The pastry chef making desserts on top of glaciers
Rose McAdoo uses cake to talk climate change
When pastry chef Rose McAdoo arrived at Denali base camp this summer for a creative expedition with other artists, her pack was adorned with a camp flag that said “CAKE INSIDE.”
It was no exaggeration. Alongside camping gear, extreme-cold sleeping bags, and two weeks’ worth of food, she’d also packed mixing bowls, spatulas, a balloon whisk, dry ingredients that could be activated with snowmelt, and an entire four-tiered cake.
Formerly a full-time pastry chef, McAdoo now spends half the year working as a glacier guide in Alaska, and the other half as a field coordinator at the US Antarctic program. But as soon as she’s off the clock, she brings out the cake pans. She’s spent the last several years translating polar and climate science into desserts.
“I think climate change has such a negative message, stereotypically speaking,” she says. “So using desserts, which are a light and celebratory and joyous tool, really eliminates a lot of the heavy doom and gloom.”
Dessert can also bring esoteric science within reach. One of the candies she made while at Denali base camp was a crevasse candy bar that offered an edible explanation of glacial movement. Flexible layers of caramel and nougat were topped with a crisp white chocolate layer that broke when you bent the candy bar, similar to how only the top layer of ice breaks when a glacier moves—ever so slowly—over an obstacle like a cliff.
McAdoo’s edible approach to science education has a whiff of the theatrical, and it makes sense when you understand her earliest sources of inspiration.
Growing up, she says, “I watched a lot of Food Network competitions…like the big sugar-showpiece shows and the cake shows where they have to move it from one table to the next. That was very much where I found the most joy and excitement around food.”
She knew by the time she was 13 that she wanted to be a pastry chef. By 19, she was running the pastry department at Lake Powell Resort in Arizona.
Eventually she moved to Brooklyn, where she ran production for a bean-to-bar chocolate factory and made elaborate custom cakes at Nine Cakes.
It was in front of Nine Cakes’ floor-to-ceiling windows, which offered a view of the Statue of Liberty, that her approach to dessert changed. Trump had just been elected, and McAdoo realized there were “a lot of things that weren’t working in our country and our world as a whole.”
She decided to make a series of “more political” cakes: A bust of the Statue of Liberty wearing a hijab, a cake that said “Refugees are welcome here,” another about gun deaths, and one that was hand-painted with the words, “Climate change is real.”
She was hooked. These were the kinds of cakes she wanted to make.
Around the same time, an opportunity appeared that would pull McAdoo’s cake activism toward the coldest corners of the world. She’d dreamed of working in Antarctica for a decade; and at 28, she landed a job as a sous chef at the US Antarctic program.
Once she got there, glaciers and ice and the infectious nerdiness of the scientists around her became her pastry muse. “It was almost exclusively climate science from there on out,” she says.
Since then she’s made desserts that explain how snowpack depths are measured and that recreate the ropes used to take those measurements. Another cake that’s bisected by a vivid blue gully explains that crevasses are getting larger as glaciers melt.
This summer, McAdoo used dessert to explain something counterintuitive about the effects of climate change in Alaska: that the number of glaciers is increasing, even as their volume shrinks.
At a dinner event in a remote Alaskan town, she served each guest “a glorified panna cotta” topped with a flat sheet of meringue. “They had to physically break the meringue to get into the dessert itself,” McAdoo explains. In its center was a sauce flavored with foraged berries and Labrador tea that represented glacial flood outbursts.
“Instead of one meringue, when you break it, you technically have five smaller meringues. That’s technically what’s happening to glaciers in Alaska as they’re melting, they’re breaking into more but smaller glaciers.”
Ultimately, McAdoo’s desserts are a canvas for issues that might otherwise be scary or complex, but in sugar form, are more digestible.
“No one is scared of desserts,” she says. “It’s just impossible. It’s this really safe, approachable medium and tool to be talking about much bigger conversations.”
In a moment of Substack kismet, yesterday food historian and fermenterJulia Skinner wrote about the menu at this very dinner that featured Rose’s panna cotta. Read more about the flavors of environmental change that Julia, Rose, and the culinary team at McCarthy Lodge served here.
The crevasse candy! Such a good way to explain what’s going on.
SHE IS SO COOL. THIS IS SO COOL.