The Cake Crusader
Inga McCarthy brings a world of experience to her Gloucester bakery, Cake Ann
You may be one of the Cake Ann devoted who journey weekly to the very ordinary Gloucester strip mall for an extraordinary kouign amann, the Breton pastry that looks like a croissant folded into a muffin tin, and tastes like a sweet puff pastry bomb, but even the devoted may not know whence comes that signature Cake Ann style: classic French pastry, local sourcing, and a splash of whimsy. Cake Ann hatched at the Rockport Farmers Market five years ago, but its longer provenance crosses the equator and zig-zags across the northern hemisphere.
Even the devoted may not know that owner/baker Inga McCarthy, 49, was born in Iowa and grew up in Brazil.
“I grew up in a small Brazilian town, Santa Cruz do Sol,” McCarthy said over coffee at one of the cafe tables in the bakery. “It was very German and Italian. I looked like a lot of people.” McCarthy’s Iowan father worked for Pioneer Seed Company. Her mother, who is German, had been traveling with a version of the German Peace Corps when she met McCarthy’s father.
Desserts were part of the family culture. “My mom always baked a lot. Dessert has always been a part of our lunch, which was the main meal. There was always at least fruit salad, tapioca, an apple cake — some dessert-y type thing.”
They still speak Brazilian dessert at Cake Ann: on a counter flush with filled cookie jars -— molasses, chocolate chip, peanut butter — stands one jar filled with the Brazilian chocolate truffle, bragadeiro. McCarthy also makes a Brazilian coconut custard called a quindim.
“It’s soooo yummy. Egg yolks, sugar, and fresh coconut. It separates into three layers and you steam it. Since we have so many egg yolks — because we do a Swiss Meringue Buttercream for our cakes and cupcakes — I am always looking for a use for egg yolks.”
After high school McCarthy traveled to London to strengthen her language skills.
“This is a really rich food community. You can be super creative and super funky, or you can have red velvet,” says Cake Ann owner Inga McCarthy.
“I left Brazil, and did the international baccalaureate in England. I knew I wanted to go to college in the US, and my college advisor’s sister went to the University of Massachusetts. Of course the band Boston was very popular at the time,” McCarthy said with underplayed humor, broadcast only by an eye twinkle and deepened dimple.
At UMass, McCarthy studied Portuguese and Brazilian Literature. She did creative writing in Portuguese, basically creating her own curriculum, just two classes short of a masters degree. But she also baked a friend’s wedding cake. And she picked up a job baking at the Amherst institution, Black Sheep Deli and Bakery. Brazilian culture and that family dessert tradition had begun to steer the young woman.
McCarthy decided she was not going to manage a bookstore and she was not going to work for a publisher. Instead, she graduated from UMass, and signed up to attend the Connecticut Culinary Institute for baking and pastry.
WIth a stop in Danvers to work at Cakes for Occasions, McCarthy graduated to Boston, to Lydia Shire’s legendary restaurant Biba. There, McCarthy worked under Executive Chef Susan Regis. While McCarthy baked peach and cherry galettes, Regis piled on the James Beard awards, three years in a row “Best Chef Northeast.”
McCarthy was baking and creating desserts in one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country, the top of the croquembouche, but ultimately, job satisfaction proved lesser than the slavish lifestyle. Not enough money, no time off.
“I was working from 4am until 2pm” McCarthy said. “The only thing to do would be to drink with the lunch people. I wanted to have a family, and I didn’t see any way to have a family and work those hours. Obviously there is a way, but I couldn’t see through it.”
Macarons
Married at this point, McCarthy packed up those hard-earned, five-star pastry skills, and went off to find a more family friendly career. For the next fifteen years McCarthy sold educational software.
“I had weekends, I had two weeks vacation, which was good because I was still going home to Brazil every year.” McCarthy says she also felt a little disappointed in herself, as if she could have done better, that maybe she should have stuck it out. But then the children came — Prescott and Eben — fifteen months apart.
In fact, McCarthy may have changed careers, but no one told her inner baker.
“My job was taking me to Alaska and the Pacific Northwest once a month. I ate a lot. I did a lot of research in Portland and Alaska. They do more with local foods there. The food is more relaxed than in New York. I liked that slightly loosey-goosey food culture, super heavy on pop-ups, and good coffee.”
The McCarthys were living in Bolton, Mass., in those years, but they were coming to Cape Ann every summer. Prescott and Eben were getting older.
Cake Ann’s blueberry turnovers
“I was beginning to think about cooking again, but I didn’t think that Bolton had the population to support a bakery.” It took four years, but eventually the McCarthys sold their house and moved to Rockport. That summer was McCarthy’s comeback after the long baking sabbatical. The Rockport Farmers Market became her focus group, her “test pancake.” Was there a market for a baker here? Was there a market for her style of classic, traditional, locally sourced and sometimes free-wheeling pastry?
Yes.
Like warm caramel over ice cream, word poured through the farmers market — get the impossible-to-spell pastry before 9:30 am or live without, because by 9:45, other people would be licking the last kouign amann crumbs off their fingers.
Today, people know Cake Ann for kouign amann, but also for McCarthy’s ability to take hot milk sponge cake, ganache, and Swiss meringue buttercream, and create exactly the very adult level of not-too-sweet but still extravagant cake you didn’t know you always wanted. She does the same thing with cupcakes, and now baker Shauna Joyal is countering McCarthy’s skill and whimsy in the bakery with a line of the traditional filled French cookie, macarons. There may be a “green tea and honey” macaron, inspired by a local beekeeper’s small batch delivery one day, and in-season there are definitely football shaped “game day macarons” filled with chocolate ganache.
“This is a really rich food community. You can be super creative and super funky, or you can have red velvet.”
Baker Shauna Joyal brings additional experience to Cake Ann — along with her skill and a little whimsy.
McCarthy sources carrots, squash and pumpkin from Alprilla Farms in Essex. When the rosa rugosa is blooming she picks petals for a rose petal buttercream. When a local forager drops in the next day’s menu might include veggie galettes with goat cheese and foraged mushrooms. Trupiano’s chicken sausage, impossible to find on its own anymore, fills the tender Cake Ann meat pies.
This is all why — to completely appreciate the Cake Ann experience — it’s important to know from whence it comes: Brazil, Amherst, Biba, Portland. Pear and local elderberry galettes share counter space beside cupcakes sometimes loaded with Captain Crunch, chips, pretzels, potato chips, and topped with chocolate ganache. (Those are Super Bowl and Fathers Day cupcakes.)
“The best thing about owning a bakery,” McCarthy says, “is that ‘everyone has to eat but no one has to eat dessert,’ so you get to be a part of people’s lives in a really interesting way. They can come to you for comfort, or celebration, or just because. We have people who come in every other day. It’s satisfying in a way that isn’t food for nutrition but is food for something else. And that part of it is really satisfying.”
Given McCarthy’s journey this all seems more destiny than dream.
“It’s too much work to be a dream! No dream would be this hard. No dream would hurt this much. No dream would make you get out of bed on a Sunday at 5 am. But I know if I hadn’t done it I would always regret it. It would be a very, very big regret.”
Trupiano’s chicken sausage, impossible to find on its own anymore, fills the tender Cake Ann meat pies.
A Note on Buttercream
What is Swiss Meringue Buttercream?
Let’s start with what it’s not: shortening and confectioners sugar. Neither ingredient appear ever in a Swiss Meringue Buttercream.
Your childhood birthday cake probably arrived plastered in American Buttercream: 4 cups of confectioners sugar, 2 sticks butter, some flavoring and coloring.
The cake your mother picked up at the grocery store when she had no time probably arrived sealed in a frosting made by beating together shortening and confectioners sugar. This compound, the most valued weapon in a grocery bakers’ armory, is both the mortar that holds everything together and the roses that keep it pretty.
Both versions might be responsible for creating generations of frosting-scrapers, the people who leave dunes of frosting beside a few cake crumbs on an empty plate at the birthday party. Alternatively, these recipes may also be responsible for creating a generation of people intolerant of anything but extreme sweetness, the people who ask for a slice with a rose.
Swiss Meringue Buttercream, frosting for grownups, can be a challenge to those weaned on the above.
Pour a simple syrup (made with granulated sugar and water) over beaten egg whites, and then add tablespoons of butter one at a time, beating all along, and then beat for at least twenty minutes. That’s how you make Swiss Meringue Buttercream, described in Cake Ann as “creamy and dreamy.” It’s meringue fattened with butter, its molecules then transformed by beaters and air into celestial matter. Butter rules the sugar here, not the other way around. It’s a luscious and seductive sensation of soft, whipped, slightly sweetened butter - the Brahms of cake frosting.
There are other styles of meringue buttercreams, namely Italian and French. The Italian uses a warm sugar syrup and the French uses egg yolks instead of whites. The latter is often a little yellow and difficult to work with. All European meringue buttercreams use butter and granulated sugar. Only the American versions use confectioners sugar and sometimes shortening. The American version can be a little gritty and sweeter than the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
McCarthy says the most important ingredient is temperature. For the highest cake eating experience, a slice of cake must be served at room temperature. That’s the temperature at which a Swiss Meringue Buttercream and hot milk cake rise to their full Proustian power, becoming the happiest cake eating memories.
Matt Kalinowski is an Ipswich-based photographer whose work has been featured in the Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Magazine, and Yankee.
▶︎ Cake Ann, 63 Rogers Street, Gloucester. (978) 865 4100
