Toasted Carrot Bread with Salty Crème Fraîche
A special Just a Bite and recipe from Bronwen Wyatt
Cake friends,
Today we’re sharing something sweet: A recipe and interview with one of our favorite bakers, Bronwen Wyatt, a New Orleans-based pastry chef and the creative mind behind Bayou Saint Cake, a pandemic-born cake studio that transformed seasonal Southern produce into whimsical layered confections.
Bronwen is not just a baker—she’s a sharp food writer, recipe developer, and masterful teacher. Her classes cover everything from mastering the dome cake to whipping up cinnamon king cakes with luscious sour cream filling. Today, she’s giving us a peek into her kitchen essentials, including the ingredient she’s obsessed with right now, a baking rule she rarely follows, and a recipe for a loaf carrot cake so good that you’ll never make banana bread again.
1. You’re making dessert. What is it? How do you make it?
Lately I’ve been leaning into unfussy desserts. After years and years of tasting buttercream day in and day out, I’m borderline revolted by it, and want to serve slices of simple cake with fruit, or perhaps a warm cobbler with ice cream. Recently I visited the brilliant Briana Holt’s Tandem Bakery in Portland, Maine, where they were serving banana bread toasted and lathered with cream cheese, olive oil, and salt. The recipe below is an ode to that, with a roasted carrot bread (with ground fennel seed, mace, and cinnamon) and salty crème fraîche.
2. Someone is making you a dessert. What do you ask for?
It’s my best friend, the pastry chef Jessica Stokes, and I’m asking her to make me her famous blueberry pie.
3. You’ve transformed into a pastry. What are you and how are you consumed?
I’m a peach hand pie, wrapped in greaseproof paper and a little crushed, carried in a bag and eaten while on a walk in a pine forest. It’s a medium-fancy hand pie (not a gas station pie, but also not a $10 boutique bakery hand pie). The pine forest is the gulf south sort, not the craggy New England kind, and very, very fragrant.
4. Tell us about a dessert scene in a work of art/cinema/culture/literature that you’ll never forget?
I think about the banquet scenes in the Redwall series of children’s books about once a week—they are what initially drew me to baking as a kid. The desserts they featured were quintessentially British, which felt exotic to me, and so, so romantic. Here’s an excerpt:
“Then there were the cakes, tarts, jellies, and sweets. Raspberry muffins, blueberry scones, redcurrant jelly, Abbot’s cake, fruitcake, iced cake, shortbread biscuits, almond wafers, fresh cream, honeyed cream, custardy cream, Mrs. Churchmouse’s bell tower pudding, Mrs. Bankvole’s six-layer trifle, Cornflower’s gatehouse gateau, Sister Rose’s sweetmeadow custard with honeyglazed pears, Brother Rufus’s wildgrape woodland pie with quince and hazelnut sauce...” —From Mattimeo, by Brian Jacques
5. Share with us a baking hack you can’t live without?
You don’t really need to temper eggs—at least, not in the finicky way when you’re ladling little drips of hot liquid into yolks while whisking. I just combine all my cold or room temperature custard ingredients in a pot, whisk them well, cook them to 180° while stirring, and strain.
6. How has your relationship to baking changed since you moved away from freelance cake making?
I’m still baking quite a bit for various recipe developing gigs, but I’m not shoehorned into only writing cake recipes, which has felt great. I will say that baking from home has been a challenge—I’m carting around half of a commissary kitchen’s worth of baking supplies in the back of my car and the other half is scattered around my home kitchen. My wife has started calling my Honda the jalopy because the cake pans in the back rattle so much. We live in an old New Orleans house with very little storage, so I need to find a better solution soon.
7. Do you have a particular ingredient that you are obsessed with lately?
The Diaspora Co mace. I love it, especially this time of year. I highly recommend buying an inexpensive spice grinder so that you can process your winter spices from whole—it will transform your baking. And whole mace is so beautiful and lacy and alien-looking.
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Visit: We’re popping up at Pioneer Works’ Press Play Art Book Fair in Brooklyn on December 7–8. Come find us alongside a great lineup of exhibitors—we’ll have magazines, merch, and a few treats inspired by our issues.
Read: A look inside the cult of the Cake Picnic, the exuberant pastry potluck created by baker Elisa Sunga that we spotlighted in the newsletter earlier this year.
Watch: A day in the kitchen with the very talented pastry chef Camari Mick, who makes singular sweets for the Michelin-starred tasting menu at the Musket Room.
Shop: Bettina Makalintal’s food focused gift guide for Eater has arrived, featuring a very nice Cake Zine mention.
Support: A fundraiser for displaced families in Lebanon at Playground in Brooklyn on November 20 with food, wine, and music.
Submit: Acacia magazine is open for submissions for their third issue on the political power of Muslims in America.
This recipe is SO good, I have made it twice already. There is something about the combination of savory and sweet, together with the spices, that elevates it to another level entirely. Thank you Bronwen for creating it, and Cake Zine for sharing it - truly delicious.
This sounds so delicious!