows in the book which I am not thinking of at this particular moment, but they're a great surprising ingredient that can do a lot of different things that people don't realize.
Suzy Chase: Here's the name for your next cookbook. You just said it. It's going to be called The Casual Eating of Marshmallows by Jessie Sheehan.
Jessie Sheehan: Love.
Suzy Chase: You're welcome. You're on TikTok. We all know that. But your second TikTok way back in 2020 was for your Rice Krispie Treats. It went viral with over a million views. Now, how has TikTok changed from when you first started way back then, and how have you changed on the platform?
Jessie Sheehan: Great question. I feel like TikTok has changed a lot particularly for people like me, and by people like me, I mean not a child. When I got on TikTok in March of 2020, it was very unusual to see a grownup, which I hope it's okay to call myself a grownup. It was very unusual to see a grownup on TikTok and very unusual to see a grownup acting crazy.
Jessie Sheehan: Essentially, I don't even know how it came to be, but my original TikToks on the platform were me very amped up, some could argue screaming. It was a little weird. I think what happened is the first TikTok I ever made, I made with some youngsters at a food media outlet, and they suggested, when I said, "Okay, I'm ready to do my first TokTik," because, of course, I couldn't even get the name right, I said, "What do I do?" they said, "Just talk fast." So that was the direction I was given and how it happened. But what came out of me was not only fast, but kind of a little aggressive and a little over the top. It's like, I'm very much a creature of habit. So once I saw that seemed to be what people responded to, I just went with it. But over time kind of being that amped up, yelling that much, being that aggressive or over the top is not only exhausting, but I also think it wasn't sustainable.
Jessie Sheehan: Then I switched over, I would say, probably by like Jan... I'm trying to think of when it would have been probably, the fall of 2020 and into and into the winter, I basically just started behaving a little bit more like me. The videos still can be a little wacky just because I'm a little wacky, but in general I'm not putting on a funny voice or trying to talk in a crazy way. Basically just me making recipes and trying to drop some science on a tip or a trick or a hack as I do so.
Suzy Chase: God, those early days were epic.
Jessie Sheehan: Yes. I made the point about me being slightly older than most people on the platform. The platform has changed a lot, too. Now almost everyone I know is trying to get a presence on TikTok as well as a presence on Instagram because the beauty of the platform is you really can grow there. I have over 200,000 followers on TikTok, and I think I have 76,000 or something on Instagram. I've been on Instagram forever, and I've only been on TikTok for a couple of years. So there's real potential there for people 100%. It's also extremely competitive, like all of the social stuff is.
Suzy Chase: The cookbook is dedicated to your parents, but I also think it might be a love letter to your mother-in-law. In the early days of your marriage, she would serve apple cake, which was the inspiration for your Pear Sour Cream Snacking Cake on Page 49. Can you talk a little bit about this?
Jessie Sheehan: Unlike my own mom, my mother-in-law was the quintessential old-school baker, comfort food maker. Like, all of the kinds of foods that I love more than anything were the kinds of things that my mother-in-law liked to make. She has a mac and cheese that she's famous for. She's Italian. She has an incredible spaghetti sauce that she's famous for. Her lamb with mint jelly on Easter is spectacular. These are just some of the savory things that she makes that are just off the charts and also very much the kind of food I like to eat. Her lobster rolls are incredible and her hot dogs. I know that sounds crazy, but her hot dogs are delicious. Everything-
Suzy Chase: What does she do to hot dogs?
Jessie Sheehan: It's the way she grills them on her... like an electric griddle kind of situation. She'll just plug it in the kitchen and grill her hot dogs on them. She melts butter and toasts the buns in the melted butter. Her grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything is the best you've ever had, that you would expect from a diner except you're eating it in her kitchen.
Jessie Sheehan: Those are all of the savory things that I think about when I think of her, but she was also an incredible baker. She had this apple cake that was off the chart. She had a French silk pie situation, a frozen chocolate pie with a Walnut crust that was off the charts. Her buckles. I'd never even had a buckle before, which is basically a coffee cake with fruit in it. She had this epic blueberry buckle. I mean, I loved the name. I loved everything about it. What else did I love? She had O'Henry Bars, which is, again, an old-school treat. I mean the list goes on and on. It was everything she touched... Everything she would put in front of me I would either be like, "That's the best thing I've ever had, or I need to make that right now. Can I please have the recipe?" She had a huge influence because when I met her, obviously I wasn't bake... I had my sweet tooth intact and was carrying it around with me, but I had not yet learned to do anything myself.
Suzy Chase: Her apple cake inspired your Pear Sour Cream Snacking Cake.
Jessie Sheehan: Yes, 100%. I still remember sitting around her kitchen table and her bringing it to the table. It was this beautifully bronzed sheet cake with chunks of apple that were just laid out on top of it, not even laid, like they'd been tossed on top of the cake before it went into the oven. I mean, couldn't be simpler. I was, of course, like, "Oh, no. There's no chocolate? Oh, no. Where's the whipped cream?" all the things that I believed at the time that I needed to zhoosh up a dessert in order for me to love it. Instead, it was this delicious, very of this season. I believe we were eating it in the fall with these plump, really yummy, moist fruity pockets of apple and this delicious, maybe vanilla cinnamon-scented cake, this moist cake with this beautiful crumb. I was just sold, like, "Oh my God, I need to make this right now. It's beyond delicious."
Suzy Chase: It's strawberry season. This week I made your Strawberry Sheet Cake on Page 55. Can you describe this?
Jessie Sheehan: In some ways very influenced by the cake I just described. I'm very much into vanilla, and it's a very vanilla-forward yellow cake or white... It's not a white cake because it has egg yokes in it, so it's more of a yellow cake or a vanilla cake. A very simple cake that you throw together in a bowl with a whisk. It's an oil-based cake. I love... I almost exclusively make cakes with either oil or melted butter. I basically make everything with either oil or melted butter, and sometimes I throw in some shortening when it comes to cookies. Sorry haters, but it's true. This particular cake calls for oil, which means it's going to be a very moist cake that has a long shelf life, not that you have to keep a cake around for very long because this is the kind of cake that will go quickly. But if it lasts a few days, it will still be super moist and delicious a few days later because of the oil.
Jessie Sheehan: Again, you make this simple cake batter in a bowl with a whisk and a spatula. You transfer it to a prepared pan. Most of the cakes in the book are snacking cakes, which in my world are cakes that are made in a 8x8-inch square or round pan or a 9x9-inch round or square pan. This cake is a sheet cake, so it's made in a 9x13-inch pan. Once you get that batter into the prepared pan, you just sprinkle some strawberries, coarsely chopped. Sprinkle those all over the cake. It bakes up beautifully with these bright, vibrant pops of red from the strawberries that are literally just sprinkled on top.
Jessie Sheehan: Also, from way back in my bakery days, I tend to be very generous with Turbinado sugar or sugar in the raw, and I like to top my cakes that don't get frosting or my muffins or even my fudge with Turbinado sugar or sugar in the raw because it gives a beautiful sparkle, a beautiful crunch, and a beautiful flavor. So I do that on top of this cake. So you have all of the strawberries beautifully sprinkled all over the top of the cake. Then I sprinkle it with the sugar, which gives it all the sparkle, etc., that I just described. Pop it in the oven. Takes a bit of time. I think this one bakes in about 50, 55 minutes. But then you have this gorgeous, perfect for a potluck, perfect for Father's Day, really perfect for anything. As I like to say with Snackable Bakes, perfect for any day, perfect for Tuesday as it were.
Suzy Chase: Apparently 2019 was the summer of strawberry sheet cakes.
Jessie Sheehan: So true. During that summer, Bon Appétit came out with a strawberry sheet cake. Deb Perelman from Smitten Kitchen came out with a strawberry sheet cake. Although I was on the mark to get a strawberry sheet cake out there, once I saw that other people were having the same idea as I was, or I was having the same idea as them, I shifted gears. I think I went with a raspberry sheet cake that summer and also a mixed berry snacking cake that summer. But in the end, a few years had passed, and I was writing this cookbook, and I was like, "You know what? I think my strawberry sheet cake time has come."
Suzy Chase: You have arrived.
Jessie Sheehan: Exactly.
Suzy Chase: For the chocolate lovers in the world, you have a full chapter on chocolate that includes a chocolate doughnut. Surprise! It's not deep fried. It's baked, and it's on Page 91.
Jessie Sheehan: If marshmallows are my favorite food, then my second favorite food is doughnuts. I just adore doughnuts. Of course, I love a yeasted doughnut. I love a fried doughnut. Of course, even like whether it's a cake doughnut, a doughnut that doesn't have yeast, and that is just leavened with baking powder or baking soda, or it's a yeasted doughnut. Of course, I love things that are fried. So do not get me wrong. I love all of it. I'm just not going to wake up and think to myself, "Today would be a great day to make some yeasted doughnuts, or today would be a great day to fry up some doughnuts." It's just not going to happen. There are so many great places, I live in New York City, where you can get delicious doughnuts. If I'm craving that, I go and get some, no problem.
Jessie Sheehan: But to satisfy my need for a doughnut on the fly, I like to make bake doughnuts, which, in this instance, you're making a dough with some baking powder and baking soda. You are using a doughnut pan. They're fairly inexpensive, but if you do not have one or do not want to purchase one, you can make this recipe in a muffin tin and have chocolate muffins as it were, and then glaze those and put on rainbow sprinkles. This is a extremely fudgy, chocolatey, baked doughnut that gets dipped in a glaze that's sweet, but not too sweet. I believe there might be a little lemon juice, something to cut the sweetness in the glaze. That really helps. That was a brilliant tip from my recipe tester. They're so festive and so fun, and you almost forget that it's not yeasted or it wasn't fried.
Suzy Chase: The photos in this cookbook are extraordinary. Tell me about shooting the book. How did that work?
Jessie Sheehan: It was a super exciting experience for me. Strangely enough, this is not most authors' experience, but I had not even been present at the photo shoots for my first two books, Ice Box Cakes and The Vintage Baker. It was just an arrangement I had with that particular publisher whereby they were in charge of the photography aspect of the book. I was in charge with producing a manuscript.
Jessie Sheehan: But in this instance, it was much more traditional, which is you're paid in advance to write your book, but your advance includes enough money, hopefully, for you to pay for the photography of the book. So it was my first time doing this. I won't lie. I was a little nervous or a lot nervous. But I just worked with this incredible team. My photographer is Nico Schinco, who's just fantastic, S-C-H-I-N-C-O. My food stylist is Kaitlin Wayne who works with Erin McDowell, so she has been Erin's person for all these years on all of Erin's books. This was Kaitlin's first solo job on a cookbook. Then my prop person was Charlotte Havelange, I think is how you pronounce her last name. I didn't even have any idea how important props were to a photo shoot. I understood having a pretty bowl and a pretty spoon in the picture, but I didn't understand about surfaces and backdrops and all of that.
Jessie Sheehan: The three of them had worked together a lot, so they were a well-oiled machine, just extraordinary what they produced. They exactly captured my dream of what this book would look like. Even though it's a baking book and the recipes are kind of old-fashioned, you could even say nostalgic or even cute... I have a Oreo Truffle in my book, a hacky recipe for candy that I found on TikTok. So I have some silly, cute recipes in the book, but I, by no means, wanted any of the photos to look silly and cute. So I love how the photos are super elevated and beautiful. Nico is a master of light, so they're just beautifully lit and unusually lit. Yet the recipes are kind of fun. It's a recipe for my take on a Nestlé Crunch Bar, and yet it's photographed in this beautiful way. That was a goal of mine to have that kind of contrast.
Suzy Chase: I love the photo of the enormous Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
Jessie Sheehan: Yes. I mean, that is so me. Basically Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are my favorite food, and the idea that you could make one... I know, now I'm saying marshmallows, Rice Krispie Treats, what was it?
Suzy Chase: Donuts.
Jessie Sheehan: Marshmallow, donuts, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I guess if I get any questions about what's my last supper, I guess it's all of those things, maybe plus spaghetti and meatballs. Anyway, the Reese's Cup is kind of amazing because you make it in a tart pan that already has a fluted edge, so it really mimics the way a Reese's Peanut Butter Cups looks. It just couldn't be easier. You're melting milk chocolate, putting it on the bottom of your tart pan. You're making an easy-peasy peanut butter. There's a little bit of sugar, some butter filling. You're putting that into the tart pan on top of the chocolate. Then you're putting more chocolate on top, and you're done. You do have to do some resting in between those steps so that the chocolate can harden before you add the peanut butter. But we're talking 15 minutes, 10 minutes. It's a super easy recipe. For the peanut butter and chocolate lovers in your life, it's a must have.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called dream dinner party where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why. For this segment, it can only be one person.
Jessie Sheehan: I know I'm not allowed to say more than one, but I'm going to say them really fast. I want to have dinner with comedians because I love to laugh. I don't know who's cooking for us, but I really want Amy Schumer, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle.
Suzy Chase: And no slapping.
Jessie Sheehan: Oh no, no. I promise not to slap anyone.
Suzy Chase: I'm kidding. That was a bad joke.
Jessie Sheehan: They're hilarious. All of them are hilarious. There are other comedians that I love, too, that are hilarious. But I want to hang out with them, and I want them to make me laugh, and someone else can cook for us.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Jessie Sheehan: jessiesheehanbakes.com. Jessie is J-E-S-S-I-E, and then S-H-E-E-H-A-N. Then my handle on Instagram and on TikTok and my page on Facebook are all jessiesheehanbakes, no spaces, no periods, no dashes, no nothing. Just jessiesheehanbakes.
Suzy Chase: Two purchase Snackable Bakes, head on over to cookerybythebook.com. Thanks, Jessie, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast. It's been so much fun catching up.
Jessie Sheehan: Suzy, I loved it. I met you for the first time when we did this podcast for The Vintage Baker four years ago, so it's so nice to come full circle.
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