My love for Lisa Donovan bloomed before I ever even sampled one of her desserts. I came across her Instagram account earlier this year, when as the new kid in town I started searching for the best places in Nashville to calm my sugar cravings. As the pastry chef at Husk (and previously City House and Margot), Donovan created desserts that gave me hope my recent relocation to Music City wasn't for naught. Her photos made me chirp little squeals of excitement as I read descriptions like "Carolina Gold Rice Pudding With Spiced Georgia Peaches," "Bourbon Butterscotch Chocolate Pudding Pie" and "Crema Coffee Cream Cake with Coffee Bean Brittle, Espresso Olive & Sinclair Ganache, Cinnamon Tres Leches and Noble Springs Goat's Milk Jam Ice Cream."
I had to eat everything she made as quickly as possible. I had to meet the mind responsible for such combinations immediately. Sadly, the Crema Coffee Cream Cake wasn't there when I stopped by Husk early one morning and chatted with Donovan. She was making benne wafers, which would be served with pimento cheese to that evening's Husk diners.
While you'd never guess it by looking at her Southern-inspired dessert offerings — which have recently included Buttermilk Chess Pie, Bourbon Butterscotch Pudding and Cast Iron Pineapple Upside-Down Cake — Donovan was born in Germany. She moved to the States when she was barely a teen in 1991, and she didn't immediately take to her new surroundings. In fact, the reason she started baking at all was because she missed some of the food she had while growing up overseas.
"I couldn't find anything good in the South, like bread," Donovan recalls while hand-cutting dozens and dozens of crackers. "I was an art student. I wasn't thinking about [baking] as a career, but without me realizing it, I just got swallowed up. I fell in love with Southern baking."
With the delightful ways she's able to manipulate sugar, butter and flour — seriously, those salted chocolate cookies that come with the little pot of butterscotch pudding are some of the best chocolate cookies I've ever eaten — I expected Donovan to roll off a list of impressive culinary schools and apprenticeships. Instead, she smiles when I ask how she honed her accidental craft, saying, "I'm totally self-taught — I studied in the Nashville Public Library and at City House. Tandy [Wilson, chef at City House] gave me a really good place to go, where I could make a lot of mistakes and learn to bake professionally. I was around really smart chefs. I could ask questions, and I did. I asked dumb questions and tried to figure out as I went.
"And I would spend hours and hours at the Nashville library," she continues. "They've got really amazing baking books, so I would just go sit on the floor of the baking aisle at the Nashville public library, writing down recipes I wanted to try. That's how I learned everything."
Unlike some pastry know-it-alls who will talk you to death about how precise everything must be — Sift your flour! Weigh your dry ingredients! And for chrissakes don't forget to level that teaspoon of baking soda! — Donovan doesn't think baking needs to be that intimidating.
"Everyone always says you have to be so exact, but actually what you have to do is know your ingredients," she says. "You have to know what their job is. Flour's job is to absorb moisture, so when it's sitting on a table in a bowl, it's absorbing moisture from the air. If you know those finicky nuances of your ingredients, you can take a lot of liberties.
"Like, if you have a drunk uncle who hates talking politics, you're not gonna sit around with your drunk uncle and talk politics, you're gonna talk about the weather," she laughs. "You have to know what they're capable of and what they're not capable of. Pastry is your drunk uncle."
One of the best ways Donovan found to get familiar with every ingredient was to deconstruct recipes that already exist — it's a technique she still practices to this day.
"I find a lot of recipes in old church cookbooks that, for some reason, don't necessarily work anymore if you just make them outright. They're usually too dense or maybe they just had different tastes. In those cookbooks, it's a lot of intuitive baking — a pinch of this, a shake of this. Those are good places to start for me. They have a lot of room for interpretation, because it used to be recipes weren't written as rules. Recipes were written as suggestions."
Days after eating it, I'm still thinking of Donovan's Chocolate Church Cake. The fat slice of three-layered cake is covered with fudgy frosting made of Nashville's own Olive and Sinclair chocolate. The frosting is intense, but its richness is cut by the creamy, heavily malted scoop of ice cream that sits in as a more delicious alternative to a tall glass of cold milk. Hot fudge, salted caramel sauce and crumbles of peanut brittle swirled together atop the ice cream, but what really struck me was the small pile of dirt that sat underneath. At least, it looked like dirt. The finely ground, deep-brown crumble could've easily been mistaken for some rogue cake crumbs, but it was much more wonderful than that. If only I could figure out what "it" was. It wasn't as sandy as cookie crumb, but it wasn't moist enough to be cake either. It wasn't too sweet, but it was candy-like enough to hold its crunch in the puddle of melting ice cream. It certainly wasn't anything that would come from an old church cookbook.
"That is actually cake trim," Donovan admits when I press for more details. "I toast and Robot Coupe it. Robot Coupe is a little R2-D2 looking machine, a super high-power food processor. If you break the cake up enough and put it in [the oven] at 300 degrees and let it go for 20 minutes, it'll turn into something really tasty, it'll actually caramelize a little bit."
Donovan's creations are filled with little hidden treasures like the caramelized cake crumbs — the sweetened whipped cream that sits on top of the butterscotch pudding came with a dusting of smoked cocoa nib brittle that had the perfect, poppy crunch, like the crumbs of a Butterfinger mixed with Pop Rocks.
"I really like a good crunch. Any bite that I take, I just want a good crunch," she says. "There's something satisfying about it. I think pastry desserts can be devoid of that, so you have to make an effort."
Despite evidence to the contrary, Donovan promises there's really nothing special behind her dish-crafting process. When it comes to adding each component to the plate — the toasted cake crumbs, the malted ice cream, the smoked cocoa nib brittle — Donovan is just following a gut instinct. "I think everything is always how I would want to eat that. Like, if I'm given a pudding cup, I better have a cookie on the side."
And with that, my new life motto is uttered for the first time, and my love for Donovan's desserts grows stronger — she's a hero for everyone who requires a cookie with their pudding cup.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
