A Heritage of Baking
I pressed down on the crumb topping, feeling the slickness of rich Irish butter between my fingers. I was seven years old and standing on my tiptoes to reach the kitchen table as my mum taught me how to make her apple crumble, a quintessential Irish dessert. I did everything just as Mum instructed, and I was bursting with pride when it came out of the oven. Like everything we made, it was a bit of this and a handful of that, and it was glorious.
Baking, in my family, has always been about making do, about turning out something absolutely delicious no matter what obstacles lie in the way. With five children to feed, my large Catholic family was always bumping into each other in the kitchen, trying to get my mum’s attention. Everyone had a job—I did the tasks that little hands were good for, like slowly adding spoonful after spoonful of sugar to egg whites as they whipped into a pavlova under my mum’s watchful eyes. Or she’d set me down on the kitchen floor with cookies in a bag and a rolling pin, which I’d use to bash the cookies into crumbs for a lemon cheesecake she was making for Sunday lunch.
My mum was an amazing cook, and she set the bar high for other mums. She knew how to improvise and worked with whatever resources she had at her disposal, and that meant she could make almost anything, even with a practically bare pantry, and only a bowl, a whisk, and a few small (but willing!) hands to help.
I watched my mum create spectacular desserts from just a few simple ingredients and soon enough I was doing it, too. But while my mum would make a loaf of white bread, I would tinker with the recipe and make a loaf stuffed with bacon and cream cheese. Or I’d transform a regular meringue by adding butterscotch and bananas. It was never enough for me to simply make a recipe—I always wanted to make it better or different.
As I grew up, I continued to spend time in the kitchen and I began to think about attending cookery school. My mum warned me that becoming a professional pastry chef was a tough road, but she didn’t realize that everything she had taught me had already set the stage for a career I was more than excited to begin.
Heading to Culinary School
At nineteen years old, I went off to study professional cookery at Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin, an institute that focused on catering and hospitality. From there, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to attend Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry, County Cork. There I trained under celebrity chef, acclaimed cookbook author, and TV personality Darina Allen, who had been named 2005’s Cooking Teacher of the Year by the IACP.
My mum and I had watched Darina’s show Simply Delicious on Monday nights for years, and there I was, learning from her in person. Under her direction, an important lesson was ingrained in me: Do not cook by halves. Your ingredients and how you manipulate them are the only things that matter in the kitchen. Everything else is a distraction.
A Baking Professional
With the incredible instruction I received under Darina and my own bold style of baking, I took off to conquer the world as a young new pastry chef. My first stop was a priest’s priory on the north side of Dublin, which housed dozens of elderly priests. The kitchen had nothing but some bowls, wooden spoons, and a small handheld electric mixer. But that was familiar territory to me, and the priests adored dessert, so I was in heaven making homemade doughnuts, tea cakes, and Chelsea buns all day for those sweet old men. They all had such an appreciation for what I did—except for Father Green.
On my first day at the priory, I was told by the head priest, “Don’t try and make him happy, because you won’t.” Father Green complained about everything, and he drove everyone batty, including me. One day, out of the blue, I received a phone call from Father Green’s niece. She was calling to thank me—after a recent visit, he had spent the entire time describing the latest thing I’d baked for him in intricate detail, and all in positive, glowing terms. It remains one of my greatest accomplishments to this day.
After that, I realized that I could bake anywhere—there was no kitchen from which I couldn’t turn out something I was proud of.
Throughout this experience, my mum was always there to offer wisdom and the encouragement I needed to take the next culinary step. That next step led me to pack my bags and head to Tuscany, where I worked as a private chef in a family’s villa. In that gorgeous region of Italy, I would spend my mornings in the village, buying locally grown fruits and vegetables and farm-raised meats. I can still taste the homemade gnocchi and prosciutto I would buy from the delicatessen. Even the herbs in the family’s herb garden were like nothing I had ever tasted.
Then I was faced with an unexpected dilemma: the family asked me to make them fresh pasta for dinner. I had never made pasta from scratch before, and the tiny, outdated kitchen didn’t even have a working fridge, never mind a pasta machine. With no internet access to rely on, I realized I would have to improvise. I took a pasta recipe from a book I found in the kitchen and tinkered with it, adding my bold style to an otherwise basic recipe. I rolled the dough as thin as I could using a bottle of wine as a rolling pin. I did know that pasta should be dried before cooking so I looked around that barren, ancient space and started hanging strands of pasta anywhere I could—on broom handles, wooden spoons, any long object I could find. In the end, the whole experience turned into a labor of love, and it was some of the most delicious pasta I have ever eaten, even to this day.
California Dreaming
After that, I realized I could bake anywhere—there was no kitchen from which I couldn’t turn out something I was proud of. So I took off for Australia and worked at the Thredbo ski resort for a season, making salads, sandwiches, and other hearty meals for hungry skiers. It was the first, and probably last, job where I rode a chairlift to work.
But I had my eye on living in the United States, and when I was offered a job as a bread baker at a South Lake Tahoe casino in California, I was thrilled. I was twenty-five years old and my shift started at three a.m., when most of my friends were only just getting home. But I didn’t care—my goal was to learn the art of bread making, and in those wee hours of the morning, that’s exactly what I did.
I fell in love with California, and when I was offered a pastry chef job at Spruce, a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco, I dropped everything to take it. There, surrounded by chefs who were as ambitious and innovative as I was, I learned to love the hard rhythms of turning out Michelin-worthy desserts every day. Again, I was up at the crack of dawn to get all the dough going and spin ice creams in the cold, early-morning kitchen. It was as hard as my mum had warned, but the knowledge I gained and the friendships I made there made it all worth it—I think there’s something about being paid minimum wage that really bonds people.
As time went by, I found myself working every hour I wasn’t sleeping, but I could barely pay my rent. I decided to quit and start a catering business, which I hoped would allow me to stay in San Francisco without having to work 24/7. The experiences I had at each job had made me a wiser and more experienced chef. I knew food, and what I didn’t know about business I was confident I could make up as I went along. My business was quickly hired by a Silicon Valley tech company to serve breakfast to their engineers, which I later found out meant, “Lure the engineers into actually getting to work at nine a.m. by cooking something mind-blowing.” The added twist? The “kitchen” was two toaster ovens and a hot plate, and I had sixty busy engineers to feed. But by then, I had spent years cooking in kitchens all over the world—this wasn’t my first rodeo. I knew I could wow those engineers. I turned that dorm room–style kitchen into a breakfast experimentation lab. When I started serving breakfast, only a few people would show up before nine, and the rest would trickle in around ten. I noticed that Friday was the most challenging day because most people were already checked out for the weekend, and decided to rise to the challenge—by god, I was going to get them into the office! One Friday I made red velvet pancakes with cream cheese frosting. Needless to say, those engineers practically lost their minds with joy. Word got out around the office that Friday was the day to show up early, and after that, slowly but surely, they all started showing up. I continued to push myself, trying to outdo the Friday pancakes and get even more creative for Monday through Thursday’s breakfasts as well. Soon every one of those hungry engineers was showing up to work early so they could eat what became known as a “Gemma breakfast.”
As you can probably tell by now, I love a challenge, and soon I was ready for a new one. But I had done it all: I’d baked everywhere from a Michelin-starred kitchen to a hot-plate-in-an-office kitchen. Through it all, I’d been collecting recipes in dozens of old notebooks and wishing I could share the shortcuts I was inventing and the little tips and tricks I was teaching myself with a wider audience. After a decade of working as a professional chef, I felt I had a lot to share. But where to from here? It was 2014, and the internet was making the world a smaller place. I thought, If I’m going to teach people how to bake, why not reach them online?
And so, Bigger Bolder Baking was born.
Taking It Online
I wanted my next move to be something new—something visual. I still wanted to bake but I didn’t want to be standing in a kitchen at five o’clock in the morning. My husband, Kevin, who has worked in the entertainment industry his entire career, said, “Why don’t we join forces and marry the two things we are both passionate about—food and entertainment?” And that’s when we created our online show, Bigger Bolder Baking.
Let me just start by saying that we quit our full-time jobs and moved cities to start this new career, and we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. All we knew was that whatever we didn’t know, we’d have to learn, and fast.
Bigger Bolder Baking has a simple premise. Most food television shows have strayed from teaching people how to cook and are focused more on competition. I saw a need for a high-quality online show that actually taught people how to bake, whatever their skill level or equipment and pantry items in their kitchens. I use my cherished recipes, which have been perfected through years of making them in every kind of kitchen imaginable, to teach my audience the basics and beyond.
We started creating videos in our tiny kitchen in Santa Monica, California. Kevin had never produced a show before and I had never hosted . . . anything?? I didn’t blink for the first few episodes because I was scared stiff. But I knew I had excellent baking skills, and I got through each episode by talking about the techniques I used and sharing the useful tips I had learned—along with great recipes, of course. Eventually, I got used to the camera and started blinking like a normal human being, and soon enough, it all became second nature to me. It helped that I was talking about a topic I loved, and isn’t that half the battle?
Once a week, Kevin and I launched a new video on YouTube. We did everything on the show—soup to nuts—and we made do with what little we had, whether it was kitchen equipment or production equipment. Somehow, we managed to make it work. Slowly but surely, week after week, people began tuning in, and we started to build a following. It turned out our instincts were right: There were others out there who wanted to learn the traditional baking skills I had mastered. They loved my tips about things like reusing butter paper to grease your baking tin, or found my Fudgiest Giant Brownies on a quest for the perfect brownie recipe. These were my people!
As my following grew, viewers began to get to know me as much as my food, and today they have become this wonderful tribe of deeply loyal fans who call themselves “Bold Bakers.”
We became one of the fastest-growing baking shows online and have one of the best baking communities. My recipes have been seen and shared all over the world on all media platforms, and I have been featured on many media outlets including the Food Network, The Doctors, and even on Netflix’s show Nailed It!
These recipes are simplicity itself, and will show that you can end the day with something sweet no matter what stands in your way.
Anyone Can Become a Bold Baker
So here I am, sharing my treasure trove of recipes with you in Bigger Bolder Baking, my debut cookbook. These are the recipes I grew up on and those I invented and perfected while traveling the world. They’re the recipes I make every day in my home in sunny California. And nearly every recipe calls for less than ten ingredients and no more than four everyday kitchen tools. They are simplicity itself, and will show that you can end the day with something sweet no matter what stands in your way. They represent my culinary journey and the bootstrapping attitude that has so defined my work as a chef, baking personality, and YouTube star.
At its core, “Bold Baking” is an ode to spontaneous baking with over-the-top flavors, all put together with very little fuss. That means to make these recipes, you won’t need any special equipment, rare spices, anxiety-inducing techniques, or unpronounceable ingredients you’ll use only once. Bigger Bolder Baking is about getting back to the essential, simplest components of baking—flour, sugar, butter, heat—and delighting you with more than one hundred utterly marvelous things you can make with them. It restores baking to an everyday art rather than relegating it to a weekend-only indulgence, and it reminds us that a few bites of a freshly made dessert can (and should) be a daily pleasure.