zoË bakes cakes Champion baker and style icon Zoë Neal François ’85 is experiencing sweet success with a delicious new book and TV series
PHOTOGRAPHS OF CAKES BY ZOË FRANÇOIS, PHOTOGRAPHS OF ZOË BY SARAH KIEFFER
BY CATHERINE NEWMAN
Zoë Neal François ’85, who grew up eating carob on a commune and then went on to sell close to a million books about bread baking, is helping her 21-year-old son, Henri, learn to pipe buttercream roses. Their heads are bent together, his dark, hers framed in her iconic silvery curls and cool tortoise-shell glasses. “It’s not the prettiest,” he says, and she says, “This is your first one! It’s awesome!” This is not a scene from “Zoë Bakes,” her new show on the Magnolia Network, filmed in her home and around her hometown of Minneapolis; those 11 episodes show her out in the community— visiting a beekeeper, an apple orchard, church basements—and then teaching viewers whatever she
was inspired to make. This, though, is a scene from “Baking With My Mother,” a series on Henri’s own YouTube channel. When I ask her about it, she says, “I didn’t realize how much I adored him until I watched the videos—looking at myself looking at him.” It’s pretty much impossible to miss, honestly: her giant smile; the way she radiates love. Then she evokes the pandemic: “It’s just this weird moment in our history that he’s even here. There’s no way he would ever have chosen to be here now in this time of his life. And it’s so fleeting.” As a young adult herself, attending the University of Vermont, François ran a vending-cart business, Zoë’s Cookies, and worked as a cake decorator at Ben and Jerry’s.
She’d been notoriously deprived of sugar growing up and had her first come-to-Jesus moment over a classmate’s lunchbox Twinkie. And it became her whole life—not Twinkies, but the making of baked things. She went on to work as a pastry chef, to attend the Culinary Institute of America, and to meet her co-author Jeff Hertzberg in a toddler music class when their kids were small. She and Hertzberg wrote Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day—which started something of a bread-baking revolution—along with a number of sequels. In addition to the best-selling bread books and the show, François also has a recipe-packed blog, a vibrant Instagram account, a way with a blowtorch, and an absolutely SPRING 2021!BULLETIN 35
