Baking Spirits Bright
Some desserts are beautiful. Some are delicious. Ruby Shenk, the baker behind Lancaster’s Salt + Light Pastry Co., has the unique ability to create confections that are as stunningly beautiful as they are decadently delicious.
Shenk got her pastry start in New Orleans. She’s worked in restaurants, starred in the Food Network’s Spring Baking Championship, consistently sells out of her fan favorites at the Lititz Farmers Market, designs gorgeous custom cakes and dessert options for weddings, and still finds the time to consistently change up her seasonal menu. Basically: she’s really busy. But that’s not stopping her from producing some of the most jaw-dropping, delectable pastry creations you can find in Lancaster right now.
I had so much fun chatting with Shenk about her favorite desserts, her holiday specials (which you’ll want to order now), and her vision for what’s next. And, of course, I certainly didn’t mind sampling her incredible tarts, cream puffs, and bûche de Noël!
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First, the basics: What is Salt & Light Pastry Co., and what has your path been like up to this moment?
Salt & Light is a studio bakery that specializes in artful wedding cakes, fresh pastries, and seasonal desserts.
I started Salt & Light in February 2018 in New Orleans, and re-established the business here in Lancaster in 2021.
The path that brought me here? That’s a bit more complicated. Let’s just say it was a winding one, but it started when I moved to New Orleans after graduating from Penn State with an Elementary Education degree.
It was the summer and I got a job at a beautiful uptown bistro called Coquette. I hosted for the first few months, but when a pastry position opened up, I made a joke about needing a job, and then they took me seriously! I staged (a trial day in the kitchen) for the assistant pastry chef position with their highly skilled new pastry chef — and got the job! I always figured I would be able to jump back into teaching, but I ended up loving the job and the culinary scene.
I continued to work in New Orleans restaurants for six more years. After working for an incredible restaurant group and managing the pastry programs at their three restaurants, I felt ready for a change and a new challenge. In February 2018, I started Salt & Light Pastry Co. I started out with weddings, custom orders, and doing desserts for coffee shops all over the city.
When Covid-19 hit and all those weddings got postponed or canceled, I adjusted the business, launching a Friday Bake Box featuring different assortments of cheerful desserts, delivered every week to the many doorsteps of my loyal New Orleans customers.
I moved to Lancaster in late 2020, and after teaching for a season for YTI’s pastry program, I reestablished Salt & Light. It’s been fantastic, and Lancaster has been so receptive to my style. Today, the business is focused on weddings, events, and my seasonal menus. I’ve also had the chance to be part of the Lititz Farmers Market and it has been such a joy! Every week, I bring inventive and fresh pastries like lemon champagne chiffon cake layered with peach leaf cream, fresh peaches, and champagne Swiss meringue buttercream; strawberry rhubarb turnovers; and, a crowd favorite, brown butter rice krispie treats topped with fun and fancy sprinkles.
How would you describe your style? How do you think about the desserts that you make?
Food has the ability to create joy, surprise, and delight. It connects people and elevates time spent together, evoking old memories and forming new ones. Food can accentuate the fullness of a great day, and can comfort the soul on the worst.
Yet many desserts only hit one or two notes (i.e. sweet, fruity, pretty, chocolatey, etc.).
I love simple desserts — don’t get me wrong. But I believe that the best desserts have the ability to elevate a moment and to inject a sense of beauty and appreciation into your day.
Have you ever experienced a near-perfect moment? One that leaves you with a heightened sense of life, gratitude, and joy? Almost always, that moment is made up of a rich combination of feelings. The warmth of the sun on your skin. The gentle flow of the cool breeze. The smell of honeysuckle. The sound of friends laughing. The scene itself. All together in one, singular moment.
I believe a great dessert is a lot like that. A layered experience that engages your senses and memories. I try to incorporate this into Salt & Light’s style and each dessert I make.
I think this perspective comes from my time leading pastry programs at restaurants and developing plated desserts. It’s a shift from thinking of desserts and pastry as a “sweet.” I approach them as an experience. How the presentation, textures, flavors, aromas, and even the setting where people will enjoy the dessert all come together.
My goal is to make desserts that are visually and flavorfully beautiful, fun, and fresh, and to make them in ways that are more accessible. Putting the same intentionality of a plated dessert into things like cakes, turnovers, tarts, and even things as simple as rice krispie treats that can be enjoyed at markets, parties, or in any given moment.
When did you start baking?
My love for baking goes back to when I was in high school. I had subscribed to Gourmet magazine and fell in love with the beautiful dishes and aspirational cooking described in its pages. I think I first ordered the magazine after a string of sick days spent watching the Food Network and finding comfort in hosts like Ina Garten, who showed how you could find joy in making things for the people you love.
When my mom got married a year or two later, I decided to make her two wedding cakes from Gourmet. The magazines are long gone, but I still have the index cards I made that correspond to each issue and list all of the recipes I found interesting by page number.
What excited me about baking then is the same for me now — it’s making sense and beauty out of chaos. Starting with raw items (some inedible as is), and taking them through a physical creative process to become something wholly different as beautiful new desserts.
In this same vein, baking is therapeutic. Working with your hands sets your mind free. I engage all of my senses when I work. Of course, taste, touch, and visual senses play a role. And as I create, I can tell where I’m at during the process based on the nuanced shifts of what I smell and hear. It is a life-giving, fully-engaging, and grounding process. I love it.
What is your favorite dessert you've ever made, and what's your favorite you've ever tasted that you did not make?
There was a dessert that Pastry Chef Zak Miller put on the menu at Coquette (in New Orleans) that is still one of my favorite bites of all time. It was a strawberries and cream dessert, plated with a delicate strawberry glass square tube filled with vanilla bean crème fraîche and served with ripe strawberry sorbet and fresh macerated strawberries. I can still taste the flavors just thinking about it. I loved the whole experience: the sweet strawberry crunch, yielding to the cool, creamy filling. The contrast of the textures and flavors kept my mouth wanting the next bite. There was something almost magical about the translucent strawberry shell. Imagine thin, ruby red fruit leather, crystalized into a vessel, then melting in your mouth, hitting you with an incredible burst of Louisiana strawberry flavor. So good!
Choosing a favorite dessert that I’ve made may be the hardest question to answer. I discover new favorites all the time. With each new season, I encounter new flavors, flowers, and feelings that inspire me to create. I find myself falling in love with a new flavor or dessert every few months. A long-standing favorite, though, is a dessert I created for Meauxbar, a now closed petit bistro on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Picture toasty sheets of molasses feuilletine, layered with crunchy peanuts, peanut butter, and drizzled honey, topped with light and refreshing milk mousse, more honey, and fresh fruit (often quartered figs or a blueberry compote). Again, the contrasting textures and flavors are what make this so good! Salty, sweet, creamy, crunchy — our taste buds can’t get enough. It’s a full experience. This dessert is now a staple on my Dessert Bar Menu, in bite sized form. I call them peanut butter honey bites.
Where did the name Salt & Light come from?
Salt & Light originally came from a biblical reference. I gave the business this name to be a daily reminder for me that my purpose is more than simply baking, and that while I care a lot about what I create, my work doesn’t define me.
The reference, from Matthew 5:13-16, is about living distinctly, differently. While this is most important in my life and faith, I believe it also applies to my business on multiple levels: choosing to run my business in a way that is life-giving (to customers, suppliers, peers, and my family), choosing to make beautiful things to bring joy and connection to others, and using unique and natural flavors to create desserts that are distinct and different themselves.
It is good to be unique and creative, and if you can add something new and good for others to experience, isn’t that so wonderful? As a bonus, I love that it reflects how I balance flavors, often using citrus to bring brightness to my work — and always a pinch of salt!
What's in store for you in the future?
Right now, I’m really excited to be working to develop partnerships with some amazing small businesses here in Lancaster to make some of my desserts available for retail downtown.
I’m also really loving working with couples to bring their unique styles and visions to life for their wedding day, and will be leaning into this area of the business even more in 2023.
I’m also currently launching a consulting arm of Salt & Light, to help restaurants create incredible desserts that work for their brand, elevate their menu, and increase their margins. I’m really excited about it, and I think it can create some great opportunities for restaurants to increase revenue while investing in their team and creating really memorable customer experiences.
What special desserts can we expect from you this holiday season?
I’m really excited for Salt & Light’s holiday menu this year! For me, the holidays are about being together with loved ones. Carving out time to cherish the warmth of others amid hectic holiday hub-bub. It’s a season dense with rich nostalgia and traditions. The flavors you’ll see in the holiday menu are ones that — to me — look, taste, smell, and feel like favorite holiday memories. My hope is that they help others create new memories by adding some extra yum and beauty to the table.
I have two tarts on the menu, which I think are the perfect holiday desserts: visually festive and not too heavy. My cranberry-orange tart is a bright, stunning red with a salty and sweet Speculoos cookie crust. There is a peppermint chocolate tart on the menu because I always drink hot cocoa with a candy cane during the holidays. That flavor combination is really nostalgic for me. It has a glossy peppermint chocolate glaze and a chocolate crust filled with rich chocolate and topped with fluffy peppermint cream.
The holiday showstopper on the menu is a Black Forest bûche de Noël. It’s a chocolate sponge roulade filled with amaretto cream and black cherry compote, decorated as a yule log with chocolate ganache, meringue mushrooms, and glitzy fruit. I love nature so having a cake that looks like a log on my table is definitely my jam!
Finally, my favorite bites on the menu are the crème brûlée cream puffs. I make a caramelized sugar Bavarian cream and use that to fill cream puffs. The puff gets dunked in hot caramel which then creates that wonderful sugar crunch we love from traditional crème brûlée. Crème brûlée is a celebratory dessert, and if I had to pick only one dessert to eat for the rest of my life, it would be the one.
There will probably be a few others that make a featured appearance on my holiday menu, but those four are my essentials this season.
*Interview was edited for clarity and length.
By Maddy Pontz
