Last week Elena Vázquez Felgueres and Tamar Fasja Unikel, the owners and proprietors and also chief bakers and delivery drivers of Masa Madre, which is, as far as they know, Chicago’s only Jewish-Mexican bakery, met in Vázquez Felgueres’s kitchen in Pilsen to try out recipes for Passover, three weeks away.
“Some say, ‘add puño,’ a pinch, a handful of flour,” adds Vázquez Felgueres. “But it depends on the [size of the] hand. I don’t know why they’re like that. They probably had kids and a full house and no time.”
“Hopefully,” Fasja Unikel adds.
While the cakes bake, they chat about Fasja Unikel’s baby, due in June, and a recent catastrophe involving a can of exploded condensed milk that was on its way to becoming dulce de leche, something that has never happened to either of them before. (“I think it’s because we left your husband in charge,” muses Vázquez Felgueres. “It was like a bomb went off.” They’re still trying to figure out how to get the remains off the ceiling.) Finally the moment of truth arrives: the cakes are on the counter.
