One Tin Bakes | Edd Kimber
One Tin Bakes: Sweet and Simple Traybakes, Pies, Bars and Buns
By Edd Kimber
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.
Edd Kimber: I'm Edd Kimber and my brand new cookbook One Tin Bakes is out now.
Suzy Chase: If you enjoy Cookery by the Book, please tell a friend I'm always looking for new people to enjoy the podcast now on with the show. Food writer, baker four time cookbook author, and winner of The Great British Bake Off first season in 2010. Can you believe that's 10 years ago, by the way,
Edd Kimber: I know it's crazy. To me it feels like minutes ago, but then 10 years a lot has happened in the last 10 years.
Suzy Chase: Because of the show you were able to leave your job as a debt collector. What advice do you have for home bakers who are thinking about competing on a cooking show.
Edd Kimber: A lot of those shows are very different when they become more established. I think I was very lucky to be on an early season, the first season, and it gives you different opportunities and it could be better or worse depending on your viewpoint. But for me, the reason I think it was better is it didn't quite have the same attention, you know, the press didn't have this odd British vendetta against anything that's popular and the criticism that the contestants get, because it's such a big show now with social media, wasn't there. So for me, I was able to go on the show and it was enough to give me a little stepping stool, to be able to take a risk and try and do this as a job, whereas now much more high pressure. So I think if you're going to go on the show these days, you have to really think about what you want and how you think you will achieve that. Because now that the show is every year and people are used to that kind of roll out of new contestants, their attention spans are incredibly short. And unfortunately, if you don't make some form of impact very quickly, then you will be forgotten sadly within the next year. And so I think it's much, much harder now to actually have success on those shows. So what I would say is, you know, I learned a lot about myself on the show. It gave me a lot of confidence and really helped me define what I wanted to do going forward. If I was going into it now, and I pinned all my hopes with my future career on that show and the success it might bring to me, it could be incredibly difficult and disappointing when that just doesn't happen because there's so much competition out there. So I would say try and just enjoy it for what it is. It's a fun thing to do. All of these shows can be fun to film.
Suzy Chase: Before we dive into the cookbook. I'd love to chat about the title One Tin Bakes. I interviewed Lola Milne a few months ago and she wrote the cookbook Just One Tin. She changed the name to Just One Can for the U.S. Version. Did you ever consider the name change for the American market?
Edd Kimber: Yes. So I initially when my publisher and myself sat down to talk about doing this book, I suggested to make it more international. The book should be called One Pan Bakes. However, it was decided the word pan doesn't sound very nice in the context of a title. Whereas One Tin Bakes has a slightly nicer lilt to it. And because we live in a slightly more international world these days, most people will understand that tin and pan are interchangeable, but it is really tricky with those words. And I have the same thing when translating recipes from, English to American having to choose which wording to use. And to be honest, I actually used the word pan completely interchangeably. When writing the book, I would often slip into writing pan because it's just often why use, I sometimes will call a Bundt pan, a Bundt pan, and I would never call it a Bundt tin because it just doesn't sound right to me. So in the end it doesn't seem to affect it too much, but there has been a few people who've been a bit snarky about the English title and the fact that English ingredients are listed first and American ingredients are listed in brackets. Some people have not liked that.
Suzy Chase: That's hilarious. I was talking to Skye McAlpine last week and she kept saying, I heated it up on the hob. And I'm like the hob?
Edd Kimber: We have the same thing with grill because obviously grill here means something very different in the U.S. so when I say cook something under the grill, that might be very confusing to someone who's like, do I put it under the grill? No, no, no. It's under the broiler, which to me just sounds like a very unattractive where to broil something sounds. It sounds so gray and I don't know, there's just something very disappointing. And I don't know, just something very sad about the word broil and I don't know why, it's just how it reads to me, but, yeah, there is always a slight difficulty I've realized over the last 10 years that you really cannot please everybody. And unfortunately, I've also realized I don't want to, because if you try and please every single person you're making something, that's not going to be interesting. So my kind of rule is I always try and please myself first, because I think I write from a place of trying to write what I would have wanted, you know, a decade ago or two decades ago for the home baker. And hopefully if I find it interesting, that means other home bakers would find it interesting too. And I also try never to talk down to my audience, to my readers. I want to help uplift their skills. So I try and make something that's interesting from my point of view and hope that people are along for that journey, which most people are, which is good.
Suzy Chase: So in One Tin Bakes what is the exact tin that you recommend?
Edd Kimber: So it's a metal 9 by 13 pan. It's just made incredibly well, it will last you a very, very long time. So if you want the exact tin I recommend that one from Nordic Ware is my preferred tin. But in reality, especially in America, so many people will already have a 9 by 13 because it is for brownies you know, it's a very classic pan so if you want to use what you already have, that will be absolutely fine. That was the reason we chose, or I chose a 9 by 13 tin when my publisher came to me and said, we kind of were thinking about this idea you've been talking about baking everything in one tin and we really liked the idea, but we don't know what that would be. So I went away and fleshed out the idea more than I had in the past and I settled on a 9 by 13 because I thought it was more flexible than anything else out there really and a lot of people would already have it because it's so popular for brownies.
Suzy Chase: The reason this book exists is because of the Milk Chocolate Caramel Sheet Cake on page 12. Can you tell us that story?
Edd Kimber: The whole kind of Genesis of this book stems from this one cake. So people who have followed my work, read my website and follow me on Instagram will recognize that cake hopefully because I published it now, I can't remember how long ago it is now a year? No must be more than that, I did it a long time ago, basically. And I posted the sheet cake recipe that I'd been working on for awhile and I absolutely loved it. It was just something so delicious to me and sheet cakes really, aren't a huge thing in the UK. We have this thing called tray bakes, which I don't really like as a term because it conjures up to a lot of people, old fashioned boring, kind of things your grandma would make, but not in a kind of cool nostalgic kind of way. And so I kind of tried to avoid that term, but sheet cakes were not really a thing of the UK. I really like them because I find my approach to making fairly international and I've been working on this recipe for awhile. I posted it thinking, Oh, I think it will do well. It's chocolate, chocolate always does well for me and the frosting was to my mind, just ridiculously good, but the response to it kind of blew me away and the recipe went completely viral I had hundreds of people making it the first weekend. They posted it. And within a couple of weeks, thousands of people had made it and posted pictures of it. That was the original thinking for the book. And after that happened, my publisher kind of got me in and said, this is the thing we think we should be talking about. And so after this recipe did so, so well, we decided this should be the thing. And that kind of was the starting point for the book. So, I love the recipe so much. I made a version of it quite often.
Suzy Chase: And I've read somewhere that this cake is the best way you know how to make friends. Oh my gosh.
Edd Kimber: Cake is always the best way to make friends. I think all of my friends at some point have been bribed into friendship with me through baked goods. I think that's basically a descriptor of my life.
Suzy Chase: Tell me about your love of chocolate. You have so many chocolate recipes in this cookbook,
Edd Kimber: Someone wrote a negative review of the book saying there's too much chocolate. And I really thought is there? Who hates chocolate? Also, I am a very, as my partner would say, I'm a very, very sensitive person. And so when someone leaves me really quite aggressively negative reviews, I have to go through the book and prove it to myself that they're wrong. I went through the book and I remember thinking, but it's very well balanced. There's a real breadth of recipes. But to me, chocolate is something that I love working with because it's a never ending source of inspiration. There's so much you can do with chocolate. There's different styles, obviously there's different origins or the flavor profile is different. It's just a completely fascinating product. And I think, you know, I've been doing this for 10 years and I know with baking what is going to be popular and chocolate is always going to be most people's favorite thing. So for me, chocolate is something I like using, because I know people are home like using it. And for me, that has always one of my guiding principles is I want to make things that people will actually want to make. I think you look at say, very chef led or, you know, high-end cooking books for me. They can be a great source of inspiration for me, but I think for most people at home, those books are so alien to them because the styles of recipes or the amount of effort put in there, or the ingredients, or just the level of complexity can be very, very off putting. And I would never want to do that. So everything I put into my books I think is doable by the home baker and something a home baker would want to do, and that will vary in skill level. So you'll have people who are very, very new to baking and just want something that's a one bowl cake that you can whip up without thinking about. But then you'll have people who have been baking for decades and wants something that's exciting from an ingredient point of view or a technique that they've not heard of before. But that's kind of the lens I always view my recipes in. So chocolate will always be in my books. I refuse to apologize for that. It's something that people just love. So, I'm sorry if you don't like chocolate, but there's 70 recipes in this book and I think maybe 15 are chocolate. So, I think there's plenty if you don't like it too, but if you don't like chocolate, I'm not sure we can be friends.
Suzy Chase: So, one thing that's not chocolate is you have a distinct memory of when pop tarts made it to the UK. It cracked me up. Cause you said when you were young, you saw pop tarts as exotic and cool. Talk a little bit about that.
Edd Kimber: Neither of those things are true. So I am basically, I, I grew up in that kind of period in the nineties when there was a big real push in the UK to kind of towards American things. And that could be, you know, American TV when I was a kid, Friends was the biggest show ever, and people were absolutely wild for it. But then also it was the period where a lot of American ingredients were, brands at least, we're trying to make in the UK, this new thing that seems so different to a British tastes seems so different and interesting and cool. And it turns out that pieces of sweet cardboard and I remember trying one, and it was one of the more wacky flavors. And I just thought this is so disappointing on every level. But the main reason they are bad to me is the pastry or whatever actually is made from is such an odd, unusual texture that it's just not good. So I love this idea. I have the Poptarts in my head and I wanted to go, okay, let's make a really, really good hand pie that just happens to look like a pop tart. And I love, love, love that recipe.
Suzy Chase: It's on page 74, if anyone wants to make it.
Edd Kimber: Yeah. And it's a really adaptable one. You can really use it as your template and recreate your favorite if you do have one pop tart or just let your imagination go wild and choose whatever filling you want really just don't make it too wet because it will end up making the pastries quite soggy. So something that's a little bit thicker.
Suzy Chase: I have a heck of a time lining a pan with parchment paper. There's always one corner that looks crazy. Can you talk about your genius clip technique?
Edd Kimber: I've been doing this clip thing for years and years and years, and I didn't realize that other people didn't do it because it seemed so obvious to me, but the reason I started doing it is, and I know this is not as common in the U.S., most modern ovens in the UK are fan ovens and they have quite powerful fans sometimes. And so you're making a batch of brownies and you've lined the tin so that excess parchment comes up the side so you can remove the brownies really easily later. I was finding very often that and would blow into the brownie and bake itself into it. And it would be really annoying cause you'd ruin the look and it would be messy and hard to use. So I would clip with a kind of just bulldog clips really. And they just hold the parchment in place along the side of the tin. And it's really something, I only do for square or loaf pans or 9 by 13's, round tins that I'm not normally lining the sides very much. So it's not really an issue, but in the book I give a number of different ways to line a tin with parchment because depending on the recipe, there's different ways you'd want to do it. But the way I do most often is instead of lining all four sides with one giant piece of paper where you will get really kind of ugly corners, if you don't cut it so it sits neatly. I basically cut a long strip that will go across the entire base and then up both of the longer sides of the tin and it kind of acts as a slang. So when the recipe id done all you need to do, depending on the recipe is just use a blunt knife just to kind of separate it from the top and bottom sides, the smaller sides. And then you use the sling of parchment just to easily lift out. And it's very, very straightforward. And then sometimes you won't need to line it at all because it's something that just pops out easily. And then sometimes I want to serve the recipe in the tin, because that's kind of the joy of a 9 by 13. You can make it in the tin, serve it in the tin and so for those occasions, sometimes I just lined the base so that you've not got kind of ugly parchment showing. So there's a whole range of ways of doing it, but the clips is a very useful way to just hold that in place. But what I would say is if you're going to buy some clips, make sure they're not plastic coated because the plastic will melt in the oven. So I try to find one side just metal, no coating on them whatsoever.
Suzy Chase: Your photos in the cookbook are just as flawless as your recipes. Did it take some time to master the art of food photography?
Edd Kimber: Yeah, so I've loved photography since I was a kid, really, I studied art at one of our kind of school things called an A Level, it's kind of a bit like your diploma. And I have learned just by being, alongside some amazing photographers over the years that I've picked up many tips. And I've also over the last 10 years of doing my website. I've kind of developed what I think of as my own style. And so when my publisher had approached me to potentially shoot this book, as well as write it, I had been in a position where I was trying to do more photography work professionally anyway. And that actually interestingly changed London during our lockdown because I ended up shooting for multiple magazines from home because I was one of the only food stylist in London that could also photograph. And that meant I was a hot commodity, but that would be very useful. But having the confidence to do my own book took a long time because I'm so enamored when I get to work with incredible teams, like my previous book Patisserie Made Simple, I got to work with one of my all time favorite photographers and just the most incredible team of a food stylist and a prop stylist and then myself. And it was just the most joyous six week process. Whereas doing this was much more different because I was at home and I was shooting on my own with no assistance, no stylists, no nothing. I did the whole thing. And so it was a very, very different process. But the thing that enabled me to do was to shoot as I wrote, which was a massive benefit because I try and write a seasonally as possible. So I don't really like shooting with strawberries from December or, you know, stone fruit in January. I try and use the best. So it looks like a look when you use it and the benefit of doing it as I wrote the book rather than one block after it was finished meant it was much easier to do that, but it was a really interesting process and something I actually loved, like looking through the book at the finished product I'm so, so proud of how it looks and how the feel of the book has a noticeable style. My boyfriend says to me all the time, well, that would be a very Edd Kimber shot because it's got a certain look to it and a certain style to it because I'm not one for propping lots of things. I like things quite clean and simple. I also like very graphic shots of closeups of the food, because that's what the book's about. It's not about pretty tablescapes. I was very, very proud of the finished look.
Suzy Chase: Last week. I made your recipe for Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars on page 53. Can you describe these?
Edd Kimber: So the Tahini Chocolate Bars were one of the last recipes I developed actually for the book, I get told off very often by all of my editors, whether it's for my books for my magazine work or our newspaper work, because I have obsessions with ingredients and I tend to want to feature them all the time. And there's a few of them generally, my most known one is cardamom, I try and sneak it into everything cause I think it's an incredible spice for baking and tahini is another, and I'd already written a recipe for Tahini Babka Buns, which was inspired by a trip to Israel. And I kept thinking, do I need another tahini recipe or really the question was, will I be able to sneak in another tahini recipe without my editor going, well, you can't have two, but I think the benefit of tahini right now is I'm not a big fan of kind of like food trends cause I think it's a little bit reductive, but for what it's worth tahini is a very popular ingredient at the moment in the UK. So it felt very easy to be able to write a second recipe. But the nice thing about that recipe is the tahini isn't necessarily the most forward ingredient, it's basically adding a ton of depth. Sometimes you'll have a recipe where tahini is kind of the front and center and it's all about that sesame flavor it's all about that kind of nuttiness that it brings. And sometimes tahini can be more of a background player or a way of adding depth. And I think with that recipe, the tahini is there, but it's not smack you in the face, this is just about tahini it's a real nice blending of a kind of classic chocolate chip cookie profile with this underlying warmth and nuttiness from the tahini that goes so well with chocolate. I think it's a match made in heaven. It just was a really nice way of doing something that wasn't just a chocolate chip cookie in a bar form, but it had something else going on that makes it just a little bit more interesting. And I don't know, tahini sometimes to me makes things have this slight addictive quality because it adds this real warmth, nuttiness, and you go, I just really liked that and I want a little bit more of it. And so I, yeah, I really liked that recipe. And I think I said that about everything I've become a broken record? And I think it's because I have this rule. If I don't like an ingredient, it doesn't go in my book because if I don't like it, how can I talk about it to someone else? So I have this habit of saying, Oh yeah, I really liked the recipe. I'm like, yeah, of course you do, you wrote the book, you should really like all of them.
Suzy Chase: Now for my segment called Last Night's Dinner where I asked you what you had last night for dinner.
Edd Kimber: So we didn't cook last night, we were at in-laws house, so my, I'm not married but I call them my in-laws, my mother-in-law, my partner's mother made us a kind of tagine with lamb and almonds. And I'm not sure what fruit she used. There was a sweetness to it though. And then she also made us a kind of Thai aubergine curry. And then we had rice and two types of couscous. So it was a real mismatch of foods, but it was delicious and very nice to have a meal that wasn't cooked by myself for a while, because I tend to be one of those people that I spend all day in the kitchen and then I will very often make the dinner as well. So it's nice when someone else is doing that for you.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Edd Kimber: I'm very easy to find I'm @TheBoyWhoBakes on everything. So my website is TheBoyWhoBakes.co.uk and I'm on every social media that I'm actually on is just @TheBoyWhoBakes. Very easy to find.
Suzy Chase: Well, thanks Edd, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Edd Kimber: My pleasure, thank you for having me.
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