The art of hobby baking: Karri Suh
Keeping baking fun, when too much cake is a problem, and three simple tools for turning out professional-looking cakes
Karri Suh has very lucky friends and neighbors in Sylvan Park in West Nashville. She’s a hobby baker, which means she bakes in her free time for the joy of it, and often ends up with too much cake or too many cookies for herself and her husband. That’s when friends, neighbors, and others who find her on Instagram get to sample professional-looking and tasting cakes, pastries, and pies geared to a theme or the season. By day, Karri works as a content marketer for a nonprofit. She bakes and plans her projects on evenings and weekends.
She likes to make special cakes for friends’ weddings and birthdays but decided against accepting commissions despite the frequent requests. “I try to keep the hobby and my joy of it very secure because I know how easy it is to give my time away. I don’t want this to be something I begrudge. I bake for friends as a gift.”
After seeing her colorful cakes on Instagram, I wanted to find out what motivates her to take on challenging projects and what she does with the mountain of cakes she bakes. Read on to find out more about her favorite projects, fun baking challenges she’s pursued, and how you might be able to sample her baking projects if you live in or find yourself in Nashville.
How often do you bake in an average week?
Often, two to three times a week [wow, that’s a lot of cake!], and depending on what I’m making, one project could span over a couple days or nights or longer. I recently made two cakes for a friend’s wedding, and I started those 10 days before the wedding. That project involved many stages including baking, freezing, prepping, and assembling. I am a planner and carefully plan out my days and evenings.
Have you always been baking?
Yes, my grandmother was an artistic and creative person who did a lot of baking and cake decorating with me. I still have the decoration tips she bought me in the 1980s. Baking was always a way for me to decompress and so I baked often in high school. My parents were supportive about letting me experiment as much as I wanted, as long as I cleaned up [laughs].
Did you have an Easy-Bake Oven as a child?
I did have an Easy-Bake Oven [laughs]!
Why do you choose a monthly baking theme?
I realized it’s easier to plan my baking projects if I have a monthly theme. I can collect ideas and resources in advance and be ready when the month comes. I haven’t had formal baking training, and I intentionally wanted to have months that included some types of baking projects that I’ve shied away from, such as pies and French pastries: eclairs, choux pastries, and cream puffs. French Pastry Made Simple by Molly Wilk was one of my main resources that I continue to go back to. I learned about it in a publication I read called Cherry Bombe. It’s a baking magazine that focuses on female entrepreneurs in the baking and hospitality world.
Tell me about your recent themes.
October was warm spice month [and included maple walnut shortbread, pumpkin ginger cheesecake, molasses garam masala cookies, apple cider donut loaf with salted cinnamon sugar coating, and many others].
November was a wild card so I could include all things that didn’t fit into a theme [and included Tarte Tatin, Oreo cookie sandwiches, Basque cheesecake, and many more].
My husband’s birthday is in December and he loves Black Forest Cake, so it’s going to be variations on that, such as brownies, whoopie pies, and a rolled yule log. January is probably going to be meringues. February is the Lunar New Year. I lived in China for a year and like Chinese pastries, so I will make those. My favorite to make are mooncakes with a salted duck egg yolk filling. I couldn’t do these without Kristina Cho’s book that came out last year, Mooncakes & Milk Bread.
When did you start your neighborhood tastings?
in January 2020, my husband and I moved from the east side of Nashville to the west side. Our new home has this beautiful porch and yard and we were hoping to have community get togethers, and then COVID happened. We started doing a lot of baking and dropped off what we made to neighbors. Also, we invited people over for socially distanced get togethers outside.
We considered opening a taco shop and I was going to bake cakes for the business. We ultimately couldn’t make the economics work, but at the time, we did a lot of free tastings of tacos and cakes in our yard. I first got the idea of creating a network of individuals as taste testers from a Lauren Ko, who published Pieometry. We gave each taster a QR code that linked to online feedback forms so we could do market research and learn what was working and what wasn’t.
You must be really popular in your neighborhood.
[Laughs] We’ve met a lot of our neighbors.
Can you tell us about the Baking Notification Project?
Earlier this year, I saw the Baking Notification Project on Instagram. They fill the void a lot of us bakers have—we want to bake, but don’t have an outlet—mouths—for everything.
The Baking Notification Project connects local hobby bakers with individuals who live in the community and want baked goods. It’s an SMS-based subscription that allows individuals to “subscribe” and pay $10 a month to their local baker. Some bakers even offer their subscription for free! When their local baker has extra baked goods, they add them to the system, describing the baked good, where to pick it up during a particular time window, and how many pieces are available. So, I put an offer out, and once it's full, the offer closes. I just package everything up and put it into a cooler, and then people come by during the time window to pick up their baked good. [I love this idea.]
Explain the psychology of baking something for fun, but then giving most of it away. With the Baking Notification Project, you are not seeing people eat what you made or hearing their reactions.
I love this question because it's something I think about often, especially when I turn down commissions. In college I saw most of my English major friends not like to read because they were reading all the time. I've taken on a few projects in the past that I later regretted because I didn't really want to do them or they took much longer than I anticipated. The price someone pays for a commission baked good is never the actual cost of ingredients and time.
Seeing someone's reaction to eating something I make is just a bonus. What I enjoy the most is the creation process and the results. I want to document and share beautiful photos. It does make me happy that my baked goods make others happy, but that's not why I bake.
Do you follow recipes to the letter, create your own, or modify other people’s recipes?
I bake following a recipe the first time I make something new, and then I will deviate from it as necessary. My go to is always Sally’s Baking Addiction because her recipes are tried and true. More recently I’ve gotten into Stella Parks, who wrote BraveTart. She gets into the chemistry behind baking, which I find fascinating.
What’s been a project that required a lot of iteration?
The restaurant Miel, that’s up the road from my house, asked me to make seasonal cakes for them for a while. For the summer, I made a peach basil cake. The challenge was the two main components—peaches and basil—get brown when exposed to oxygen. It took a lot of trial and error to get those flavors in there without compromising the look of the cake.
How did you do it?
After a few experiments, I finally added thin-sliced peaches that had been sprayed with lemon juice and sprinkled with sugar between layers of the cake and buttercream so the peaches were always covered. When the restaurant cut a slice to serve, all they had to do was put parchment over the cut part of the remaining cake to prevent air exposure. For the basil, I made a basil simple syrup and soaked the cakes in the syrup but there wasn’t enough basil flavoring. I found a tip online that suggested making a paste of basil and powdered sugar and then adding that to the buttercream frosting. The basil is so finely minced that even though it’s black, it just looks like little speckles.
What is your favorite cake?
My favorite cake to eat is anything strawberry or lemon. My favorite cakes I’ve made so far are the ones I made for my friends’ Matt and Lisa for their wedding—chocolate orange and lemon thyme—were taste-wise and visually my favorite. From a taste and structural integrity perspective, making those cakes was a challenge I enjoyed.
What do you mean structural integrity?
Cakes are heavy and I make them with at least three layers of cake and buttercream frosting. When you make a cake for a wedding or a bigger event and it has several tiers, you have to make sure those tiers stay intact en route to the event and during setup. There’s also the issue with heat and humidity and what it does to buttercream. Luckily, I used Italian buttercream which is the most heat resistant of the buttercreams. I’ve done two-tier cakes before without a problem, but the lemon thyme wedding cake I made had three tiers and the lemon curd filling can create some instability. Three tiers meant there were nine layers of cake, which is very heavy! I had to make sure each cake was stable.
Did you use some type of structural support inside the cakes?
Typically, bakers use rods inside the cakes. I started using boba straws that are made from bamboo or plastic because they are easy to cut. I use at least four of those to stabilize the two bottom tiers of the three-tier cake.
There’s a tradition of freezing part of a wedding cake and then eating it at the one-year anniversary. Can it last that long? Do you have any tricks for making cake taste good after a year in the freezer?
Technically, yes, cake can last that long in the freezer but why eat year-old cake? I'll just make a tiny cake for a one-year anniversary!
The fats in the buttercream encase the cake and create a good moisture barrier for the cake, so freezing leftover cake isn't bad. But again, no one should eat cake frozen for a year [smiles].
When you decorate a cake, do you know at the outset what you want it to look like, or do you decorate more spontaneously? Are there decorating principles you follow?
I typically know what aesthetic I want before I make the cake, but when it comes to the day of decorating, sometimes the design chooses me instead of me choosing it. A good example would be Lisa's wedding cake [the lemon thyme cake above]. I had fresh flowers that matched her flowers, but on the wedding day, the cake screamed "naked cake" which was not what I originally planned. A naked cake is simply a cake with less frosting around the sides so some of the cake is seen through the frosting. It creates a more rustic look.
When it comes to colors, following basic color theory always helps: Use complimentary colors or a monochromatic color palette. This was especially important for the most recent cake I did, which was vintage inspired. I knew I wanted to use a nice chartreuse green and the rest of the cake needed to be shades of red or pink. I pulled in a tertiary blue color for a little contrast.
There’s a legendary story of Massimo Bottura who created his now famous “oops I dropped the lemon tart” dessert. Have you ever had any failures that became something else?
In October I was making an apple caramel cake and I had never made caramel icing before. It was a new recipe that I would not use again. The frosting was running off the cake! I had already set up an offer on the Baking Notification Project and I had to do something [laughs]. I put it in the fridge and luckily it firmed up. It would have been cake soup if I hadn’t done that.
What’s been your most ambitious project?
I made a Bundt buffet for a friends’ wedding reception. I thought, “Bundt cakes are easy—put the batter in and it bakes.” I decided to make 11 or 12 Bundt cakes. Halfway through I realized it was a lot of work. I had to make them all in advance, which meant having adequate freezer space. I have an extra freezer at home, but space got tight. I also needed boxes for all of them for transportation. That I almost forgot about!
Are there specific pieces of equipment and tools you rely on to make professional-looking cakes?
If you are going to make layer cakes, a sturdy turntable allows you to move the cake without touching it while you are frosting it. A bench scraper, which you use to make the frosting stand up at 90-degree angles on the side is useful. And an offset spatula allows you to spread the frosting around without the fear of a knuckle touching the frosting. You’d use the offset spatula for the top of the cake and the bench scraper for the sides of the cake. These three things enable you to make a regular cake look like a bakery cake.
Your Instagram shows that you bake many different items: cakes, loaf cakes, cookies, graham crackers…
This is where theme months are helpful because I want to bake it all! [Laughs] I feel comfortable baking cakes and muffins. Cookies are kind of a weak spot. Pies are also a weak spot, so I took a pie crust class last week. I haven’t done much candy making. I would like to get good at all of it!
My mom will want me to ask this question because she wrestles with pie crusts. What did you learn from your pie class that would be helpful to her?
The pie class I took was instructed by the owner of Caitypies, a microbakery that is bucking the diet culture industry. She sells pies at farmer’s markets. Her crusts are a butter and lard [sorry, vegan mom] mixture. The lard helps to keep the crust from sinking when it’s baked. Sometimes she will use Crisco with the butter to make it more accessible to more people who don’t use lard. Mixing in a shelf-stable fat with the butter keeps it from slumping. I also learned that putting the bottom crust in the freezer for 15 minutes before you fill it also helps the crust maintain its shape and have a better texture.
Do you lick the beaters?
Sometimes [laughs]!
Does it matter what type of butter and flour you use?
Butter, yes. I only use European-style butter. It has a higher milkfat content, so it’s creamier. As for flour, I wish I could say I bought the heirloom style flours, but I don’t. I mostly use all-purpose flour that I get from Costco.
Do you have a preference for specific types of other ingredients?
Not really. I read an interesting article about vanilla by America’s Test Kitchen. They said as far as the flavor of vanilla, in a baked item, once you bake it at 350 or higher, it doesn’t matter whether you use real vanilla or the imitation vanilla. It will taste the same. I like that because more people can bake with confidence and not feel bad if they can’t buy the real thing.
You’ve made some really colorful cakes. How do you get such highly saturated colors?
This is also where I am not a purist. I use the AmeriColor food-grade gel coloring.
Do you like the band Cake?
I definitely listened to some Cake in high school!
Who are some chefs and food personalities you admire?
Growing up as a child of the 1980s, I watched a lot of Julia Child. She was inspirational. As for a food person, Anthony Bourdain is my absolute favorite, because of his commentary and approach to travel and food.
Do you cook savory food? Do you cook lunch and dinner in your household?
My husband and I are both savory cooks, and he’s better at cooking than me. He is a bread baker and got into making sourdough bread during COVID. There is some competition in the kitchen [laughs].
Lightning-round questions: People often bond over food and art, and here are quick questions about both.
Favorite breakfast: Savory ham and cheese croissant.
Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks? I would have said Starbucks in the past, but we have an espresso machine at home now.
If tomorrow was your birthday, and I was going to bake you a cake, what kind should I make? Strawberry cake with strawberry fudge frosting, served cold. My mom made it when I was a kid. The cake is from a box mix and you add frozen chopped strawberries to it. The frosting is a lot of powdered sugar and strawberries.
Most memorable meal. Canlis in Seattle. The only reservation available was at 9 pm Pacific time, which for us travelers was 11 pm central time. I still think about the bread, and they served us a second loaf because we liked it so much. I believe the loaf was sourdough and it was presented on a small tray filled with grains and a wonderful salted butter. At midnight, after we finished our meal, they gave us a tour of the restaurant’s grounds, which were like an arboretum. It was magical.
You are hosting a dinner party and get to invite six people, living or dead. Who is coming and what are you serving? Anthony Bourdain, Julia Child, and Lisa Marie Donovan, a Nashville pastry chef who wrote Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. Also, Julio Hernandez, who owns Maiz de la Vida, which started as a taco truck and expanded to a restaurant that makes Mexican food from the Oaxacan region. As a Texan who can’t get good Mexican food here, Julio has been very welcomed. I would invite the monks who make Chartreuse. There are only two monks still alive who know all [130!] of the ingredients!
I would cook from whatever cookbook I find interesting at the moment. Right now I like Salt and Time, a cookbook that showcases Siberian cuisine, which is an intersection of Russian and Asian cuisines, and its where the author is from. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the author started the #CookforUkraine movement which has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Ukrainian relief from bake sales, supper clubs, etc.
Favorite piece of art you own. A piece by Andy Anh Ha that my husband gave me as a gift.
Most captivating museum visit. I went to New York City for the first time in January 2020 to celebrate my 40th birthday. My husband and I went for four days and visited The MET, MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the American Museum of Natural History. We dined at Le Bernardin and went to iconic bagels shops too.
Palate & Palette menu
Here’s what I would cook for Karri and her husband if they came to dinner, which they are invited to do (yes, I know it’s risky to make Mexican food for a Texan, but these recipes are from the expert Pati Jinich):
Arugula avocado salad with date and walnut vinaigrette
Brown sugar carnitas tacos with salsa macha
Blackberry cheesecake
Where to find Karri: @karribakescake
What a joy this post was to read! I was wishing I was Karri's neighbor so I might be lucky enough to enjoy an indulgent treat from time to time. I love her enthusiasm and endless curiosity to try some very challenging projects. Three cheers for Karri and her gorgeous endeavors!
Soooo much great information and visual treats. Thank you Amy. I will be checking Karri out on IG.