This article was originally published in The Examiner on Jan. 25, 2018.
By Eleanor Skelton
Staff Writer
Logan Bauer dreams of opening a bakery filled with pastries inspired by popular culture, but right now all of their creations come from their own kitchen.
Moonlight Bakery — which got its name because Bauer describes themselves as a night owl — operates under Texas cottage food laws, which allows the sale of some homemade foods like baked goods.
“It’s easier to focus when it’s just me in the kitchen. I can get into the zone and I focus,” they said about their nighttime cooking routine. “It’s just me and my creation.”
Bauer said they applied for Moonlight Bakery’s DBA license in March 2016. They were
working full time at Jason’s Deli, a casual dining restaurant, where they obtained their Texas food handler certification.
One of the biggest projects they’ve been hired to do was 120 regular-sized cupcakes and two giant cupcakes for a friend’s wedding — which they finished within 24 hours of the ceremony.
The biggest challenge of operating out of their own kitchen is finding enough space for
large projects like that, Bauer said.
Their most elaborate projects are inspired by nerd culture — like the Tardis cake that they made for a friend’s daughter’s 10th birthday, inspired by the time machine in the BBC show Doctor Who.
Bauer said they marbled the inside of the cake teal blue and royal purple with bright pink raspberry buttercream frosting, all covered in “Tardis blue” modeling chocolate. Using modeling chocolate adds to the flavor in a way that fondant icing doesn’t, they said.
“That’s a big thing for me, the flavor experience,” Bauer said. “If it doesn’t taste good, I’m not going to throw it in, even if it makes it look better. I’ll find a different way to do it.”
The Tardis cake was made to feed 40 people — about 20 kids and one parent per child.
It had three pounds of modeling chocolate on the outside, Bauer said. They said they estimated the whole cake weighed between 10 and 20 pounds.
They said they used white fondant on cardboard with gel food coloring and painted circles with sponge brushes, added Kosher salt for the stars, then used vodka to blur the edges and create a watercolor effect for the tie-dye background behind the legendary time machine.
For a finishing touch, Bauer said the sugar pearls spelling the girl’s name were color-matched to the 10th doctor’s screwdriver for a finishing touch with a blue
waterproof blinking LED light on top of the Tardis.
One of Bauer’s more unusual projects was the dessert they made for a potluck dinner at Temple Emanuel two weeks before Passover, said the former Beaumont resident.
“I made the crossing of the Red Sea in cake,” they said.
One side of the sea was chocolate cake and the other side was vanilla, Bauer said. They added floral foam covered in yellow-colored fondant icing with crushed cereal on
top to look like sand.
Bauer took culinary classes through Houston Community College before moving back to Austin last fall to continue their education at Austin Community College. They are working on an associates degree in science for baking and pastry arts.
Their idea for a bakery that would fit in at a ComicCon convention came from a project from their bakery operation and management class.
Their project detailed a bakery named Chaotic Delicious, like the chaotic good or chaotic neutral character alignments from the popular tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons.
Their recipe ideas include “100 percent no strings attached Turkish Delight” inspired by
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, lemon cakes for Sansa in Game of Thrones,
Tobara desserts from the Dune chronicles to add sci-fi to the mix.
“Hagrid liked to bake, and he had Norbert in The Sorcerer’s Stone, so of course, Hagrid would totally have gotten Norbert in on the baking,” Bauer said. They said they wanted to make buttery shortbread cookies and stamp them with a dinosaur claw to look like a baby dragon footprint and then pipe peppery raspberry jelly into the center.
“So that you get a little bit of a kick, but it’s tempered by the buttery shortbread cookie,” they said.
But they didn’t stop there.
“For Star Trek: The Next Generation, I had Raktajino cake. Raktajino is Klingon coffee, and it’s heavily spiced,” they said. “I have a chocolate cake recipe that involves pour[ing] in one cup of boiling water. Well, if you mix a lot of spices into that water, bring it to a boil and then add it, you’ll get all of those spices in the cake. So I went okay, there we go, Klingon coffee chocolate cake.”
Bauer’s stories-come-to- life edible creations aren’t just ideas on paper — they made a Forbidden Forest cake earlier this year for a coworker’s birthday, complete with butter
rum flavored frosting to taste like butterbeer.
They said they used dark chocolate to make leafless trees on top of the cake, with brown butter beer frosting along the sides and melted marshmallow for cobwebs. The centaur on top was a tabletop game miniature from a Southeast Texas game and comic book store.
Bauer’s goal is to be able to create these delicacies all day long. They said they related to the muggle character in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them who just wanted to open his own bakery.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you going to culinary school? You could just watch videos
on YouTube,’” Bauer said. They said they believe being taught and guided by experienced pastry artists and being able to ask them questions is something the Internet alone can’t teach them.
Eleanor Skelton 