Interview with Gemma Stafford | Bigger Bolder Baking
By: Suzy Chase
Tags: Interview, Baking, Cookbooks, Podcast, Food

Intro: Welcome to the number one Cookbook Podcast, Cookery by the Book, with Suzy Chase. She’s just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Gemma Stafford: Hi, I’m Gemma Stafford, and my new cookbook is called Bigger Bolder Baking: A Fearless Approach to Baking Anytime, Anywhere.

Suzy Chase: So I have to start off by saying a huge congratulations to you. You have a bun in the oven, so to speak.

Gemma Stafford: Thank you.

Suzy Chase: That’s so exciting. When are you due?

Gemma Stafford: I’m due early February.

Suzy Chase: Oh my God, that’s right around the corner.

Gemma Stafford: I know. I know. Tell me about it. At the time, at the beginning, time stood still, and now it’s going really fast, so I don’t really know where I am.

Suzy Chase: Yay. I’m so excited for you.

Gemma Stafford: Thank you.

Suzy Chase: So, you have a line in the cookbook that goes, “I watched my mom create spectacular desserts from just a few simple ingredients.” I feel like this is your philosophy, too.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I worked as a professional chef for 10 plus years, and I trained, I studied professional cookery in college. I went to two different cookery schools, and definitely the more, especially as I look at the book, my biggest influence and my first teacher was really my mom.

Suzy Chase: Now what exactly is bold baking?

Gemma Stafford: So being bold is about taking risks, and it’s about trying something different, and it’s about being fearless. And that’s what I do in my recipes. I try and take away the unnecessary steps that people don’t need that might confuse you, that sometimes, in baking, people can have very long winded recipes.

Gemma Stafford: And what I like to do is just get straight to the facts and show you how you can make over the top desserts, but still using very simple techniques and very simple ingredients.

Suzy Chase: Long winded recipes are so much fun to read, but so hard to follow.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah. I can’t. The reason we’ve had such great success with Bigger Bolder Baking is because bold baking is about taking risks and it’s about being fearless. And I really try, and with my millions of fans all around the world, try and give people the confidence to bake anytime, anywhere.

Gemma Stafford: And in the book, it’s a collection of recipes where you can do that using simple ingredients. The majority of recipes are less than 10 steps. They’re really finely edited just to give you the exact information that you need, and anytime, anywhere baking really … We heard this from our audience.

Gemma Stafford: We have 5 million bold bakers all around the world, and we heard from them that they want to bake, but they’re students in a dorm. They want to make a cake for somebody, but they live in, maybe, an older facility, and they don’t have access to a kitchen, or they only have a microwave, and things like that. And we didn’t, I didn’t want that to restrict people from baking.

Gemma Stafford: So in the book, I broke the chapters down into different pieces of kitchen equipment that you would need, and tools. So there’s a whole section in my baking book where you do not need an oven to make frozen desserts, to make mousses, to make chills desserts, to make chocolate Tiffin cake, all of these sorts of things, and trifles you don’t need an oven for, and just really make it as simple for people as possible to make, to be able to bake no matter what their equipment or their circumstance.

Suzy Chase: Your bold baking journey started at Ballymaloe Cookery school. That is incredible. Tell us about that, and what skills did you learn there?

Gemma Stafford: I hold Ballymaloe very close to my heart. I had a really lovely time there. When I was young in the 80s, we used to watch, my mom and I used to watch Darina Allen on a Monday night on TV, and she was … This was a long, long time ago, where she was the only chef, really, on TV, and then she was Irish, and she ran this cooking school, and I was just fascinated by her.

Gemma Stafford: And my mom told me that when I was older, I could go to the cooking school. So after college, I studied professional cookery in college, and I was in my first job, and the opportunity came up to go to Ballymaloe Cooking School, and it’s really special.

Gemma Stafford: I don’t know if I can describe it well enough. It’s a really amazing experience. It’s such a special place. For people who don’t know, it’s a cooking school on kind of like, almost like now, a farm, because I know that they have a lot of their own animals and bees and and things like that. But they have … It’s a little cooking school down in East Cork in a place called Ballymaloe.

Gemma Stafford: I’m sorry, the school is called Ballymaloe, and run by a lady called Darina Allen, and her whole ethos is very, I would say, typical of a lot of Irish people, which is good ingredients in, and amazing out. And so the thing about Darina is that she does recipes from all around the world.

Gemma Stafford: It’s not, as people often say to me, meat and potatoes from Ireland. It’s a little bit of everything. And just to be there, to be at the school, and to be with students who come from all around the world to do her courses, it’s really incredible.

Suzy Chase: Did a Diane Keaton movie really inspire you to move to America?

Gemma Stafford: It did.

Suzy Chase: Which one?

Gemma Stafford: I know, it’s crazy. So, a lot of people have seen, or are big fans of us, baby boom in the late eighties, like ’87 or so. So I was … I would have been … We always get everything later. At that stage, we got everything like a year later than America did. So it was on TV in Ireland in maybe ’88 or something like that. So I was only a child.

Gemma Stafford: And I saw it, and for those of you who haven’t seen it, it is about, long story short, about a kind of high powered exact woman in New York. She has a really busy lifestyle, and she gets landed this baby, and she has to move out of the city.

Gemma Stafford: She buys a farm in Vermont, and she, her lifestyle totally changed, and she starts making applesauce and selling it in local shops in Vermont, and it becomes really big, and I just, I was fascinated by it. I just thought that this was the most amazing thing ever. That this is what I want to do. I wanted to move to Vermont and make applesauce.

Gemma Stafford: And you know, it always, it stuck with me. I must’ve been like six or seven when I saw it, but I made kind of a promise to myself then and there that when I was 25, I was going to move to the United States, and I was going to marry an American man, and I was going to be in America for the rest of my life.

Gemma Stafford: And yeah, it was. I was 25, actually, when I did end up moving here. But yeah, it always stuck in my head, and the thing about it is, I never told anybody, which was so funny. So when I was in my twenties later, and I decided to go to America, I think they were kind of surprised, but I always knew in the back of my head that this was part of the plan. I was going to do this.

Suzy Chase: It was your vision.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah.

Suzy Chase: Wow. So, for busy home cooks, you also have a few mug cake recipes in this cookbook. Describe these.

Gemma Stafford: So the mug cakes are some of my most popular on Bigger Bolder Baking, and they are really, they’re little tiny single serving, I shouldn’t say tiny, but they’re a small single serving cakes that … This is where kind of anytime, anywhere bacon comes in. We heard a lot from people who, like I said, don’t have kitchens, don’t have ovens, but still want to bake.

Gemma Stafford: And there’s a whole world of microwave recipes out there for cakes that I have in the book, and then savories that I have on my website for things like pizza, mac and cheese in a mug, and things like that that can all be made in the microwave.

Gemma Stafford: So in the book Bigger Bolder Baking, I shared three recipes of some of my most popular, and they’re an amazing … They’re really great recipes, because there are only a handful of ingredients. So even if your kitchen is bare, all it is is a little bit of raising agents, some flower, a little bit of oil. You might need an egg, but not even all of them need an egg.

Gemma Stafford: Most of it is just standard cupboard ingredients. And you can have a mug brownie, a funfetti cake in a mug, or even a donut in a mug, which is a really popular one. And they’re just a really amazing way for somebody to make a single serving treat fast with very little wash-up. And then you’re not left with cake or cookies or whatever it is. You got to just have exactly what you wanted, or what you needed.

Suzy Chase: I do love how you’ve included so many microwave recipes in this cookbook, because I feel like the microwave is a little passe right now. But it’s so convenient.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah. You know, the thing I explained, because I get asked this a lot. I’ve been a professional chef for many years now, and a lot of, when I first started doing microwave recipes, I talked to myself, “Should I be doing this? Because I’ve worked in [inaudible 00:09:41] restaurants now. Should I be making recipes in a microwave?”

Gemma Stafford: Because people question you. And the thing about it is, it’s not about the microwave. It’s about, it is, these recipes are another way for some people to feed themselves, to make something from scratch, what I like to call real food fast, not fast food, with just a few ingredients, with very little waste.

Gemma Stafford: And when we started making them, we were doing the cakes, we heard from a very much younger audience. Then when we kind of ventured into savory, and we started doing things like ramen in a mug and pizza, which was one of my favorites, pizza in a mug, and lots of different things like that, we heard from all around the world.

Gemma Stafford: And heard from truckers, we heard from people living in elderly facilities, people who had been widowed. I just got an email from a man in Australia yesterday, 87 years of age, who was asking me about … He just got the same microwave that I did, and he was asking me about the recipes so he’d be able to feed himself.

Gemma Stafford: So it’s much bigger than making food in a microwave. It’s giving the people independence and confidence to be able to create their own meals, and that satisfaction and pride that you take in that.

Suzy Chase: Gosh, that’s so smart. Good for you.

Gemma Stafford: Thanks.

Suzy Chase: You also included mug net. What’s that?

Gemma Stafford: Yes, that’s a donut in a mug. is a little kind of a cinnamony, kind of a cake with a little bit of jam in the middle, and eaten all together, tastes just like a donut sprinkled with some cinnamon sugar. It’s just a fun little take on a donut.

Suzy Chase: If I’m going to teach people to bake, why not online Guess who said that. Your YouTube channel has almost 2 million subscribers. Tell us about your channel, and how was your husband involved?

Gemma Stafford: My husband is the driving force behind us. So, we started Bigger Bolder Baking five, five and a half years ago, as a YouTube channel. Long story short, myself and my husband, I still worked in food. I worked, I had a catering business. My husband worked in tech. Sorry, he did marketing for a tech company, but he also had a lot of experience in the entertainment industry, because he’d worked for Lucasfilm and Pixar.

Gemma Stafford: And we got married, and we joined forces. We decided, how can we come work together to join both of what we’re passionate about, which is food and entertainment? And Kevin said that he wanted to do more of the production side of entertainment, because he always did the marketing side.

Gemma Stafford: So we came up, he said, “Why don’t we create a cooking show?” And you know, five and a half years ago, YouTube was very much a different playing field. There wasn’t a saturated … There wasn’t as many baking channels, and it was just a different ballgame. And you know, we quit our jobs in San Francisco.

Gemma Stafford: We left behind paychecks and healthcare, and we moved to a city that we didn’t know anybody, down to Santa Monica in LA, and we just started creating videos out of our kitchen. We went all in. We financed it. All of our time, all of our effort, we were working around the clock.

Gemma Stafford: And the thing about it is, we didn’t doubt ourselves. We knew that we were kind of crazy for doing it, but we never doubted ourselves. We knew that we were onto something good. And it took some time, and blood, sweat and tears, but it started to pay off really fast, and slowly but surely, we started to garner this audience of what we call, and what they call themselves, bold bakers.

Gemma Stafford: And within a few months, we had some videos go viral. Our subscribers just doubled. And from then on, we’ve just, in the last, sorry, five and a half years or so, we’ve gotten to 2 million subscribers on YouTube. And then with our Facebook and Instagram, and our website included, we’re around 5 million people all around the world.

Suzy Chase: What’s the most popular recipe on your channel?

Gemma Stafford: Most popular recipe, I would … So there’s two that are kind of tied. The mug cakes are some of my most popular, it’s kind of what I’m known for. And then also, what’s actually, I had to include this in the book, is my no machine ice cream. It’s just a few ingredients, cream, condensed milk, and some vanilla extract.

Gemma Stafford: And you can make a base of kind of a vanilla ice cream. But then you can add any flavor you want. And I actually think, Suzy, you tried one of the ice creams.

Suzy Chase: Yes.

Gemma Stafford: And so it’s just a really fun recipe. But that was another one that resonated with our audience, going back to it’s not about the microwave, it’s not about the utensil. It’s the fact that you were able to make something without the traditional methods.

Gemma Stafford: So the ice cream is made whisking together, you can do it by hand, or you can do it with a stand mixer, but you don’t need an ice cream machine to make ice cream. And that video was just huge for us. So we had to include that ice cream and some different flavors in the book.

Suzy Chase: Yeah, I made your raspberry swirl cheesecake ice cream on page 239.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah, that’s one. I love cheesecake ice cream.

Suzy Chase: Ice cream has always been so intimidating for me.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah. And because you have to make a custard base, and you have to, there’s different steps, and it just, it can be laborious. And there’s a chance that you curdle your custard, and then what do you do? But this is, for want of a better word, it’s foolproof. And it’s really, it’s awesome, because also, we don’t, we have a large audience.

Gemma Stafford: It’s kind of funny, but we have a large audience who are, who don’t eat eggs, for dietary reasons, for religious reasons. So this ice cream doesn’t include any eggs. It’s only cream and condensed milk. And so it really ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of our fans. So that and the mug cakes are some of my most popular recipes with tens of millions of views on YouTube.

Suzy Chase: For Christmas, are you going to be doing your 12 full days of cookies again?

Gemma Stafford: I am.

Suzy Chase: Oh, yay.

Gemma Stafford: Yeah, we’re doubling down on cookies this year. I started making them in August.

Suzy Chase: Oh, my gosh.

Gemma Stafford: So we’re planning. We’re getting kind of our team, we have a team now. At the beginning, it was just Kevin and I, my husband. And then, a few years in, we were able to start building out a team, and so our team are working on those campaigns. So 12 days of Christmas, and all the things around holiday baking.

Gemma Stafford: We’re also going to do a holiday baking hotline where I go live. It might be on … One time we did a hotline on the website, on biggerbolderbaking.com, where I was, what do you call it? I popped up and I answered people’s questions live, the day of Thanksgiving.

Gemma Stafford: And then we also use an app called [inaudible 00:16:59], where … It’s like a voice mailing app where people can leave me a voicemail, and then I answer them back straight away. And it’s just a really fun way to do it. And the holidays can be, it can be challenging. And you face, you come across things in the kitchen that you didn’t know were going to happen and you need help fast. So we also do that and that’s a lot of fun.

Suzy Chase: So I also made your recipe for 10 minute vanilla refrigerator cookies on page 44. Can you describe these?

Gemma Stafford: Those cookies are, they’re one of the first cookies I remember making, and they’re really simple, because they’re a plain vanilla cookie. It’s a little bit crisp, it’s also a little bit soft. But it’s a recipe that, since the book has come out, I’m just, I know what recipes mean to me.

Gemma Stafford: They have certain nostalgia to me, but I keep on getting photos on social media of these cookies, and it just, I don’t know what it is about them, but they really resonated with people. But they’re just a plain little cookie. And the best thing about it is, is you keep the dough in the refrigerator, in a log, and then you can just slice it whenever you want to bake some off.

Gemma Stafford: And it also is kind of a good blank canvas. If you wanted to add in chocolate chips, orange rind, different flavors, some knots, it really is versatile, and you can add anything you want to it.

Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. Aside from this cookbook, what is your all time favorite cookbook and why?

Gemma Stafford: Oh my gosh, that’s a really good question. I’m going to have to say there’s not a lot. I have a huge collection of cookbooks, as I’m sure you do as well, Suzy, and I treasure them. But there’s very few that I’ve read kind of front to back, and the one that my mom …

Gemma Stafford: My mom used to get me cooking books or cookery books for Christmas, and one year, when I was a student in my teens, I was probably 17 or something, she got me the Ballymaloe Cookery School three months course in a book, because Darina’s course at Ballymaloe, her longest one is three months, and they compiled what you learn in that course into one big, thick book.

Gemma Stafford: And I went through that book like nobody’s business. I tried recipes, everything from salads to dressings, to cookies, to cakes, to breads. I went through it page to page, and I still use it as kind of my go to Bible of today. I still go to it for my Asian pork salad, and she has a Tennessean citrus cake, and it’s just, it has a little bit of everything. And I just absolutely adore it, and it brings me back to that time of Ballymaloe as well.

Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Gemma Stafford: So you can find me on my website, biggerbolderbaking.com, and then on Facebook and Instagram, it’s Bigger Bolder Baking.

Suzy Chase: Wonderful. Thanks, Gemma, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.

Gemma Stafford: Thank you, Suzy. It was lovely to talk to you.

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