In the tight kitchen at Helen in downtown Birmingham, pastry chef Candace Foster is doing more than whisking sugar and cream together. She’s engineering feelings.
“I try to do nostalgic things,” she says. “Things my grandmother made, things my mom made, or food memories from the cooks I work with. People want something that tastes good and looks good but also reminds them of something.” That mix of memory, technical rigor and Southern comfort has made Foster one of Birmingham’s most compelling pastry voices, garnering her a recognition as Top 14 desserts in the US of 2025 by New York Times, for her “Watermelon Icebox.” She oversees desserts at both Helen and its seafood-focused sister restaurant, Bayonet, bringing a quietly exacting discipline to everything from angel biscuits to custard tarts.
From Chelsea to the Peach Cake That Changed Everything
(Southbound Food Festival/Contributed)
Foster grew up in Chelsea, Alabama, the kid who always wanted a hand in the dough. “My mom made dumplings, and me and my sister would fight over who got to roll and cut them,” she remembers.
Formal training came later at Jeff State, where pastry instructor Chef Rinske left an imprint. “He was very old school,” she says. “Technique and discipline were really important. That’s something I still talk about all the time—discipline. It’s hard to teach, but it changes everything.”
She honed these skills at a beloved Mountain Brook restaurant, Ollie Irene, where she created a peach cake that charted the next step in her career. As luck would have it, Chef Rob McDaniel and his wife Emily came in for dinner one night and ordered that dessert. When she saw him start to follow her on Instagram, she remembers thinking, “Something is happening…it felt like a sign.”
Ollie Irene shuttered in 2020, prompting Foster to seek opportunity elsewhere. She staged at a few area restaurants including Automatic Seafood & Oysters and Hot & Hot Fish Club. She was offered a pastry chef position at Automatic but shares “I wanted to learn how to cook with fire. Something just kept calling me toward Helen.”
She joined the restaurant on New Year’s Eve 2021 and today her peach cake has evolved into one of the most sought-after desserts. She credits Giffard’s Peach Liqueur for the edge, noting “I’m very specific about that specific liqueur. I’ve tried others and they are not the same. I want it to be consistent.”
Two Restaurants, Two Voices
Today, Foster runs the pastry programs at both Helen and Bayonet, supported by assistants Jackie Ochieng at Helen and August Williams at Bayonet. Each restaurant demands its own dessert identity. “At Helen, you might get a slice of cake,” she says. “At Bayonet, you might get a more intricate, individually plated dessert.”
Helen leans into elevated Southern comfort: angel biscuits, banana pudding that never leaves the menu, and nostalgic treats like an oatmeal cream pie inspired by the Little Debbie basket at her grandmother’s house.
“You don’t leave your grandma’s house hungry,” Foster says, laughing. “I want desserts that feel like that—comforting, familiar—but a little more special.”
At seafood-focused Bayonet, desserts are lighter, more fruit-forward and intricately plated. But creativity always coexists with practicality. “As cooks, we always want to make things really cool and really nice,” she says. “But you have to ask, ‘Can we execute this in volume? Can everyone on the line do this consistently?’”
Discipline in the Details
(Mary Fehr/Contributed)
Working with McDaniel has also shaped Foster’s ideas about leadership and mentorship.
“Rob has really opened me up to mentorship,” she says. “The most rewarding part of the job is when my assistant creates a dish and I can see they thought about the things I taught them. Or when I see someone doing the thing I showed them—or teaching someone else. That’s huge.”
She watches the seemingly insignificant details, too. “Rob always says, if something’s on the floor and you step over it three times instead of picking it up, that tells us a lot,” she says.
For Foster, those small habits translate directly to the consistency required in pastry. “You have to let go of ego and just train people,” she says. “If they don’t know the hows and whys, technical skills disappear. I don’t want that to happen.”
It is this adherence to consistency that can be credited for the success of Rob’s execution of recipes handed down from his grandmother Helen, that runs through Candace and her team.
Seasons, Stories and Salt
Foster draws inspiration from seasonal ingredients, cookbooks, her own memories and those of the people working beside her.
“It’s kind of all of those things,” she says. “Seasonal ingredients, classics people actually want to eat, and then memories—mine and my team’s. I don’t want to get weird just to be weird.”
She’s especially drawn to older Southern recipes, including Lane cake. Her Uncle Jack repeatedly asked her to make one, but its combination of coconut, bourbon and dried fruit didn’t appeal to her younger palate.
After he passed, she finally baked it.
“I was really impressed,” she says. “My palate had changed. It opened me up to those older recipes your grandma made or her grandma made—bringing them back to life, adding little modern touches to make them more approachable.”
And there is one ingredient she reaches for again and again: salt.
“I finish most desserts with salt,” Foster says. “You don’t want things to be salty, but you want to taste it. If something’s really sweet and you get a little bit of salt, it’s like a palate cleanser. It makes you want another bite.”
That combination of memory and precision will be on display at SOUTHBOUND’s Heritage Dinner cakewalk, where Foster plans to serve her Alabama Lane cake, a version of the dessert that has appeared at Helen as “Uncle Jack’s Lane Cake.” You can find the recipe for her Lane Cake below.
“It feels right for a heritage dinner,” she says. “It’s old-fashioned, but it still surprises people. That’s what I love.”
And that, perhaps, is Foster’s sweet spot: creating something familiar enough to stir a memory, but interesting enough to make you pay attention.
“I want them to feel like they want to come back for it again,” she says. “Not overloaded or heavy—just impressed, satisfied, and maybe reminded of something they didn’t even know they missed.”
Chef Candace Foster’s Alabama Lane Cake
Yields: 1 9-inch, 4-layer cake
(Candace Foster/Contributed)
Cake:
474g sugar
6 eggs, warmed under hot water
435g all purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
339g sour cream, room temp
237g canola oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
Filling:
115g unsalted butter, room temp
250g sugar
¼ cup milk
8 egg yolks
¼ tsp salt
½ cup bourbon
1 tsp vanilla extract
145g chopped golden raisins
115g chopped toasted pecans
90g toasted coconut
75g dried cherries or maraschino cherries, chopped
Bourbon syrup:
¼ cup bourbon
200g (1 cup) sugar
¾ cup water
½ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla
Swiss Meringue Frosting:
8 oz sugar
4 oz egg whites
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
1 tbsp cornstarch
To Make the cake
Grease and flour two 9 inch round cake pans, then line the bottom with parchment.
Combine oil, sour cream and vanilla in a pitcher. Sift together flour, salt and baking powder, place in a bowl or pourable cup. In the stand mixer with whip attachment, whip warm eggs with sugar on medium high speed for several minutes until the mixture is pale, voluminous and sugar has dissolved. Turn the mixer to low speed and alternate adding the flour and wet ingredients until almost combined. After adding the remaining, turn the mixer off and use a rubber spatula to gently scrape and finish mixing by gently folding in. Divide evenly into 2 pans and bake at 350 conventional oven or 300 high fan for convection oven, for about 35 minutes or until set in the middle and golden brown. Place on racks to cool completely.
To make the filling
In a small sauce pan, combine sugar, butter, milk and egg yolks with a whisk or rubber spatula.
In a bowl combine coconut, dried fruit, pecans and salt.
Place saucepan over medium low heat and cook, stirring continuously to prevent scrambling eggs, until mixture feels hot and the sugar has completely dissolved. You can check by rubbing the mixture between your fingers to feel for sugar granules. Pour the mixture (through a strainer if necessary) into the bowl with the nuts and fruit, then add vanilla, bourbon and salt. Stir to combine and set aside to cool down.
To make the bourbon syrup
Combine everything in a saucepan and bring to a boil to dissolve the sugar. Set aside to cool completely.
Swiss Meringue
Combine everything in a bowl that will fit on a pot of simmering water, whisk everything thoroughly then cook over simmering water, whisking constantly, until the mixture is hot to the touch and the sugar has completely dissolved, use your fingers to test or check that the mixture has reached 160 degrees with a probe thermometer. Remove the bowl from the boiler, wipe the water off the bottom with a towel, then immediately pour the mixture into a stand mixer with whip attachment. Whip on medium high speed until smooth, glossy thick peaks have formed and the meringue has cooled down. Use immediately.
Assembly
Have everything ready and cooled before building. Place bourbon syrup in a squeeze bottle or have a pastry brush handy for soaking the layers. Have a scoop for the filling, and an offset spatula or two for frosting and spreading filling. Ideally have a turning cake stand and a long serrated knife for torting the cake.
Using a serrated knife, divide each layer of cake into two layers to make four layers total. Place one bottom layer of cake, cut side up, on a cake board or plate, with a dot of meringue to keep it from sliding. Soak the layer evenly with a quarter of the bourbon syrup. Add ¼ of the filling and spread evenly to the edge. Repeat with the next three layers. Once all layers are nicely stacked. Frost the sides with the meringue, creating whatever pattern or swooshes you desire to decorate. Lightly torch the meringue to seal it. Store at room temp. The cake is best eaten the next day when all the flavors have soaked in.
Never miss a story. Subscribe to our newsletter and get the best of Alabama delivered to your inbox every Friday.
