The Science of Sweetness

Originally Published in the Washington Post - Style: April 6, 2012

Winnette McIntosh Ambrose does double duty at Sweet Lobby bakery and NIH lab

On a perfect day, Winnette McIntosh Ambrose would be in the kitchen of the Sweet Lobby, the pastry shop on Barracks Row she owns with her brother, by 6 a.m., in her National Institutes of Health lab by 10 a.m. and home by 8 p.m.

But not every day is perfect.

On this day, Ambrose is in the throes of training a new baker, which makes her a little late to Building 6 on the NIH campus, where she dons a white lab coat and peers through a microscope at mouse retinal cells. The cells are being cultured on a new biomaterial that Ambrose hopes will provide them with a better living environment than regular substrate. She would like to see, someday, sections of this biomaterial transplanted into degenerating retinas to restore vision.

Usually, her two lives — one as a creator of fine pastries and the other as a biochemical engineer — dovetail in a strange kind of harmony. Ambrose has a simple explanation why. “A lot of what we do in the lab involves a protocol of some kind,” Ambrose says. “You figure out how to plan an experiment in order to test the hypothesis. When you do an experiment, there are proportions — so this idea of following recipes to get a desired result is very much innate to me. When it comes to the kitchen, it’s kind of a similar thing. It was just a natural fit for me.”

The fit proved so natural that in February, just seven months after opening its doors on Capitol Hill, the Sweet Lobby won Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars.” Ambrose, incidentally, has never taken a cooking class.

Any cook knows that science has its place in the kitchen — it thickens sauces, raises souffles and enables other seemingly magical transformations. But Ambrose understands the marriage of sugar and butter just as she understands the link between tissue and substrate.

And there’s something more in the way this 36-year-old has dedicated her energies and expertise toward healing the most essential parts of the human body — the eye, the heart and the insatiable sweet tooth inside each of us. She is a perfectionist — tempered with a gift for madly creative improvisation. The same commitment to trial and error that is evident in her design of a cardiovascular stent (Ambrose holds a patent for the first Food and Drug Administration-approved carotid stenting device) is evident in her colorful macarons, which sit in mouth-watering rows in the Sweet Lobby’s custom-designed cases.

Fascination with science

As a young girl, growing up in a middle-class family on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Ambrose exhibited a highly motivated and ambitious nature. She always had a fascination with science, as well as an interest in languages.

“I knew from a fairly early age that there was this place called MIT, where you studied engineering, and you had to work really hard to get there. It was my goal from very early on.” At that point in her life, she’d had little exposure to things culinary. “What I did do,” she says happily, “was eat a lot of really tasty food.”

At 19, she entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on scholarship, beginning a double major in chemical engineering and French language and literature. “So having this kind of dual mind-set is something I’ve been comfortable with for a long time,” Ambrose says.

Almost immediately, she met fellow Trinidadian Ricardo Ambrose, a Computer Science major, and fell in love. They were married six days after graduation.

The food at MIT was ghastly, she says, so under Ricardo’s direction — he was an accomplished cook — they began preparing and freezing a month’s supply of meals. Soon, they were entertaining friends — he cooking the main courses, she the appetizers and desserts.

During a semester at the Sorbonne in Paris, Ambrose discovered French patisserie, particularly the macaron, that whimsically colored and filled almond meringue. Her admiration was based strictly looks — on a student budget, she couldn’t afford them. Only years later would she taste one, but she was determined to learn how to make them.

‘A global perspective’

It was after graduate school in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University when Ambrose began her methodical experimentation with making the technically precise macaron.

“It was about finding existing recipes, figuring out how to modify them and making them my own, combining my technical background with what I call a global perspective.” She laughs and says, “A lot of trial and error, too.”

Jennifer Elisseeff, Ambrose’s adviser at Johns Hopkins, says that she was good at bringing different things together. “She was the one to bridge all the people she had to work with. In science, you don’t usually see people with such social skills,” Elisseeff says.

After Ambrose obtained her doctorate in 2009 and eight months after accepting a job at the NIH’s National Eye Institute, she decided the time had come to put her culinary ingenuity to the test and open a boutique bakery with her younger brother (and fellow MIT graduate), Timothy McIntosh. He moved to Capitol Hill, where Ambrose trained him in the techniques she had taught herself.

It took 10 months to convert a 100-year-old former hair salon to the sleek storefront that is the Sweet Lobby. Ambrose was involved in every detail, from the high-capacity commercial kitchen to the color palette. The boxes, labels, even the tags were hers from concept to creation.

Creativity in science can progress at a glacial pace. “I think that the gratification you get from the life in pastry is a lot more immediate. I can come in with an idea for something I think would be amazing today and see it tomorrow. There are loads of opportunities for being inventive in science — that’s what it’s all about — but knowing whether or not your inventiveness plays out to impact people is a very delayed process,” Ambrose says.

Keeping both worlds aloft is a Herculean task. “It has segmented my life in two,” she says. Until she won “Cupcake Wars,” she never told anyone at NIH — not even her boss — about her “other” life at the Sweet Lobby.

“I feel that when you’re in one sphere, it’s important to focus on that sphere,” she says. “Unnecessary distractions can detract from the integrity of what you’re doing in that space.”

But if she had to choose? “I really don’t like thinking about it,” she says, frowning. “Most of the time, I am at peace, but I would not be entirely truthful if I said I didn’t feel conflict at times. But it’s my choice.” She smiles.

“At the end of the day, too, we have to be careful not to take ourselves too seriously.”

Because when you live in two worlds, every day cannot be a perfect day.