Fancying sweets

Sticky Toffee Pudding Co.'s desserts draw a whole lot of attention after win in food show

By Kitty Crider
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Originally published on August 15, 2007

Oprah's people have called. So has Martha Stewart Living. And Food & Wine magazine.

Tracy Claros' phone is ringing like mad. Her e-mail box is racking up the messages. Ever since her baked English lemon pudding won a gold Oscar-like statue at the Fancy Food Show in New York in July, her life has spun from one of local success to national hoopla. The show is sponsored by the National Association for Specialty Food Trade, a nonprofit trade group, and it attracts 20,000 to 30,000 attendees who know a good thing when they taste it.

"When I first got back from New York, I felt terribly overwhelmed," says the rosy-cheeked baker who hails from the Lake District of northwest England. "But I am returning every single call."

As she talks, Claros, founder of the Sticky Toffee Pudding Co., scoops golden globs of rich lemon curd into 160 individual black disposable baking cups. Then she and chef Andre Fecteau, a Culinary Institute of America grad who has worked with both the late Barbara Tropp and the Barefoot Contessa, ladle cake batter into each cup. She pops the trays of puddings into a large oven in a commercial kitchen in East Austin.

After baking for 25 minutes, the cakes cool before being sealed by hand (think slot machine lever-driven contraption) and then packaged. The tightly wrapped puddings will stay fresh in the refrigerator for six weeks, in the freezer six months. To serve the puddings, you zap them in the microwave oven for about 40 seconds, cool a minute, run a knife around the rim of the cup and flip out onto a plate, cake-side down, gooey lemon curd on top.

Obviously, this is not Bill Cosby's Jell-O pudding.

In England, baked desserts are often called pudding, explains curly-haired Claros in her charming English accent.

Her artisanal products are labor-intensive: hand-scooping, hand-rolling, hand-sealing, hand-wrapping. In October 2006, she produced about 20,000 cases, 75 percent of which were sticky toffee pudding, the rest mostly chocolate and lemon. It's difficult to predict yet what her breakdown for the fall of 2007 will be - how many lemon puddings she will make because of her win in the baked goods category. But others in the area who have also won the specialty food industry's gold statue say the award will make a significant difference.

"It did quite a lot for sales," says Patrick Timpone, founder of Timpone's Fresh Foods. His Salsa Muy Rica won for outstanding condiment in 1995. "Many of the smaller stores called us. It helped us get distributors. It opened some doors for sure." (Timpone has since sold his sauces to Fischer & Wieser and is now founder of Timpone's Market in Dripping Springs.)

Case Fischer, co-founder of Fischer & Wieser in Fredericksburg, says when their Original Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce was named the outstanding best-seller in 1997, it was a launching pad for the fruit sauce market for them and for the nation in general. "What it did for our company - it gave us a push to get our product out there. It was like an extra push on a bike. You still have to pedal, but it got us extra pedal action."

Lauri Raymond, president of Sisters & Brothers Inc., says when their Sesame Garlic Sass was awarded the gold for the salad dressing category in 1997, they saw a big bump in sales in Texas but not nationally. Their dressing is a perishable product stocked next to the lettuce in produce departments, she says, and produce buyers did not go to the Fancy Food Show then.

Claros, however, says when she exhibited her products at the Fancy Food Show this summer, many of the attendees, unable to sample all 1,000 booths at the show, already had her on their short list because she was a finalist. (In addition to samplings for the exhibit, she had to take 300 of her products to the show for the final judging, and it was midway in the show that she was declared the winner of her category.)

As a result, one East Coast chain of stores is talking with her about an order so large that Claros has suggested reducing it by 75 percent. After all, hers is a handmade line.

"We don't cut corners here at all, and it's both a blessing and a curse," Fecteau says of the 400 to 500 eggs he is cracking and the various ginger ingredients, the large bag of El Rey chocolate, and the 50-pound block of butter on the counter. "It doesn't get any more handmade than this."

While Claros has increased the production of the English lemon pudding and is trying to stockpile a supply, orders are coming in so fast that even though she works 72 hours a week, she has not been able to get ahead.

Baking pudding, incidentally, was not Claros' first career. That would be the hotel industry. Then she briefly taught English in Nigeria, where she met and married a Bolivian. When he returned to the University of Texas for his doctorate, she studied communication science and disorders there, too, obtaining bachelor's and master's degrees, and giving birth to their son James in between. She worked in the speech pathology field for 10 years, including with the National Health services in England, after the marriage failed.

"I was cooking always in England, not professionally, but for family and friends," she says. And always in the back of her mind was the thought of a professional food career. "But it is hard to walk away from a good paycheck."

When she decided to take the commercial English pudding plunge in 2003, she selected Austin as her destination because plenty of people in England make the dessert and her son's father, German Claros, lived here. She also had friends here. And she missed Austin, having been charmed by it in her student days.

When she began, she baked sticky toffee pudding, profiteroles, pavlova, chocolate tarts and banoffi, a toffee custard banana pie. The products sold well at Whole Foods but their shelf life was short and they were expensive to produce.

Claros took them to Central Market, hoping to get them on those shelves, too.

Edouard Damez at Central Market was very candid with her, she says. "The product was great, the packaging was terrible," or words to that effect. She also was told to get $5 million worth of liability insurance and better packaging, then come back. She took the suggestions and now her sticky toffee pudding is in all the Central Markets in the state and four different regions of Whole Foods Market, with five more regions on the horizon since the New York win.

Like most beginning businesses, she's had hiccups. In fact, her very first week, she had to move her kitchen. Then she baked from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m., delivered her products at 6 a.m. and went back to the store for a demonstration at 9 a.m. She also has tales about malfunctioning ovens in the various kitchens she's used, loading trucks in the dark because the power is out, driving 30-foot vehicles to San Antonio to deliver products.

Almost from the first, she also has sold her products at the Austin Farmers Market downtown. For the Saturday morning shoppers, in addition to her pudding, she bakes quiches, double-ginger scones, an English flapjack, a cinnamon bun and a lemon layer cake with lemon curd filling that her customers love.

Claros, 45, laughs now at her naivete. She had in mind that she could make this whole business on one product - sticky toffee pudding. But selling English puddings to a Texas audience has been a challenge, she acknowledges. "We have to explain it to most everyone." (Coincidentally, she got a boost in helping get the word out to Americans last year when Haagen-Daz came out last year with a sticky toffee pudding ice cream - rich vanilla ice cream swirled with sticky toffee sauce and morsels of moist brown sugar cake.)

In January 2006, she attended the winter Fancy Food Show, taking in some business seminars, and realized that she needed a line of products. She came home and added a sticky ginger pudding, made with five or six forms of ginger.

Because some people thought the sticky pudding was more of a fall/winter dessert, she decided to add something chocolate for year round. And something lemon for spring and summer. She took the components of her already-popular lemon curd layer cake to create her award-winning baked pudding.

Now the Englishwoman is baking her European pudding like mad in Texas, awaiting the tidal wave she thinks is coming from the rest of the country.

kcrider@statesman.com; 445-3656