In the Kitchen with Nicola Collie of PICNIC Baked Goods

How does one from New Zealand go from dancer/actor/model to self-taught pastry chef in the high desert? An obsession with food, a pandemic, and plenty of creative ambition. We stepped into the newly-renovated bakery trailer with Nicola Collie of PICNIC Baked Goods to shoot our latest spring textiles, eat some unbelievably delicious cake, and learn more about how she got here.

Tell us about the cakes you made for our spring textile shoot. The chocolate cake was literally the most delicious cake I have ever eaten. I think about it often to be honest. The cheesecake was a great fresh tangy palette cleanser (as if you need a palette cleanser from cake to cheesecake).

Love to hear it! I’d been wanting to put something with black sesame on the menu purely for how beautiful the color it imparts is. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, but cement grey in the pastry world is kind of stunning and unexpected. Plus the flavor slaps! Sesame and chocolate are always good together hence the pairing. The nori caramelized hazelnuts are such a lovely crunch with a hint of saltiness from the nori to balance the sweetness.

That cheesecake flavor came to me one night when I knew I wanted to make a passionfruit cheesecake but couldn’t figure out what else to pair it with aside from white chocolate, and suddenly ginger occurred. It cut through the richness of white chocolate and a lonely little bite from the peppery-ness. 

Are you a self-taught baker?

I am! My grandmothers were both great bakers, and my Mum has always been pretty inventive in the kitchen but not necessarily one for following recipes down to a tee, which isn’t conducive to baking. My Dad, however, was a chemist and professional brewer (beer) and I think that’s more where I got the intuition for baking. He’s a very science-based, logic-based, precise kind of guy. Very meticulous and neat, and always knows the why of the chemistry of things. I think the mix of being half that way, and half artistically-minded makes for fun cakes and good baking! And of course, the more you practice something, the better you get at it. I didn’t know all the whys and hows when I started baking, or the chemistry behind it initially, but I’m very good at following a recipe to a tee and hunting out ones that seem promising and tweaking as I go. I generally find American recipes are overly sweet so I always try to take the sugar down (though it’s also a humectant so you have to be careful and compensate for that!). Once you start researching, and if you’re naturally a bit of a perfectionist, you go down the rabbit hole of learning as much as you possibly can - and the internet is a pretty great resource for that.

Where do you find inspiration for your cake flavors/combinations?

It’s helpful to think of cake flavors as a whole and how all components will marry together. Does it have texture? Does it have flavor balance? Is there enough acid or bitterness to counter the sweetness? Will every component be tasted in one forkful of cake? All those things help to build components and flavors. I also like to consider flavor combos that I love that aren’t cakes, and to see if they’re possible to make into cakes, which they always are!

A good example is the Arnold Palmer cake. Earl Grey chiffon cake (the tea), yuzu curd (the lemonade - lemon curd works well too but I love that extra little bitter kick from yuzu), and a lemon sumac turmeric Swiss buttercream. More lemon flavor, the sumac helps with the tang; frankly, turmeric is purely aesthetic. It feels like happiness in frosting form!

You are also an accomplished dancer, actor, and model. How is baking like dancing?

Thank you! Such a good question; scratching my head here to find similarities…AH!! PERFECTIONISM. It’s a disease, to be sure, but this is one huge overlap I’ve found in ballet and baking. I started ballet so young I wasn’t actually cognizant of this until I did my Bachelor of Dance in Contemporary Dance, and we got into the minutia of dance that I realized how ingrained that was. Fast forward to baking and it helped me to get rid of some of that perfectionism. When you’re testing new recipes and making tweaks, you have to accept that most of the time, the first try ain’t it. It’s going to have to be binned or thrown out to the birds etc. And when you’re frosting cakes, perfect is the enemy of good. You can really overwork buttercream due to temperature sensitivity so you have to know when to stop fucking faffing and call it DONE! I think the ingenuity, creativity, and hard work that’s allowed me a career in dance, acting, and modeling has absolutely bled into PICNIC. To be honest, PICNIC was born out of wanting some control and agency over my life as a freelancer. I fantasized about people coming to me for a product, as opposed to having to be approved of by a brand/director/designer/choreographer. And now that I have the prior, the latter doesn’t bother me anymore. Variety really is the spice of life and I feel incredibly lucky to juggle all of those. It’s a little hectic at times, and a lot of juggling, but it’s well worth it.  

What brought you to the desert? In what ways do you like it compared to back home?

The desert is nothing like New Zealand - it’s the one landscape we don’t have at home which is probably why I find it so novel. There are minor similarities between Central Otago and the high desert, but that’s about where it stops! I first visited the desert when I met my husband Todd many years ago. He’d bought our house here 10 years ago and really lucked out with timing. I was still living in New York City when I first visited the desert - it was such a beautiful counter to the chaos of NYC. Long story short, eventually I came west, we moved out here full-time right before the pandemic hit and the timing was perfect. That was that! 

Your bakery trailer was a huge inspiration for our shoot - I was so inspired by your color palette and use of materials. It feels retro but not overly kitschy. Tell us about this huge project you took on.  It must feel so great to have a dedicated baking space. 

Oh my gosh, it feels so great to have it finished! Thrilled you got to experience it with your beautiful textiles! And thank god because kitschy is not my jam. I really love classic, timeless everything, which doesn’t mean a lack of color or whimsicalness, but I wanted the way it was executed to hold up and look beautiful for a long time. I’m very much a quality-over-quantity kind of gal, so if something in the renovation was a little more pricey but it was a better option, would last longer, age better, etc - that’s what I opted for. I justified every extra penny by being like, “Oh it’s just one more wedding order,” and that’s why I got very burned out from weddings last year, but I took a little break and am back in love with them again 

But the build-out was a matter of necessity. I needed a dedicated space and professional-level appliances, ovens, speed racks, fridges, etc. It was somewhat of a leap of faith because PICNIC was only a matter of months old when I took it on. But the timing was right and a dear friend of mine was selling her 1951 33ft Spartan Imperial Mansion so I scooped it. It took about 1.5 years of doing the build-out on and off as I had the money coming into the business. It could’ve happened faster but I was dogged about not wanting to take out a loan to pay it for, and I wanted to own it all outright once it was done, which is exactly what happened. It took more patience and the stops and starts weren’t always ideal but it also gave me time to research all the equipment to the point of exasperation and I knew I’d made all the decisions with a fine-tooth comb, which is nice for peace of mind when you’re investing in such a big project with your own money. 

Thank you so much for making our photoshoot fun and delicious! We got so lucky with a perfect weather day in the desert in late winter. 

My pleasure! It was so much fun to have such beautiful textiles, colors, and energy in there. I adore anything plaid, particularly bright colors so it was a match made in heaven. The weather turned out for us, the crew was great, and the end-of-day snacks (CAKE) were epic. What more does one need?