Brigitte Malivert, the pastry chef behind Queen B Bake Shop, was a late bloomer in the kitchen.
Her Haitian mother and grandmother had long pressured her to learn to cook, but Haitian cuisine could be complicated and time-consuming. And the intuitive approach clashed with Malivert’s self-described “very type A way of thinking.” She wanted exact timing and measurements; her family relied on natural ways of knowing.
“I remember asking my grandma how much of a certain spice to put in, and she would say, ‘you put in until it’s enough,’” Malivert said. “That’s very difficult for my mind to wrap around.” When she started baking, she found the precision and consistency she sought.
Baking beignets
Her senior year of college, Malivert baked late-night bites for her friends to make her thesis-writing go by faster. Her muse: Tiana of the Disney movie “The Princess and the Frog,” a character who baked hundreds of beignets for a masquerade ball.
It didn’t matter that hers turned out differently shaped instead of perfectly rectangular like in the movie; the doughnut-like powdered sugar pieces were fluffy and well-fried, and baking them calmed her during a stressful time.
Shifting gears
By contrast, the pre-med track wasn’t bringing her joy. On a whim, Malivert applied for a restaurant job while she figured things out.
Malivert didn’t tell her family about the pivot upfront. They found out when a family friend spotted her working at the restaurant before she had the chance to make the big reveal. The news wasn’t well received by her family. She was leaving a secure path in the medical field for a less dependable career in the food world.
Her job meant 10-hour shifts on her feet in a high-pressure environment. But Malivert was used to the hustle from healthcare. She also credits her years swimming competitively since age 8 for the stamina. She quotes another Disney favorite, “Finding Nemo”: “It definitely helps with that kind of mindset of ‘just keep going, just keep swimming.’”
The making of Queen B Bake Shop
During the pandemic, Malivert poured her Disney-inspired experimentation from college into her Queen B Bake Shop.
She started playing around in the kitchen, and by summer 2020, cake orders started rolling in. Back then, before her job as a pastry sous chef in several New York City restaurants, she had nearly limitless time to experiment and say yes to all requests including classic pastries like carrot cake or specialized orders like wedding cakes.
She’s currently taking orders on Instagram but her goal is to eventually open up a physical pastry shop that has a rotating menu. She envisions herself creating “a dining experience to reflect what [her] favorite parts of pastry are” while continuing to do wedding cakes and other customized desserts.
Closer to her roots
A larger project Malivert has been baking is exploring what Haitian desserts would look like without a colonial influence. She started with a corn porridge called labouyi. She reimagined it without its colonial influences by skipping typical French elements like tart shells and layered cakes. Instead, Malivert focused on pre-colonial Haitian ingredients like cornmeal and cassava.
She started this de-colonizing journey while in pastry training at the culinary school Ferrandi Paris in France.
“France is like the world’s capital of pastry and that’s where a lot of pastry innovation happens — and we [in Haiti, as a former colony] have a complicated history with France,” she said.
Tensions rose, for instance, when a lecturer visited the pastry school from a chocolate company based in France. The country doesn’t directly produce chocolate — the cacao is farmed in other countries—so it irked Malivert that the lecturer was lauding his company’s farmer growth program.
“That really just bothered me … and I know I pissed off this representative because I was like, ‘I don’t know how great your farmer growth program can be if a farmer can never progress out of farming and into the business aspect, which is where the money is,’” Malivert said.
The experience has informed Malivert’s thinking around baking ingredients that are considered classic, such as chocolate and vanilla, but that are not produced in places considered pastry capitals. She started looking into the history of colonization linked to sugar cane, vanilla, and chocolate, all of which are unaffordable for many people who are somehow tied to their production.
“Why is that?” Malivert said. “I like to think about those things a lot and imagine these pastries through the context of history.” It’s an ongoing project that Malivert has also explored as a freelance food writer for the Food Network. It might someday bake into a book, she says.
Meanwhile, Malivert has been feeling closer to her family history. She has been able to grow into the cooking intuition her family always talked about. Now, even if she’s not working with a recipe, she can still navigate her way to a culinary creation. It has also brought her closer to her food culture — and her language, in which she wasn’t always fluent.
“I am more able to feel out something that I used to [prepare with] an exact measurement,” she said. “So I need to revisit making more Haitian food.”
Queen B Bake Shop
She is revamping her website. You can place orders on Instagram at @queenbbakeshop
