Salted Caramel & Pink Apples
Our friendship began with a fortuitous meet one afternoon in Portland, while each of us was on a tour visiting a potential preschool for our children.
A few months before I was to move up from Los Angeles, the IACP, an annual cookbook conference, was being held here. I jumped at the opportunity to meet with friends and peers and to get a jump start on figuring my way around the town that I would soon call home. While attending the conference I spent one afternoon touring a local preschool, and while there met a woman. She was in book publishing, and knew who I was from my cookbook, but was looking for a career change. We exchanged numbers and promised to meet again.
Once I moved and settled into town we met for an evening together on a patio in SE Portland, and a fast friendship formed. This woman has encompassed so many facets of friendship over the years — always there as a sounding board regarding professional ideas, as a workout buddy on foot and bike where all topics are on the table, once even selflessly staying overnight with my kids when I needed to run wholesale deliveries for the bakery in the middle of the night. She is the true definition of friendship: someone who consistently shows up.
Professionally, Elizabeth left the publishing world to pursue her dream to open a local, organic, homemade frozen yogurt shop. At first she dabbled in the kitchen with me when I was operating out of a rented kitchen space on a work table in the back of a cafe, then she headed off to France to attend Bellouet Conseil pastry school and stage at Normandy ice cream maker Martine Lambert. Eventually she came back to Portland to open Eb and Bean. Her quick rise to success, starting with watching her navigate her first year in business while developing a roster of 100 seasonal flavors, has been inspirational.
Bakeshop has been fortunate to work with Elizabeth and make many of her sauce and cookie crumble toppings. Weekly orders from Eb and Bean keep our hands very busy mixing doughs and baking off sheet pan size cookies, only to be crumbled into bite size morsels. The two sauces that we make for her - the Salted Vanilla Caramel and Marshmallow - are mostly used as toppings, but occasionally she stirs the caramel into her base to make perfectly textured flavors like Apple Cider Caramel, which debuts in all three of her shops this Friday!
The beginning of autumn is always marked for me with a freshly-picked apple from Kiyokawa Family Orchards dipped in our salted caramel sauce. Especially when it's one of their rare Mountain Rose apples with its lovely pink flesh. It’s a strong childhood memory for me, recalling warm Santa Ana blustery days, bobbing for apples at childhood birthday parties and costumed outings on Halloween.
To celebrate this time of year, we are making available as our Secret Item special jars of Salted Caramel Sauce along with a very special bright pink Mountain Rose Apple tart. Put them together and enjoy the beautiful combination of fall colors and tastes! Available for our newsletter subscribers only, so be sure to join our email list for access to all of our weekly specials.