The Bright Side of Baking Mistakes
A special Just a Bite with Kassie Mendieta, plus her recipe for creamy, caramelized flan
Pastry friends,
Kassie Mendieta is known online as @IBakeMistakes, but there’s nothing accidental about her pastry wizardry. The L.A.-based baker and recipe developer creates artfully frosted, ambitiously flavored sweets (espresso martini cake! brown butter brioche donuts with brownie spice glaze!) Her mint chocolate, Elphaba-inspired layer cake was a favorite at our Wicked Cake pop-up at Quarter Sheets in L.A. last December, and we haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Read on for for her Just a Bite interview, featuring a genius buttercream hack and her recipe for creamy, caramelized flan. — AA
1. You’re making dessert. What is it? How do you make it?
I always find myself with an excess of egg yolks and I almost always have 2 gallons of heavy cream on hand, so I feel like I'm constantly making flan. I'm always tossing in odds and ends to change the flavor—most recently I added some ovaltine powder to the custard. Insane. Flan is incredibly easy: make a quick dry caramel, combine everything for the custard, then just forget about it in the oven for a few hours. The hardest part is waiting overnight for it to chill and set before being able to enjoy it. Read on for my recipe below.
2. Someone is making you a dessert. What do you ask for?
I'm a fiend for whipped cream and fruit. I feel like that's also the least amount of work I can ask someone to put into making something for me. I'm not too picky about it either—the cream can be freshly whipped or from a can. Any seasonal fruit. Toss on store-bought or homemade cake for a little "shortcake" action or some crushed meringue for an Eton mess moment. I'm a sucker for the simpler things in life.
3. You’ve transformed into a pastry. What are you and how are you consumed?
I'm definitely a croissant. But a twice baked one, filled with some sort of nutty frangipane. OH, like a yuzu almond frang. A very crisp and delicate outer crust filled with a gooey, floral center. That describes me as a person as well.
4. Tell us about a dessert scene in a work of art/cinema/culture/literature that you’ll never forget?
The scene between Meryl Streep and Steve Martin in "It's Complicated" where they just casually make chocolate croissants together. Watching the scene back gives me so much anxiety LOL. Casually making a 3 day process something that comes together in 2 hours? The haphazard triangle cuts??? THE SHEER AMOUNT OF CROISSANTS BAKED ON ONE TRAY? Funny enough though, growing up I thought the scene was so cute and how my dating life would unravel. It has not.
5. What’s a baking hack you can’t live without?
Sometimes I need small amounts of Swiss meringue to top a cheesecake. I'll make much more meringue than I need so that way the mixer can properly incorporate air into the whipping egg whites and get nice stiff peaks. Once I've used the amount I need, I'll slowly add softened butter to the rest to make Swiss buttercream. I get perfect meringue for my cheesecake and buttercream for cakes when I need it. You're able to store the buttercream in the fridge or freezer too. (You can also bake off the extra meringue in a 200°F oven until nice and crisp, for the Eton messes from earlier ;-))
6. Can you walk us through your thought process when choosing flavors?
I'm mostly just working with what I want to eat. Most of the time when I'm putting together a menu I'll write out every flavor/ingredient I'm currently loving. I'll look at this long list and start pairing things that I think/know go together and the best way to incorporate each flavor into the final build of the pastry. Other times though it'll kinda strike as a stream of consciousness where my brain just keeps spitting out ideas. Then it's a matter of deciding which component will hold each flavor. What flavor is the star of the dessert and which flavors are supporting characters helping the star shine. Basically my two mottos for flavor development are "f*ck around and find out" & "have fun and be creative."
Follow Kassie Mendieta on Instagram: @ibakemistakes and on Substack:
Make this flan and show us on Instagram: @cake_zine
Love these questions and answers, and that scene in It’s Complicated! 😂 If you get a chance look up the dessert scene from the movie Babette’s Feast -- the Baba au Rhum 😋 !