Seeing Gale Gand's "Sweet Dreams" series again was almost enough to offset the horror of "Top Chef Desserts"

I don't know what Gale Gand plans to put in those ramekins,
but whatever it is, please, please save one for me.

by Ken

One nice thing about the long weekend was being home on the two weekdays, and discovering that Cooking Channel is rerunning, on weekday mornings, the old Food Network series Sweet Dreams with that wonderful pastry chef Gale Gand. The two episodes I got to watch, even though they didn't contain anything I plan to make anytime soon, reminded me why I remembered the show so fondly.

As far as I know, Gale is still going strong as pastry chef at Chicago's Tru, the restaurant she and then-husband Rick Tramonto started in 1999 (if I'm reading her blog blog bio correctly), and in which they have remained partners post-divorce. Sweet Dreams, I see in the blog bio, was "the first all-dessert show produced by the Food Network."

Sweet Dreams isn't that old. As best I can tell it dates back only to 2003-07, but that was another epoch in desserts, and in food generally. Back then desserts were still a treat made to top off a meal providing satisfaction and gastronomic pleasure. Somewhere culinary satisfaction and pleasure gave way to what I can only describe as fetishizing, eventually leading to such entertainments as Food Network's useless Challenge and -- now two seasons old -- Bravo's Top Chef Desserts.

I'm not sure why I kept watching TCD, considering how it regularly infuriated me, with its overwhelming focus on the repulsive fetish aspects of desserts, What they're doing, essentially, seems to me masturbating in public, turning a healthy and vital activity when practiced into a shocking, gross, embarrassing spectacle, especially watching the practitioners so desperately craving public adulation and career-building. The grossness is surely epitomized by those now-required-for-pastry-chefs "showpieces," which had a lot to do with this TCD seaons's no-doubt-deserved triumph of that human zero Chris. "Deserved" because the pastry chef's profession has been redefined to place a premium on something that, for all its hellacious difficulty, is even more useless. There ought to be a place here for the word "travesty."

I remembering first seeing what might be described as showpieces while watching chocolate genius Jacques Torres in his early years on American TV. There was undeniable fascination in seeing what Jacques could do with chocolate, even as you knew that the result was a waste of time, energy, and chocolate product. Now these "showpieces" have metastasized to the point where they're a crucial component of pastry-chef competence, even though they have nothing to do with pastry, cheffing, or anything related to the satisfaction or pleasure of dessert or food generally.

It's my assumption that if you asked the Chris, or any of these dessert fetishists, "Could you please put a really nice slice of chocolate cake on a plate for me?," they would be insulted. How beneath them! At the same time, I wonder if any of them could do it.

I bet if you put that question to Gale Gand, she would beam. She would understand, totally. And my gosh, would I love to eat the cake she'd put on that plate.

I'm not sure I would be as happy with the black-and-whites Gale made on a Sweet Dreams show I haven't seen since it aired originally. Her "secret" ingredient, she explained, was lemon, and I don't want any stinking lemon in my black-and-whites. Sheesh! Lemon is great in specifically lemon desserts, but in black-and-whites?

Still, Gale had gone to the trouble to devise and show us how to make her version of black-and-whites, and by and large the stuff she presented on the show looked both lusciously worth making and within the pastry-making skills of most any home cook. There was a lot of camaraderie, dare I say love, being shared on that show -- a quality I associate with the cooking and baking I most enjoy. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I've set my DVR to record Sweet Dreams episodes.)

Maybe it's just coincidence, but contestants on Top Chef Desserts who appear to have found their way into the pastry-making profession with that kind of love and desire to share, even some with clearly high skill levels, don't seem to fare very well. I really, really love and respect expertise, but my love and respect shrink when the expertise is directed to useless purposes. I realize this is entirely subjective, but for me producing -- no, sharing -- that slice of lovely chocolate cake registers easily in the "winner" zone on the usefulness meter.

With all the hoopla Food Network devoted to its (gasp) live two-hour Thanksgiving-cooking show the Sunday before the holiday, featuring a battery of network celebrity cooks, you might forget that once upon a time -- and again, we're not talking about prehistoric times -- the network put out a fine hourlong cooking show, Cooking Live, hosted by Sarah Moulton, five nights a week. And unlike the much-hyped Thanksgiving special, which was on the whole a snoozefest, Cooking Live was almost always stimulating, entertaining, and informative, with a deft combination of Sarah's planned live demonstrations, usually with interesting guests, and fielding live phone calls from viewers.

A special guest who proved so special that for a while he filled the Friday-night slot by himself, was the great baker and baking teacher Nick Malgieri. From Nick I always got that special combination of expertise and love, with a compulsion to share what he knows. He made rolling out pie dough, a task dreaded by many home bakers, look easy (and for a while I could actually do it!). He always ended his segments or shows with one of the less catchy but most inspirational of catch phrases, "Bake something," and I learned so much from watching him, and from working with his great book How to Bake, that I always tried to do so.

One thing that fascinated me in the book was Nick's explanation of how the bread section came into being. Growing up in an Italian neighborhood in New Jersey, he explained, he had the benefit of watching a large roster of skilled bakers in his extended family, but one thing they didn't bake much was bread, because they had such ready access to great bread in their neighborhood bakeries. As a result, he had to really work up his bread-baking chops for the book, and the result of that, at least for me, was that his instructions and recipes were unusually well suited to a novice baker. For a while there I was turning out some really nice, crusty, tasty round loaves.

I wasn't looking forward to writing about Top Chef Desserts, which I've been meaning to do for a while now, but it was awfully easy to write about Gale Gand and Nick Malgieri. And what I assumed I would be writing about today was the curious case of Buddy Valastro and Cake Boss, trying to explain why I love at least certain aspects of the show. With the second season of Next Great Baker bowing tomorrow night on TLC, I'm going to try to get to it in tomorrow night's post.

Yes, an awful lot of stuff produced on both Cake Boss and Next Great Baker falls into much the same category of uselessness as the Top Chef Desserts dreck. But Buddy and his associates produce humongous quantities of at least honorable-looking baked goods, and Buddy himself -- as I put it recently to a friend -- isn't nearly as dopey as he seems. In this regard, a fair amount of the appeal of Cake Boss for me is similar to what I was just talking about this afternoon in my Sunday Classics post in connection with those good early seasons of MTV's The Real World, which on an elementary level that still exceeds most of our sensibilities taught the lesson of how different people can be from what we first assume based on superficial impressions.

But with Buddy, there's a special hunger for knowledge and mastery of baking skills. The single image I retain is from the first season of Next Great Baker, when he introduced the next challenge by taking two already-baked cake layers and assembling, frosting, and decorating a layer cake, which he did effortlessly, flawlessly, and beautifully in what seemed like a matter of seconds. I suppose it was showing off in a way, but it was showing off skills that deserved to be shown off.

There's more to the story, but that will have to wait for another occasion.

Buddy Valastro's manifest goofiness can easily obscure his extremely high skill level, not to mention his obsessive passion for broader and deeper knowledge of the baking art.

#