831: Summer Baking with Nicole Rucker and Eileen Gannon

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

American Public Media

Arts, Food

4.2 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, we turn up the ovens and test our baking skills with two incredible bakers. First, we talk to LA-based cookbook author and star baker, Nicole Rucker, on why summer is peak pie season, the fruit and flavor combinations that elevate her pies (imagine toasted fig leaves!) and making the best out of her leftover cookies for pie crusts. Nicole's latest book is Fat and Flour: The Art of the Simple Bake, and she left us with her Strawberry White Chocolate Cream Pie recipe. Then, Iowa's champion baker Eileen Gannon, talks to us about her surprising baking techniques for cakes, from making moister cakes, fillings vs frostings, and her buttercream preferences. Eileen is the winner of over 600 state and national baking awards and the founder of Sunday Night Foods Sauces.

Broadcast dates for this episode:

August 8, 2025 (originally aired)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Splendium Table was supported by Vitamix. You know, there are some essential cooking tools that have spanned generations, cross continents, and found their way into kitchens around the world. I'm thinking of the cast iron pam, the rolling pin, the mortar and pestle. But all of those were innovations at one point, and the high-powered Vitamix blender takes its place in that pantheon.
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1:05.3	That's onepassword.com slash podcast offer, all lowercase.
1:37.3	Thank you. word.com slash podcast offer, all lowercase. I'm windows open, you really, really don't want to turn on the
1:45.7	oven to bake with it. But we have a show today that might, I am sorry, cost you more money
1:52.0	in your air conditioning bills because you're going to want to bake after this. Later in the show,
1:56.9	we talk with one of the most impressive bakers in America. And no, she's not the pastry chef of a high-end restaurant.
2:02.8	She's not even a bakery owner.
2:04.5	But Eileen Gannon has 60 blue ribbons to her name, most of them from the fierce baking grounds of the Iowa State Fair.
2:14.1	And we'll start with someone I think of as the Queen of crust, the president of pie, Nicole Rucker.
2:21.6	She is the owner of Fat and Flower Bakery in Los Angeles and is an absolute genius with, well, many things, both in her baking and in her hilarious social media.
2:31.9	But it's her pies that have me in her thrall. And true story,
2:35.7	last year I got stuck in Los Angeles for over a full day because I missed the flight. But what cheered
2:41.2	me up was a thought that I could go get two slices of her pie. So hey, chef, it is so great to see you.
2:47.8	Hi. Nice to see you too. So you may not say this about yourself, but I will say that about you.
	...

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