How Nature Tastes

How a recipe gets made featuring Girl Scout Cookies, Competitions and Glaciers Adventures. How wonderful nature tastes. BONUS CLASS DISCOUNT CODE.

Say it with me……it’s Girl Scout Cookie Season! These were the best cookies of my childhood, in some ways the only ones. I was a briefly a Girl Scout and since I had to sell them my mother couldn’t keep this sugar from me. I only had one season before I petitioned my brothers Scout Leader to attend a Boy Scout meetings because building a fire and cooking outside deep in the woods appealed to me more. Big tom boy and tagalong (see what I did there) to my older brother for a long time. But every time I see a stand of scouts in green sashes laden with these cookies, it makes me so happy.

Which is why it felt like so much magic to be invited to compete on The Girl Scout Cookie Championship. It was the last professional thing I did before the pandemic hit and the world to a halt. Traditional hospitality work evaporated overnight, and I leaned into my favorite things – making beautiful, delicious food, and teaching! Ultimately it all tipped me more into cake! Aka my WHOLE WORLD NOW. But I would never have been prepared if I hadn’t had a wild hair the summer before when I went to join my dear friend Rose McAdoo (also Rose!) in Alaska to make pastry in the wilderness. So here’s the story of how a recipe is born through nostalgia, adventure and a sense of place in wild nature.

Backpacks filled with limited camping gear, prep bowls and kitchen utensils and mised ingredients up a mountain. We carried heavy cream, eggs, sugar, flour, you name it! Bonus Challenge: There was a bear on the loose and we smelled

I joined Rose for two weeks in the wilderness of Alaska to make pastry. After hours on the phone dreaming and breaking into fits of laughter, we somehow decided that the way to make high-level desserts most approachable was to show that you could do them literally anywhere with a few ingredients and a few tools. So obviously we headed outdoors armed with only a jet boil, a couple spare pots, some prep bowls, and basic kitchen utensils. We also hoped to share our knowledge and enthusiasm for the natural world.

Alaska is home to a diverse array of vibrant biospheres. We hiked in some of the most stunning landscape, foraging ingredients and plotting our grand pastries. We did everything onsite for every adventure. We prepped, cooked and fried donuts under the vibrant green canopy of the Girdwood Rainforest featuring a Barley Brioche Donut with fillings made from pineapple weed, fireweed, watermelon berries and cloudberries we foraged along the hike.

Barley Brioche Donuts in Girdwood Rainforest

We boiled sugar candy and jellies on the vast receding Matanuska Glacier, featuring key species involved in the health of glaciers. And we endured a comedy of errors making a no churn ice cream Baked Alaska at +3,000 feet elevation atop the Harding Ice Field. Layers of ice cream being used to demonstrate the life of glaciers and their importance. Note to other hikers: If you see a whisk in the ice, don’t dig up the treasure please. lol.

Whisk marks the spot where we buried layers of no churn ice cream dyed with foraged produce, for an overnight sleep on top of Harding Ice Field after an 8 hour climb.

So when the Girl Scouts called months later and asked if I could make a cake inspired by nature…kismet. I knew it had to be a Glacier! You can watch “This Glaciers Tastes Like Thin Mints” on Apple TV to see all the drama. I breeze through the challenge of reinventing a Girl Scout cookie, taking Lemonups and transforming them into a moon pie stuffed with a rosemary infused marshmallow and enrobed in dark chocolate shell. The I make a double barrel cake of crushed Thin Mints!

On set Girl Scout Cookie Championship - Thin Mint Glacier Cake.

There were layers of Cookies and Cream Cake, Blueberry Mint Jam and Vanilla Swiss Buttercream, Cookie Crumble. There was a Yeti and there was endless sugar glass and rock candy. The blueberries mimicked the ones I had picked along steep mountain trails and showed the visually stunning blues found at the center of glaciers due to millennia of compressed air and water. Mint to pull all the flavors back together and give your throat the feeling of hiking in thin icy air. A full experience. I loved this creation, and only wish I had added more layers of crumbled and crunchy cookies between the layers. Texture is everything!

I have the recipe for the snacking version of this cake at the bottom for paid subscribers. GO OUT AND FIND A GIRL SCOUT TROOP TO SUPPORT AND MAKE THIS CAKE IMMEDIATELY! You can catch some more of the Wild Roses: Alaska Extreme Pastry Adventure below, and a lot of more of what Rose McAdoo has been up to since in her sizzle reel. Catch up with Rose here, she’s about to embark on an incredible prestigious journey and you’ll want to follow along.

Not enough cake? Make cake with me!! Don’t miss my Milk Street Class March 12, 6pm EST. We’ll be making my Buckwheat Yuzu Coconut Meringue cake from my book Bread and Roses! It’s a deep dive into grains in cake, curd and custard technique, building and decorating together. I can’t wait. Use code ROSEBAKESCAKES for 15% off the cost of class. Sign up for class here.

Obsessed with: Watching through my deep dive food movie list. I have always loved movies where film is predominant or even better deeply connected to narrative or character. Talking more about this with friends has only pushed me further into obsession. Recent stand outs: The 100 Foot Journey, Mystic Pizza, and Scotland, Pa. I was also surprisingly obsessed with Pig with Nicolas Cage, it’s one of his best performances.

Reading: I picked up this book on my own tour in Portland. Edible; 70 Sustainable Plants That Are Changing How We Eat. It’s beautifully illustrated and informative. I want to share it with adults and kids! So lovely to see friends old and NEW celebrated in this way.

Inspired by: The braised lettuces in the film The Film The Taste of Things.

Recent Publications: Kitchen Tape dropped it’s second episode Tuesday 2/27. Our guest was Dara Yu, listen on Spotify or Apple. We put out new episodes every two weeks on Tuesdays. EXCEPT WHEN WE BONUS EPISODE YOU! Find another quickie where we discuss the new film The Taste of Things. Don’t forget to subscribe to make sure all new episodes show up in your play list when they are released. Leave us a review and reach out to recommend someone who inspires you!

Catch a double dose of me and take a deep dive into grains role in regenerative cuisine on a recent episode of the Regenerative Baking Podcast with host Dressler Parsons.