Every summer growing up, Audrey Leonard traveled to Germany to visit her grandparents, where mornings meant sharing pastries from the local bakery with her sister, and afternoons were spent laughing over a slice of cake.
When the pandemic hit years later, Leonard found herself back at her family’s home in Colorado and missing the pastries she grew up enjoying during those German summers. After realizing how difficult it was to find authentic German baked goods and recipes in the United States, she decided to recreate them herself. Leonard enrolled in pastry school and began documenting her creations on a small baking blog that soon evolved into Red Currant Bakery — a space where she shares modern takes on traditional German desserts alongside her own original creations.
Today, Leonard is known for her decadent ganaches and fruit-filled cakes, as well as her cookbook Süss, which combines her fond memories from German summers with recipes she loves. A graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology who interned with designers like Tory Burch and Marra Hoffman, Leonard now blends her trained eye with her baking skills, creating desserts that are equally beautiful and they are delicious
We chatted with Leonard about transitioning from career interests, the inspiration behind her seasonal birthday cakes, and publishing her first official cookbook.
Spoon University: You first began your career in the fashion world before transitioning into food media and recipe development. What inspired that shift and how do you use that previous experience to influence work you do now?
Audrey Leonard: Totally. Well, to be honest, the shift kind of came about because of COVID. I graduated in 2020, and my whole life, I had planned on doing fashion. I loved fashion, and I still do. I was like, “This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.” I will say, my retirement plan had always been to open a cafe bakery in some small town somewhere, like that was my dream. But I never really thought about that as a career in food.
And then I moved home to Colorado because I didn’t have a job and didn’t know what I should be doing. And — I love learning — so the jump from college, where you’re learning all the time or being an intern, to not really having anything new to learn, I was bored. So I decided that I should take myself to pastry school, essentially, because I always thought it would be so fun to go to pastry school, just like, as a hobby. I ordered a few textbooks and read through all of those and then started practicing, but quickly realized that I really didn’t love following other people’s recipes. I found it quite boring to just follow something and know what the outcome was going to be. I was like, well, then I didn’t need to make it. I could have just bought it somewhere.
Because of COVID, we couldn’t go to Germany, and I had grown up going to Germany every summer with my mom, my sister, and my grandparents. So I kind of took it upon myself to start recreating a lot of the recipes that we grew up eating there, specifically the desserts and pastries, because they aren’t really very accessible in the US — there’s not a lot of German bakeries, there’s not a lot of German baking books. And honestly, a lot of the recipes in Germany aren’t published anywhere; they’re just family recipes. I think they’re starting to become a bit more accessible, but there’s this website called Chefkoch.de. And basically, it’s kind of like Reddit. Like anybody can post a recipe on there. And it’s all German, but a lot of the recipes are from anywhere in the world. But old grandmas write their little recipes, which also means it’s a traditional grandma recipe — like there’s no bake time. There’s no method. There’s no real amounts sometimes. You never know what you’re going to get. So basically, I just started remembering some type of dessert, did a whole bunch of research on it — my mom had some old German baking books, too, because she loves to bake — and yeah, I just started there and really fell in love with having an idea and being able to create it, and it tasting how I wanted it to.
SU: Your audience especially looks forward to your monthly birthday cake recipes. Can you walk us through how you develop the flavors and concepts for each month?
AL: Yeah, I was just talking to somebody else about this recently, and I wish I could very clearly spell it out, but really, it’s kind of just a feeling. It’s very seasonal. So I will say, especially when a lot of fruits are in season, I kind of find it the easiest. I love baking in the summer, like spring, summer, and fall are my favorite times to bake, because every time I go to the farmers’ market, there’s a different fruit available. A lot of the birthday cakes during those months are very inspired by whatever is in season for me.
In the summer, when it’s really hot, I don’t want a cake covered in buttercream because that just seems so sickly and rich. Whereas in November/December, you can kind of get away with it a little bit more. Same with like, if I’m going to make an ice cream cake, that makes sense to me in the summer; probably not going to do that in January. And otherwise, yeah, it’s kind of just a feeling. I feel like gender is so fluid, but sometimes certain months just feel more boyish to me, and others feel more girly. Like, I think March feels like more of a boy month, and April feels like more of a girl month. April just feels whimsical and kind of like there should be something pink in there. Whereas last March, I made a banana bread cake with chocolate ganache and a sour cream whipped cream. I feel like it’s just meant to be a little bit bolder, a little bit more — I think that’s a better way to describe it — certain months feel light and airy, and then other months feel a little bit more like the font is bold.
It’s also funny because sometimes it’s based on people I know who have a birthday in that month, and then sometimes it’s not at all. Like my best friend, her birthday’s in March, but it’s after the spring equinox, and I feel like because of that, it’s a totally different cake. She always wants something with Bavarian cream and fruit of some sort, which I love to make, but at the beginning of March? The March birthday cake is in the fridge right now and it’s snowing and raining and gloomy outside. The thought of doing raspberries and Bavarian cream just doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s also so interesting to hear when people agree versus disagree because I’m just doing it based on how I feel. That’s why every time I’m like, “If my birthday was in this month, this is what I would make.” But also, I love it when people make, like, the February birthday cake in September. Like, there are no rules; it’s just a cake.
SU: Out of all the birthday cakes you’ve created, is there one that you especially love?
AL: That is a hard one. I’ll give you my top three from last year. The February birthday cake last year, which is a raspberry hazelnut, dark chocolate one. I would love to do another version of it, but it would be the exact same flavors, so I feel like I can’t bore people by doing that. And then the raspberry apricot brioche, which was for June last year. That to me, I could just eat the whole thing. I love a brioche honestly — more than a cake sometimes — because I feel like it’s not as sweet, but you still get that light fluffiness. And then the dirty chai tiramisu cake from October of last year, where it’s just chocolate cake and mascarpone cream and soaked lady fingers. I like that one a lot because I feel like it was a fun crossover of desserts into a cake.
SU: Your German heritage plays such an integral role in the heart of Red Currant Bakery, and why you started it. Why was it important to you to incorporate those flavors and memories into what you do?
AL: I think it was so interesting growing up in Texas and Colorado, but also experiencing it in Germany, where I think sweets are such a part of the culture. Like every morning, my sister and I would go down to the bakery, and we got to pick out a pastry for breakfast, and that was like my favorite part of the morning. And then in the afternoons, we would go get coffee and cake, which is kind of like the Swedish fika, but in Germany, we go get coffee and cake. I think it just held so many memories for me, and that’s what’s so special about food, and especially about baking, is we often bake for a celebration or for something, and it just holds so many memories of who you shared it with. I think a lot of the flavors and textures are also quite different in German baking; they tend to be a lot less sweet. I personally feel like, therefore, you can taste the different flavors a bit more. And so, it was kind of impossible for me not to include it.
In the beginning, of course, I started out just doing German baking, but then once I started to do recipes that were just my idea, it was kind of impossible to separate the two. I grew up eating old-fashioned cake donuts and Oreos and a Twinkie here and there, but also beautiful 10-layer cakes in Germany that have no buttercream and are just mousse and jelly and different things like that. And to me, it just always made sense to meld them together.
SU: You published a cookbook in 2023! What was that process like? And what do you think a younger version of yourself would have said if they’d known that you were going to become a cookbook author?
AL: Oh, my gosh. Okay. Well, the process is very interesting. It was a lot of work, for sure. And I do remember when I was approached about it, at first I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t really feel like I was qualified to do it. I was like, “I haven’t been baking for that long. What do you mean you want me to write a cookbook?” It was always something I thought I would do way further in the future. But then, I kind of sat with it and was like, “How cool would it be to be a published cookbook author? Like, that’s pretty fun.” I never thought about that because, truly, my whole life, all I thought about was fashion design — like that was all I thought about. So it was kind of this idea that I hadn’t really put much time into previously until the opportunity came about. And then I was like, “Hmm, interesting.” So I think, for sure, younger me would be like, “Whoa, we wrote a cookbook.”
I actually also wrote a cookbook for my dad in college. They weren’t my recipes; it was more just a way for him to have this assortment of recipes that he wanted. But yeah, I think younger me would be very proud.
Honestly, I think one of my favorite parts of that book was doing the photography because I did all of the photography and styling and editing myself. I just had such a clear vision for each recipe. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted each one to feel, and I kind of styled them very much based on the recipe, so there aren’t a lot of other props in the photos. It’s very much just about that food or that recipe. But it was a very cool process. And it’s always so fun to see people still making the recipes and sending me photos because it’s kind of just out there now. But then people will have cookbook clubs and make all the recipes from it, which I just think is crazy. But yeah, it was a labor of love, and I spent a lot of hours and a lot of sleepless nights on it!