Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Earlier this week, I got to be in persons with hundreds of you at the New York Public Library, where I spoke with Author Erik Larsen. His book, The Demon of Unrest, was our September Get Lit with All Of It Book Club pick. We'll hear excerpts of that conversation on tomorrow's show, along with songs from Sons of Town Hall.

Now it is time to start reading our October book. Our pick is Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu. It's about a journalist searching for answers about his father's death and mysterious past. New Yorkers can borrow an eBook from the New York Public Library, and then on October 30th at 6:00 PM, join us to talk about it in person. For details, head to wnyc.org/getlit. That's wnyc.org/getlit. Happy reading, and I will see you on the 30th. That's in the future. Now let's get this hour started with this week's Food For Thought conversation.

It's time for another Food For Thought Thursday. With the start of the school year, we wanted to focus on recipes that are really geared toward afternoon snacking, treats like blondies or maybe cakes, maybe even that coming home from school to an extra sweet treat. Let's get into a new cookbook from Sarah Kieffer. It's called 100 Afternoon Sweets: With Snacking Cakes, Brownies, Blondies, and More. Sarah is a baker and the founder of the Vanilla Bean Blog, and she joins us now to share her expertise.

Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Kieffer: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, what are your favorite go-to baked goods to add a little sweetness to your afternoon? What pastries go best with your afternoon tea? What snacky recipes have you found your kid loving when they get home from school? 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Or maybe you just have a baking question for Sarah Kieffer, our number is 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. What kinds of scenarios are in your head when you start thinking about a real, an afternoon suite?

Sarah Kieffer: Obviously cookies are the first thing, and that's what I baked in high school in the afternoons. Part of why I wrote this book, was just a tribute to those times of coming home from school and needing something comforting and sweet. Also bars and snack cakes and all those kinds of goodies are also things I love to indulge in.

Alison Stewart: These are for not every day, we should say, before somebody calls us and tells us that. This is for that little extra treat, or maybe you're bringing a friend home after school, or something like that.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes, exactly. My kids bring friends home a lot after school. They're both in high school now. I try to have cookie dough in the freezer ready to bake off if I need it, and have treats just ready to feed everybody.

Alison Stewart: I want folks to hear a little bit about how you got into baking. You say you started around 9th grade, and that you 'learned' about it a lot on your own, figuring it out by failing or falling forward. What does falling forward look like to you?

Sarah Kieffer: It's the story of my life. I have learned that I learn best when I mess something up first. That was part of it. My mom hated baking, so I didn't have someone teaching me how to do it.

Alison Stewart: She hated it?

Sarah Kieffer: Oh, yes, she still does. She likes that I bring her things to eat, but she does not want any part of it. She hated the kitchen altogether, hated cooking, hated baking. I got in my head in 9th grade that I wanted to make cookies. Part of it, honestly, was to eat cookie dough after school because it's delicious. I started making cookies, and we had a ton of old church cookbooks, and I just started going through them and baking every chocolate chip cookie recipe in there until I found something I liked.

Alison Stewart: Those old cookbooks are really interesting when you find them at yard sales.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes. I love them. I always pick them up, and there's so many-- You see where everything stemmed from, and then also there's just some crazy stuff in there.

Alison Stewart: What's the funniest thing you've ever seen in one of those picked up cookbooks?

Sarah Kieffer: One was make a man cry cookies. I have it saved on my phone. It'll take forever to find it. It was just all this ridiculous stuff in there. There was one with raisin and ketchup, cookies with raisins and ketchup. That seemed too far out there for me.

Alison Stewart: Oh, we got a couple of texts already. "Whenever I get home from school, I always go for a corn muffin with butter and grape jam. The best part is the jam is homemade."

Sarah Kieffer: Oh, that sounds amazing.

Alison Stewart: Somebody else texted in, actually tweeted in, "A warm slice of banana bread."

Sarah Kieffer: I love banana bread.

Alison Stewart: Actually, banana bread gets me onto our next subject, which is about the kitchen gods.

Sarah Kieffer: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell folks your rule about the kitchen gods.

Sarah Kieffer: Obviously, I hold all myth with a grain of salt, but I do believe in the kitchen gods because every time my ego gets a little ahead of me, they like to always reign it back in and make sure I remember that, my place in the kitchen. The story that I share in my cookbook is I had made banana bread on a daily basis at a coffee shop I worked at and just had the recipe memorized, went through the motions, and they didn't turn out. My boss, Larry, had just said, "The kitchen gods are always watching. When you think that you know something too well, they're going to put you in your place."

That's just always stuck with me, just to remember to just make sure I am paying attention when I make something, even if I've made it a hundred times, and to just leave my ego at the back door.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sarah Kieffer. She's a baker, the founder of the Vanilla Bean Blog and cookbook author. The book, 100 Afternoon Sweets: With Snacking Cakes, Brownies, Blondies, and More. What are your favorite go-to baked goods to add a little sweetness to your afternoon. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. Or if you have any general baking questions for our guest, baker and cookbook author, Sarah Kieffer, we'll see if we can get you some answers. 212-433-9692. 212-433. It is our Food For Thought Thursdays.

A lot of your recipes use a stand mixer.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Any tips or tricks on making the most of a hand mixer or a manual mixer, because a lot of people in New York City, they don't have the room for a stand mixer.

Sarah Kieffer: Sure, yes. I get that. I grew up using just the kitchen-aid beaters, which do work, especially for things like cookies and bars and cake. You can substitute that. It's just going take a little bit longer. You want to make sure that your butter and sugar are really creamed together. The stand mixer will do all of that a little faster, and it's just a little more hands off. You can do that with a regular rotary mixer.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, I saw you on a video of yours where you put salt in with your butter and sugar. Is that correct?

Sarah Kieffer: Yes. I started adding it early a couple of years ago because I just felt like it gets incorporated a little better than when you just whisk it in with the flour and baking soda and then dump it in. It gives it more time to just really get in there. I do that. Another trick that I like is sprinkling the flaky salt on before you put the cookies in the oven because it gives it a chance to melt on top and it's not such a bite of salt, but it's just a more subtle, salty flavor.

Alison Stewart: You point out that kitchens are different, from the unique character of each oven, to the ambient temperature, to even the humidity in the room. How can folks get to know their cooking environments better to understand how they might need to adjust their recipes?

Sarah Kieffer: A lot of it is just practice, honestly. I live in Minnesota, so our weather extremes are crazy. It's -20 in the winter, and it gets really hot and humid in the summer. I have to constantly adjust for running the air conditioner, running a heater. Heater has dry heat, so I have to make sure my flour is contained in plastic containers and in a cool space. There's just all kinds of little things that I've just learned after 20 years of doing this, but it's mostly just practice and learning from mistakes, and just trying, trying, trying again.

The biggest thing is the oven. Everyone's oven is so different. Getting to really know your oven, it's hot spots. If it's running too hot or too cool, that will really help your baking.

Alison Stewart: What are some underappreciated kitchen tools that will help people work through your recipes?

Sarah Kieffer: That's a good question. I love a bench scraper. I use it all the time for just lifting up chopped chocolate or other ingredients and putting them in a really good spatula. Williams-Sonoma has some, it's all plastic. It's a really big one, and the whole thing's plastic, and it doesn't come apart. Because a lot of times the spatulas that are hooked onto the wood, they get crap in them, and I hate that. This one, you can just throw in the dishwasher, and it's lasted me 10 years. I've had it forever. I trade them out, but they go forever. I look for one that's all plastic and really durable.

Alison Stewart: For folks who want to work their way through this cookbook, what staples would you recommend people always have on hand?

Sarah Kieffer: Butter, and eggs, and flour, and sugar. It's mostly all the basic ingredients. You want to make sure you have some chocolate, too. I use a lot of chocolate.

Alison Stewart: People, if they're going through this cookbook and they're thinking like, "Oh, should I substitute this? Should I modify that?" How would you encourage folks to think about substitutions, or modifications, or beginning to push a recipe outside of its comfort zone?

Sarah Kieffer: I think making something once or twice as written so you know it and know how it turns out. Make sure it turned out the same both times. Then if you want to start playing, you want to start playing slowly. If you feel like this is too sweet, well, decrease the sugar, but just by a little bit, because sugar has a lot of moisture and its texture, and so if you just cut out a bunch of it, it's going to change how your product turns out. Just start. I would start just a couple of tablespoons, but a fourth of a cup, I wouldn't go more than that. Then if it turned out great, still feels too sweet, well, then try a little bit more. Each time just tweak it a little bit till you get things where you want them.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Justina, who's calling in from Manhattan. Hi, Justina. Thank you so much for calling WNYC.

Justina: Hi, ladies. You just answered my question, really? Because I am calling about the amount of sugar. I found a lot of goodies here in America. I'm polish. Especially the cream. The frosting is extremely, extremely sweet. Also in cakes, also in cookies, I find everything very, very sweet. Like you suggested, I cut down the amount of sugar usually. I wonder how far can I go before ruining the texture of the cake or the cookie.

Alison Stewart: What do you think?

Sarah Kieffer: What I just said, I would say you don't want to do too much, and it depends on what it is, too. A cake, if you just cut out half the sugar, it's going to be dry. You want to just do a little bit at a time. Also salt does help balance sugar, so you can try adding a little more salt. Obviously, you don't want to go crazy with the salt, but adding a pinch or two more and just taking that up can also help balance sweetness.

Alison Stewart: Here's a good question we got via text. "I find my banana bread becomes hard when I prepare it using my stand mixer. Not sure how to adjust the mixing so as not to over beat the dough."

Sarah Kieffer: I would, if as hard as dry hard or just cold hard, I'm not sure, but I--

Alison Stewart: I think it sounds like dry hard.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes. I would say stop mixing after you get all the wet ingredients in and then just do the flour by hand. A lot of times I'll do that with something that's more delicate. You can get all the hard work done in your mixer, and then when you add the flour, just slowly stir that in so you don't over mix it.

Alison Stewart: When you use milk in recipes, you usually use whole milk. Any advice for people who are dairy free, have dietary restrictions?

Sarah Kieffer: I haven't dabbled a lot in changing that out, but coconut milk is a good, really, creamy milk. That's a good substitution, but it does taste like coconut. I've also just started using cashew milk in my coffee, and it does have a distinct flavor, but it's a little more subtle than the coconut, and it is really rich and creamy.

Alison Stewart: Sarah Kieffer is my guest. She is the founder of the Vanilla Bean Blog. She's written a book called 100 Afternoon Sweets. We want to hear from you. What are your favorite go-to baked goods to add a little sweetness to your afternoon? Maybe your favorite pastry to go with your afternoon tea? Or maybe you have a general baking question for our guest, baker and cookbook author, Sarah Kieffer. Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. After the break, we'll talk recipes.

You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're talking about the new cookbook, 100 Afternoon Sweets from baker and founder of the Vanilla Bean Blog, Sarah Kieffer. It's part of our Food For Thoughts.

Let me get your opinion about this. Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: The tradition is to eat apples and honey. Can you share one of your apple-based recipes that you think would make a nice holiday treat?

Sarah Kieffer: I do have a recipe for apple caramel pie, and you can either use homemade caramel or store-bought in it. You could use a honey-based caramel and use that for the dessert. I think that would be really delicious.

Alison Stewart: How do you make that?

Sarah Kieffer: There's corn syrup, usually in caramel, so you can replace some of it with honey. You could do that in the recipe and then use that in the pie.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Steve from Manhattan. Hi, Steve. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Steve: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi. You're on the air.

Steve: Hi. Is it my turn to--

Alison Stewart: It is your turn. Why don't you tell us what you-- Yes, go for it.

Steve: Okay. I'm a little bit off topic. I'm not much of a baker, but I have this situation where I'm living on the Upper West Side, where there are two places that sell, there's variations of something really fantastic, which is something called a breakfast bar or a cranberry oatmeal bar. Those are the two ingredients, and it's just fantastic. It's so popular around here that by the time I get to one of these places in the morning, they're inevitably sold out. I beg him, please, to have more in stock. That's what I have to say.

Alison Stewart: Your opinion. Thank you so much for calling. By the way, do you have any suggestions so in case Steve might want to try making them on his own?

Sarah Kieffer: I do have in my new book, it's a blueberry bar. That would be great. It's based on the breakfast bars, so you could play around with using cranberries instead.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Margie. Hi, Margie. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Margie: Hi, and hi, Sarah. I'm a big fan.

Sarah Kieffer: Oh, hi. Nice tom meet you.

Margie: Nice to meet you, too, telephonically. I'm calling to ask, it seems to me it feels suddenly, this obsession with baking with olive oil instead of with butter. Since I clearly object to this, how do you turn a measurement for olive oil back into butter? How can you substitute butter for olive oil?

Alison Stewart: Good question.

Sarah Kieffer: I'm not sure. The obsession, I'm guessing it has to do with trying to be a more healthy baker. Turning it back into butter can be tricky, especially if the recipe is written for olive oil, because it's just a liquid. Butter does turn to liquid, but it does work differently in a recipe. I would suggest doing half olive oil and half butter, and seeing how that turns out. If it is in the right direction, then you could try all the butter. If it's just a disaster, even with half butter, half olive oil, then probably it's not going to work.

Alison Stewart: You have a recipe in your book, the strawberry balsamic shortcake ice cream bars.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That sounds very interesting. That's a lot of words. Thinking about balsamic ice cream bars, how do those flavors go together?

Sarah Kieffer: Strawberry and balsamic, I feel like, is a pretty common pairing in dessert, just trying to throw in some of that acidic bitterness from the vinegar and then sweet with the strawberry. I use a no-churn ice cream in this book, which the base is sweetened condensed milk and heavy cream. It's really sweet. I find if I add more acidity to it, it really helps balance that and make it not overly sweet. I also have a recipe for coffee, no-churn ice cream that I love that really balances that sweetness from the sweetened condensed milk.

Alison Stewart: This is interesting. We got a real basic question. "For people who are intimidated by baking, how would you convince them to give it a try?"

Sarah Kieffer: It's so fun, so I hope that you try. It can be intimidating. I would say start with something simple, like cookies. Cookies are a great place to start. There's a lot of recipes for cookies that don't even need a mixer. You can melt butter and just start there. Go slow. If it doesn't work the first time, that's okay. Just try again till you get it.

Alison Stewart: Got a text here. It says, "My cookies always spread out in the oven. Any tips on stopping this from happening?"

Sarah Kieffer: Sometimes that can be there's not enough flour or there's too much butter. If you're committed to this recipe, you might want to start adding maybe a tablespoon of flour, see if that helps. A lot of flours have different protein content, and if you're not weighing your ingredients, too, sometimes that can make them measure off. I would start by maybe adding a little bit more flour, or else looking for a new recipe that the picture matches up to what you think you want your cookie to look like.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Marie from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Hi, Marie. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Marie: Hi. Thanks for having me. I just had a question. I was looking, you were talking earlier about old cookbooks recipes, and I was looking for a chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe. The one I found said to make it chewy, to use half oil and half shortening instead of butter, which I usually use. I tried it and it did not work. I'm just wondering if you can please comment on the differences between butter, shortening, and oil in baking cookies specifically.

Sarah Kieffer: Sure. Shortening, a lot of recipes used that, especially in the '70s and '80s. Shortening helps the cookies not to spread, and it will make them a little more chewy. Also, brown sugar helps. Just on the chewy note, adding more brown sugar than granulated sugar can help make a chewy cookie. You might want to play around with that. Shortening helps hold the cookie together. Butter is going to make it spread a little bit more and just have more flavor.

I haven't done a lot of baking with oil in cookies, like olive oil or canola oil. That feels like a very different beast. I'm not sure how to comment on that in cookie related dough.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the cookbook, 100 Afternoon Sweets, with the baker and the founder of the Vanilla Bean Blog, Sarah Kieffer. I've got it open to Page 230. It says giant pop tart.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Which the name alone made me laugh. Tell me a little bit about the giant pop tart.

Sarah Kieffer: All growing up, I really wanted to eat pop tarts for breakfast, and my mom never let me. This is me being able to do that now as an adult, but instead of buying the box, I have made them with puff pastry, which is flaky and delicious. Then there's a cream cheese filling inside and a little bit of jam. Then when you eat them, when they're just cooled and a little warm with icing, they are delicious.

Alison Stewart: In the first section of your book, it's got a quote from Thoreau. It says, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." This starts your chapter on one bowl bakes.

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why do you like a good one bowl bake?

Sarah Kieffer: They are so simple, and there's less to clean up. Sometimes you just want to whip something up quick. I wanted to have a chapter where people didn't feel overwhelmed and knew they could just go into their kitchen, grab a bowl. Obviously for this, it's thinking that you're going to put the bowl on the scale and throw stuff in. If you don't have a scale, you might have to use measuring cups to throw stuff in. There are some dishes, but this way you are getting stuff in and it's just easy. Pop it in the oven and you can have something very quick in the afternoon.

Alison Stewart: I was taken by the classics, the classic birthday cake. How does your recipe aim to keep it classic?

Sarah Kieffer: I wanted the traditional yellow cake with fudge chocolate icing. That's what I set out to do. I tried a lot of cakes. My recipe has a little bit of almond flour in it, which really helps keep the crumb tender over a couple of days. It's just rich and has a buttery flavor, and it's so delicious in there. Then paired with the fudge buttercream, it just felt so nostalgic.

Alison Stewart: How about some no-bake recipes?

Sarah Kieffer: A lot of them are ice cream based. Again, with the no-churn ice cream, I do have some that aren't, like peanut butter bars, and there's some s'mores bars in there that set with a marshmallow filling. Our summers get really hot here, and there's times you just don't want to turn on the oven. It's nice to have some things you can whip up for that.

Alison Stewart: We got a question that says, "How about using applesauce as a substitute for butter?"

Sarah Kieffer: I honestly haven't tried it. I know people do try to do that. It doesn't always swap out well. If you want to play around with more healthy baking, sometimes it's just trial and error to see if it works, but I honestly haven't tried doing that.

Alison Stewart: You have a recipe in here about your cheater croissant dough?

Sarah Kieffer: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Explain that to me.

Sarah Kieffer: Sure. I wanted a recipe that, obviously, croissant dough, no matter what, is going to be some work. This isn't like you can make it in four minutes. It's always very intimidating to make croissant dough. I had read a quote by Thomas Keller where he basically says you can never master croissant dough completely. Every time you attempt it, it's new. Here is this man who must have made thousands of croissants, and he's saying, "A home baker just can't master this. Even I can't." I just wanted something that was more forgiving.

Mandy Lee has this beautiful cookbook called The Art of Escapism Cooking. She has this mochi bread dough that she just spread butter on and fold and laminated it versus the big butter block that croissant dough usually has. I took that idea and used my croissant dough and folded it up, and it turned out beautifully. It's not a perfect croissant that you would find in a French bakery, but it is flaky and buttery, and it bakes up beautifully, and I love it so much.

Alison Stewart: Your fifth chapter is about feeding large groups when you're entertaining or going to a potluck. Do you have a favorite in this group?

Sarah Kieffer: Yes. The coffee blonde brownies are a favorite of mine. I've been making these for 25 years. They have gone to every event with me, and I always am craving them.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is 100 Afternoon Sweets: With Snacking Cakes, Brownies, and Blondies, and More. My guest has been Sarah Kieffer. Sarah, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you taking calls and answering questions.

Sarah Kieffer: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Thanks to everybody who texted and called in.