I called Naomi
Robinson on a Friday afternoon several weeks ago and caught her in the middle
of baking a pumpkin cake—how apropos for a baking blogger.
Robinson,
38, is the talent behind
Bakers Royale.
Based in Ladera Ranch, she created the three-year-old baking blog for fun in
February 2010. It has since exploded. With 25,774 Facebook likes; 9,568 Twitter
followers; 3,298 followers on Instagram and her food-porn photography floating
all over Tumblr,
Bakers Royale is
every food blogger’s dream.
“It’s
stuff people are familiar with,” Robinson said when I asked why she thought her
blog has become so popular. “I try to use ingredients that are easily sourced.
I don’t use any special equipment that would be hard for the home baker to
either source or buy or might be too expensive—I try to avoid those things.”
Growing
up in Fullerton, California, Robinson was raised in a Vietnamese family that
did not do too much baking.
“[Baking
is] just something that I picked up later on—I think in my twenties,” said
Robinson. “I just like food, and baking was one of those things that, you know,
I can resonate to because it’s very methodical and measured.”
Another
thing Robinson just picked up? Photography.
“I’ve always really enjoyed photography. But
I never started really getting into it until I started photographing for the
blog,” Robinson said.
A self-taught photographer, she told me she
went from using a point-and-shoot camera in her first year of blogging to a
single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. From there, Robinson began buying various
camera lenses and taking on freelance photography jobs. Now, some of her posts
include food photography tips. One
post features a tutorial on how to create
backdrops to display baked goods to their best advantage, while
another links
to sites where her readers can find props similar to those Robinson uses in her
own food photography. Indeed,
Bakers
Royale is a highly visual blog. Each post consists of several large,
intensely vibrant photos sandwiched between a few lines of type.
“Because [blogging is] a visual medium,
people aren’t smelling it, they’re not tasting it,” said Robinson. “So the
first thing they’re going to do is—if it looks good—it’s, you know, going to
sell the food. And I don’t mean it has to be a technically sound photo, it
just—you have to make it look appetizing.”
And this she definitely does. Robinson even
managed to capture appetizing images of a cake that she purposely smashed. Her
coconut mango cake, posted on
Bakers
Royale in March of this year, had “assembly” issues, so the first picture
readers see in this post is of a lightly frosted, eight-layer cake toppled and
cracked against a slate-colored background amidst a heap of strewn flowers.
Although her post refers to the presentation as “unorthodox” and “messy,”
Robinson also calls it “an artistic choice” and writes that it still tastes
“pretty fantastic.”
Of all the posts Robinson has created for Bakers Royale (she told me there are
over 380) this coconut mango cake is her favorite. She liked each component of
the recipe, from the coconut sponge cake to the mango curd, despite the fact
that she was unable to get it to look the way she wanted. Robinson’s decision
to photograph the cake anyway is, I believe, what makes her blog unique.
The
“About” section of
Bakers Royale proclaims that baking is about having fun and
learning from failure. Although there are definite rules in baking, throwing
out such conventions allows you to find creativity.
“Because I don’t have any formal training in
baking, that really is my philosophy,” said Robinson. “…Of course there are
certain principles you have to know to make a successful recipe, but you learn
just as much from failures as successes. So for me it really is all about
having fun, and even if you make mistakes—I’ve
made mistakes. And then if it doesn’t look pretty, crumble up your cake and
turn it into a trifle or something!”
Because Robinson has a family and full-time
job, and still manages to update Bakers Royale
three to four times a week, I asked her about her blogging process. She
explained that she spends Thursday and Friday evenings baking and the weekends
staging and shooting the pictures for each post. And for the last year, she has
been receiving help from her husband, Matt, on the business end of running the
blog. Robinson monetizes her blog, and although she would not disclose exactly
how lucrative Bakers Royale is, she
did tell me that her husband executes the advertisement networking and business
prospecting.
“If
you want to have a blog where it’s just, you know, kind of a journal of sorts—a
blog journal—you probably don’t really care about…working with brands, having
an ad network. I do,” Robinson said. “I monetize the blog and I enjoy it. So
there are companies that I—we will go after, or they will come after us to work
with them. And he handles all of that. He handles all the business end. And I
do all the creative work.”
But
it seems that some work will be coming to stand still, as Robinson shared with
me that she is eight weeks pregnant. In her post titled
“Some Big News,” which
appeared on her blog three days after our interview, Robinson explained that
the smell of creamed butter and sugar makes her sick. She jokingly wrote that
she fears this may be a sign that the new baby may not like sweets.
Toward
the end of our interview, I asked Robinson what her long-term goals are for Bakers Royale. It took her a few moments
to think of an answer, but when she did, it reflected her honest passion for
her craft.
“You
know, I like the part where I get to engage with the community,” Robinson said.
“So that’s the nice part about it. So really, if I have to—one long-term plan
is just for me to continue to engage my readers and grow my readership. Because
that’s where my community is going to be.”
Because
Robinson told me that both her favorite and least favorite recipes posted to
her blog involved coconut, I was inspired to play with the ingredient myself.
What emerged was a cross between a chocolate-dipped coconut macaroon and a
truffle. Sounds delicious, right? This recipe is simple but it took a bit of
trial and error and some major rethinking on my part. There were several mistakes and mishaps, but it was fun being
surrounded by so many varieties of ganache!
Coconut and Dark Chocolate Tartlets (Yield: about 6 tartlets)
Ingredients
2-1/2 c. sweetened shredded coconut
2 tbsp. sweetened condensed milk
1 egg white
1/4 tsp. salt
1-1/3 c. dark chocolate chips
1 c. heavy whipping cream
- Preheat
the oven to 325° F.
- Put
the coconut, egg white, sweetened condensed milk, and salt in the bowl of a
food processor and pulse until the coconut is finely chopped.
- Dampen
a paper towel with a little bit of vegetable oil and rub it into the wells of
six mini non-stick tart pans with removable bottoms.
- Place
about four tablespoons of the coconut mixture (depending on the size of your pans)
into each well and firmly press it into the bottom and up the walls of the tin
to form the crust. You’ll want the majority of the mixture on the bottom in
order to prevent cracks and holes from forming in the tartlet shells.
- Put
the pans onto a baking sheet and bake for 20-22 minutes, or until the edges of
the tartlet shells are a light golden brown. Allow them to cool on the baking sheet
for 10 minutes then remove the coconut crusts from the tins. Be very
careful—the shells are delicate. You can leave the removable bottom of the pan
on the coconut shell if you wish.
- Now
make the chocolate ganache. Place the chocolate chips into a glass bowl and
bring the cream to a boil in a small saucepan over medium-high heat.
- Immediately
pour the boiling cream over the chocolate chips. Allow it to sit for a minute,
then gently whisk the chocolate and cream together until all the chocolate has
melted and the ganache is smooth. (If the chips don’t completely melt, put the
bowl over a pot with an inch or two of simmering water in it, and stir the
ganache until everything is smooth.)
- Spoon
the ganache into the coconut shells. Refrigerate until the chocolate has
hardened (the cold ganache will act as glue if your tartlet shells have cracked). Or eat them straightaway and enjoy being drenched in dark chocolate.
It’s messy, but not unpleasant.
