Dona Murad Of Librae & Lucie Franc de Ferriere Of From Lucie, Live From Cherry Bombe House

She's My Cherry Pie

Host Jessie Sheehan sits down with bakers Lucie Franc de Ferriere and Dona Murad for a live taping at Cherry Bomb House. The guests share ho

Key takeaways

• Dona Murad incorporates Bahraini flavors like chai buttercream and black lime (lumi) into her Librae recipes.
• Lucie Franc de Ferriere's bakery, From Lucie, was established in the Lower East Side during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Main topics

• Culinary heritage and family traditions
• Bakery ownership in New York City

Notable quotes

You can't have a bad cup of coffee and a beautiful croissant vice versa.

Conclusion

The episode provides an inspiring look at how personal history and cul

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:02) Hi, peeps. You're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from the Cherry Bomb Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of four baking books, including Snackable Bakes. Each Saturday, I hang out with the sweetest bakers around and take a deep dive into their signature bakes. Speaker 3 (0:24) Hello from Cherry Bomb House. I'm in the podcast studio at Cherry Bomb's pop-up in New York City's Meatpacking District. We've got a very special episode today. It's our She's My Cherry Pie live event from Cherry Bomb House with Lucie Front de Ferriere of From Lucie and Donna Murad of Le Bray. I had the pleasure of chatting with these two entrepreneurs about their popular New York City bakeries and their beautiful cookbooks. Donna is the author of the brand-new book, Le Bré, Third Culture Recipes from a Cult New York Bakery. And Lucy released her book, Cake from Lucy, Recipes and Techniques from the French Countryside to New York City earlier this year. Stay tuned for our convo. Calling all West Coast peeps, Cherry Bomb is headed to California this September for our Farmers and Makers weekend, and tickets are on sale now. Farmers and Makers is a three-day celebration of the farmers, winemakers, chefs, artisans, and culinary creatives who make California's food and beverage scene so extraordinary. It's taking place in Paso Robles, California from Friday, September 25th to Sunday, September 27th. There will be tastings, winery tours, panel discussions, dinners, and special gatherings. Weekend passes are sold out, but you can still snag tickets to select events. For more deets and to get your tickets, head to CherryBomb.com or click the link in our show notes. I hope to see you there. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Lucy and Donna. Lucy and Donna, welcome to She's My Cherry Pie Live. First, I wanted to ask you both about how you discovered your love of baking. Donna, in your gorgeous new book, you refer to yourself as a third-generation baker. Can you tell us about your maternal grandmother, Matilda, or Tilly, who was a cake designer, and your mom, who made many a fantastic house cake, and about their impact on your Speaker 2 (2:27) passion for baking? Speaker 3 (2:28) Growing Speaker 2 (2:29) up, There was always a cake in our house, and this goes back to the house cake thing. So in our culture, our house is always supposed to be ready for guests. And so that hospitable nature sort of stuck with me. There would always be a house cake, and it would always be laid out because your house always has to have guests as if they're accepting the king and queen. And so every home in the region... has one of these. And my mother's was a carrot cake. And for Libre, we wanted it to be, it needed a little bit of spazaz. So we added a chai buttercream. And I put that in the book because it's such a special memory. And I think also we have this tradition in Bahrain and in many parts of the region where if you go over to someone's home, you take your plate with you and filled with food, but you have to return it. filled with food too. It doesn't keep going on and on, but it's how it works, right? You have to, you receive food and then you give back that plate with food in it. So I think from that to the fact that my grandmother Tilly, we called her Nana Tilly, she would make wedding cakes and she would make naked wedding cakes with these beautiful marzipan flowers. And she taught me how to do that. And I would do it on Play-Doh. I would create little roses on Play-Doh. I was telling Lucy earlier that my mother had these magazines called Australian Women's Weekly and she would make all these cakes for us and she did too and she would make all these cakes for our birthdays with the train with the little cones to you know represent the way that the train looks and I would have a barbie cake and all these things and that craft and the way that they were so meticulous was so it just resonated with me and I really wanted to bring that into my life. Speaker 3 (4:16) Lucy, you and I are old pals, really, and we have discussed your lovely mom before. But tell us here about how baking is her love language, how it's connected to her roots, and the impact she's had on your love of baking and particularly your love of cake baking. Speaker 1 (4:33) Yeah. So it's kind of similar in the sense that my mother was a big inspiration in the way I bake at the bakery. Just because I wasn't professionally trained, I didn't go to pastry school. And so the inspiration I have is my mom baking and me standing next to her, not baking with her because she was very specific. I just had to watch, let her shine. But I learned a lot from just, you know, sitting there and seeing what she does. She is originally from New Zealand. So I have all of that. cakes with icing on top, which is not very French as well. So people are all confused and like, but you're French, but you don't do very French pastries. I'm like, yeah, because I'm just from basically all over the world at this point. That's why my accent is a bit weird. My mother came from New Zealand, fell in love with my dad, who's French, and then moved into this home that we inherited. And they built this vineyard and then a bed and breakfast from scratch. So we'd have guests from all over the world come and sit at our table and there would always be cake there because that was kind of her love of language as well. But it wasn't the cakes that you would find in a patisserie that are super nicely done, perfectly done. It's more like that. sponge with like too much cream and too much jam oozing out from the garden and so that warmth in baking that I felt for my mom is something that I really wanted to bring to that bakery as well. Speaker 3 (5:47) I also wanted to mention coffee briefly because Donna I wonder if because coffee is such an integral part of everyday Bahraini hospitality and is a passion of yours, it may have helped cement your love of baked goods, particularly when traveling in Copenhagen and being so inspired by the beautiful laminated pastries and the beautiful coffee. Speaker 2 (6:08) So it's very interesting. Growing up, you know, we have something called gahwa, which is the Arabic word for Arabic coffee. And my father would roast green beans in a little frying pan and grind them and add the cardamom. And he would drink that. And I used to watch him do that. My whole family, both sides, they're just all cooks and, you know, they're all bakers. So I've been around food and it's part of my culture, really. Food is celebrated very heavily. Speaker 2 (6:35) I fell in love with third wave coffee because I would frequent London so much, which has such a large influence from Australia. The Australian coffee scene is very strong. And we didn't have that in Bahrain 10 years ago when I opened my roastery. I was the first Bahraini female roastery. And people didn't understand it. They didn't understand an eight ounce Americano. They didn't understand a latte without this up and down macchiato sugar situation. They didn't understand how you could. just enjoy coffee the way it's supposed to be drank at a medium roast. So it started with that and my roastery did very well and people really gravitated towards becoming coffee snobs and I call them that now and I have the same customers for the past 10 years in Bahrain in my space there. So I think it was always very important to have both a beautiful cup of coffee and a beautiful pastry. And Copenhagen, especially Scandinavia in general, they do that very well. They take that very seriously. And that's how I pivoted because I think it was important because I'm actually a certified barista and roaster. They go hand in hand. You can't have a bad cup of coffee and a beautiful croissant vice versa. Lucy, Speaker 3 (7:47) there's a little bit of a stretch, but I think it's true. For you too, coffee played a role in your early passion for baking as it was. coffee shop during the pandemic when you first started baking and sharing your wares with customers. And I feel like that enthusiastic response that you received there to kind of during the pandemic, et cetera, surrounded by coffee was inspiring to you in terms of your future. No, Speaker 1 (8:11) that's a, that's a good stretch there. Speaker 2 (8:13) I try. The Speaker 1 (8:14) funny thing is I don't drink coffee. I love the taste of coffee and desserts. Coffee ice cream is my favorite. But I didn't drink coffee growing up. My mom drank a lot of tea, so I just learned the tea culture, and then I just stick with it. But when I met Gupri, he was still the manager of Irving Farm Coffee Roasters at the time, so I could see him shine with all of his knowledge on coffee. And then he had the idea to open Sunday to Sunday, and at the time I was still at the gallery, but I was so involved already in it, and we had just started dating. And then I got... fired from my job, I think a month after COVID hit and Sunday and Sunday had just opened. So I joined forces straight away and started baking over there as well. And then we reopened with a takeout window. It was two of us and Ralph, who still is with us at the takeout window. So I'd be serving pastries because people would be making coffee. So there was that warmth of a time, I think, in the Lower East Side where everyone was strapped in