This month, Bon Appétit’s Bake Club is putting a spin on a classic. Listen in as Jesse Szewczyk breaks down his popular recipe for Chocolate Guinness Cake.
“The cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I got lucky,” Jesse explains to cohost Shilpa Uskokovic. But the challenge came when it was time to develop the frosting. “I feel like everyone in the Test Kitchen had an opinion on what it should be…I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings.”
Ultimately, Jesse landed on a brown butter frosting as the perfect topper, not just for taste but also because it matched the visual of an expertly poured Guinness with its creamy head. “It’s reinforced with just a tad of Guinness, two tablespoons,” Jesse says. “I found it important to have Guinness in both places.”
Jesse and Shilpa also dive deep into the mailbag and answer questions about the cake and troubleshoot issues listeners encountered.
Plus, baker and psychologist Helen Goh stops by in our “Baker You Should Know” segment. Helen confesses that she has been living a double life for years and explains how she juggled working with the acclaimed Yotam Ottolenghi on developing sweet treats while seeing patients in her psychology practice. Her latest book, Baking & the Meaning of Life, bridges the gap between the two worlds.
As always, we’d love to hear from you! To send your questions to Bon Appétit Bake Club, subscribe to us on Substack, or send us a voice memo to [email protected].
Shilpa Uskokovic: I'm Shilpa Uskokovic.
Jesse Szewczyk: And I'm Jesse Szewczyk.
SU: We're both senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit.
JS: And this is BA Bake Club.
SU: Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers.
JS: We're creating the nerdiest and most wholesome corner of the baking internet.
SU: Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know.
JS: And then you'll go bake, send us any questions you might have or pictures of your finished creations.
SU: And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.
JS: The April Bake Club recipe, Strawberry Roll Cake is live now on bonappetit.com. And we'll tell you a bit more about that at the end of the episode.
SU: But today, today, Jesse, we're here to talk about your chocolate Guinness cake.
JS: Yes.
SU: Here are some of the comments we've got on this cake, in quotes, "Indulgent, truly obsessed, magic cake."
JS: Okay.
SU: Jesse, tell us. Tell us everything about this magical indulgent cake that everybody is truly obsessed about.
JS: Yeah. The truth is I feel like sometimes for Bake Club, we sit and we pull these ideas out of our head. And then sometimes we-
SU: That's not the body part I would've referred to.
JS: With the clean version. And then sometimes we identify these iconic beloved bakes that we don't have and we ask ourselves, how do we put our Bake Club spin on these? And with St. Patrick's Day and the season, we don't have a chocolate Guinness cake.
SU: Yeah. It's crazy to think about.
JS: Yeah. And that's where it came from.
SU: It was lovely. Before we get too far into the development process, why don't you tell us a few of the basic steps of how you make the cake. We're going to queue the instructional jaunty music.
JS: Oh, wow.
SU: There we go. Jesse, can you walk us through the steps of your recipe?
JS: Yeah, totally. It's a very simple cake. You make it by hand. It's a loaf cake with some frosting on top. To make the loaf cake, you whisk your wet ingredients together. You whisk eggs, the Guinness, of course, a little bit of vegetable oil, and some vanilla. And then in another bowl, you whisk up your dry ingredients so you have sugar, flour, Dutch-processed cocoa powder, salt, your leavener, powder, and soda. And then you add a stick of butter that's cut into cubes and you pinch it and massage it in, like you're making pie crust but you go all the way until essentially the butter disappears and you're left with moistened sand-like texture. And then you add the wet to that, you whisk it up, pour it into a loaf pan and bake it.
Once that is baked, you make the frosting. And the frosting is you brown a stick of butter and then you let it re-solidify a bit. It's soft and then you add powdered sugar, you add a little more [inaudible 00:02:58] some vanilla, some salt, and just whisk that up by hand. That's your frosting, swoosh it on top and that's it.
SU: I'm very intrigued because first of all, you use two kinds of fat.
JS: Yes.
SU: It's oil and butter.
JS: Yes.
SU: And that's very unusual, your approach. The oil and butter using two combination of fat is not uncommon. I know you love to use both.
JS: I do love to use both, yes.
SU: But what's your reasoning behind using both?
JS: Okay. Because I love the flavor of butter. I love the texture of an oil cake. This is like a little bit of both. Yeah, you're the best of both worlds.
SU: And then perhaps the most unusual thing about this cake is your technique of rubbing that butter into the dry ingredients like it's pie crust, as you said.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think you need to explain this a little bit more.
JS: Yeah. Okay. For our listeners who have been here for a while, I don't know if you guys remember the episode with [inaudible 00:03:54] But she popularized this technique called reverse creaming which was popular in professional bakeries, which is when you combine your fat source with your dry ingredients instead of creaming together your sugar with your fat first, you're coating the flour in fat. She took that and she made it for home cooks using butter, mixing your butter with the flour. And typically this is done in a mixer.
And I thought to myself, "I bet I could do this by hand." And that's exactly what I did. And what's happening is you're coating the flour molecules in a very thin layer of butter or fat. And it prohibits the gluten formation a bit. Then when you add your wet ingredients and you whisk it up, you're left with a very, very tender cake. And also it prevents you from over-mixing. Certainly you can over-mix but I think it would be really hard to over-mix a cake once you reverse cream the dry ingredients. That's that, I wanted an ultra plush cake and this was my take it in.
SU: I love how you did a technique that we normally associate with having to need a mixer.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think the breakthrough here was that you achieved it without the mixer. Everything is by hand, which I think is quite revolutionary.
JS: Yeah. No, I think it's fun. And then the frosting comes together by hand too so it's like a very laid back affair.
SU: What about the Guinness? First of all, do you like Guinness?
JS: I like beer. Yeah, sure. I do. Yeah, I like Guinness. I do. I know it's a bit polarizing. It's a classic combination with chocolate but I think it makes sense. Guinness is made with malted barley and then also malted milk powder, which a lot of bakers probably know is this magical ingredient that just makes things taste so much better but it's hard to find. They're sisters in my mind so this made a lot of sense to me. I'm like, "Oh, I think Guinness is actually quite easy to find." And maybe it would produce that same kind of magic that chocolate and malted milk powder does together. And I think it does. And Guinness tastes like chocolate, coffee, kind of nice bitter. I think of when people say, "Oh, add espresso powder to chocolate." I think it's doing the same thing. It's reinforcing and invigorating that chocolate flavor. Yeah.
SU: Well, that's interesting. I didn't realize that was your initial flavor inspiration, the malted milk powder. And that's clever.
JS: And Nigella.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: Yeah. I can't say chocolate Guinness cake without mentioning Nigella. She made her iconic cake, which is what stood the test of time.
SU: It really has. We love Nigella.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Jesse, speaking about the Guinness, is it doing anything more besides just adding flavor and obviously moisture?
JS: Sure. Mostly, it's moisture in that it's mostly water. It's in the place of milk or water often in cakes. But you also have to keep in mind, it's like coffee. It's quite acidic. You might not think of things like Coca-Cola or beer or these things as acidic but they are quite acidic so you have to calibrate your leaveners accordingly, and know that they will react with the baking soda and the baking powder to provide additional leavening, like brown sugar but even more in this case. You know what I mean? It is interesting.
SU: Okay. Another important or fun technique that you do in this recipe is you slash the cake.
JS: I do.
SU: And I know you wrote about this on our Substack.
JS: I did.
SU: Once you have the cake... To give everybody a little bit of context, once you make the batter, you pour it into a loaf tin, and then you do this one step before you put the cake in the oven.
JS: Yes, I take a knife. This is extra but I coat the knife in a little bit of oil and I just run it through the top to create a line. And what this does is it creates this fault line, this weak spot. And so as it bakes, it splits there. You know when you score a loaf of bread, you're scoring a cake. And yes, it makes it beautiful because you get this perfectly centered line in a bakery. But also I do think that when it has this weakened spot, it's able to expand and puff in a easier way. And I think it really does make for a slightly lighter cake. Yeah.
SU: I think there was a difference in the volume or the height of the cake when you slashed versus not.
JS: Totally.
SU: And the cake that was slashed did seem to rise higher and it certainly looked more nice.
JS: Yeah. I started doing this because I was a stylist and I was like, "Oh, it just looks good." I'm like, "Wait, I think this actually is important." So I started writing it in my recipes, coating it in a thin layer of oil is the key. But I've used anything from a butter knife to a very sharp pairing knife and it's all the same.
SU: And the oil is to prevent it from dragging through the cake batter and getting you a clean cut?
JS: Yeah. It almost leaves a oily residue in that line that then keeps the line in place. I've seen people actually... Have you seen...
SU: Oh, the pipe of butter in there?
JS: Yeah, the pipe like a line of butter. I guess it's the same exact thing.
SU: Yeah, I guess it's the same thing.
JS: And it sizzles in the time-lapse. You know what I'm talking about?
SU: Yeah, that is fun. Okay. Now the cake theoretically, this cake is in the oven. And then we're making our frosting.
JS: Sure.
SU: Why did you want to add Guinness to both the cake and the frosting? I don't know if this was your first choice.
JS: Okay. Okay.
SU: There's a story here, everyone is...
JS: Well, for everyone listening at home, the cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I don't know. I got lucky. The frosting, I feel like everyone in [inaudible 00:09:49] kitchen had an opinion on what it should be.
SU: I think because the cake came together so fast and nobody had a moment to air their opinions, the frosting was the poster child for everybody's grievances.
JS: Yeah. Yeah. I started with a ganache when we poured over.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: I was like, "Oh, it's tonal. It's dark on dark. It's moody." They did not love.
SU: No.
JS: And then Chris and Hannah, they both said it needs to be tan because I want it to look like the head of a beer.
SU: Yeah. When you see Guinness poured into a glass and then it has this frothy.
JS: And then it led me down like, "What the hell is a tan frosting?" I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings. And I ended up on a brown butter frosting that is reinforced with just a tad of Guinness, two tablespoons. I found it important to have Guinness in both places because it's like almost the glass. What is it called?
SU: Pint.
JS: Not a pint. What do they come in? A bottle. It's almost a bottle.
SU: I was like, "What?"
JS: There's almost a whole bottle worth of beer. I'm like, "Oh, I want to use up a little more." And also, I just like the idea of having it in both places. And I want actually a raw bite too, just a little bit.
SU: Okay. Because the Guinness is cooked in the batter and then you want it...
JS: Yes.
SU: Oh, interesting.
JS: I wanted it to express itself firmly.
SU: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And then also when you brown butter, you're losing some moisture so this is just adding that back. And then we ended up here.
SU: I remember this frosting journey.
JS: It was a journey.
SU: Because you were making it by hand and then you brown the butter. And then what texture was the butter before you add the rest of the ingredients?
JS: Like softened butter.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah, it's like just cooled enough.
SU: And an interesting thing happens to butter when it melts is even when it cools, it never comes back to that same structure as softened butter.
JS: No, you're left with often liquid with a cap of fat.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And I know that you really vigorously whisk this frosting.
JS: Yes.
SU: Do you think that's an essential part of this recipe, how much you mix the frosting?
JS: Yes, this actually acts very similarly to my chocolate olive oil cake frosting.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: In the sense that if you mix the ingredients together with the frosting, you'll be left with a textured spread.
SU: Yeah.
JS: And then when you switch to a whisk and you mechanically give it a little...
SU: You're full of noises these days in this podcast.
JS: I only have so many words to describe things. That's when it comes together, you need this mechanical action of actually vigorously whisking it to not only emulsify these ingredients together but to add air, which is an essential ingredient to give it body so that it stays in place and it's swooshable rather than dripping.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And that was a huge difference because I remember-
JS: Huge difference.
SU: ...there was times when you didn't whip it as much and it was like a more-
JS: And it's completely different.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yes.
SU: It was much more like blonde wood color like this...
JS: Yes. And then when you whisk it, there's this couple of second transformation when it becomes so much lighter.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yes. It holds onto the air.
SU: It's quite magical. You could do it both ways, not whip it as much and then smear it on the cake. But there's something very magical and light and fluffy about this frosting and its capacity to hold air.
JS: Yeah, you really need to whisk it.
SU: Okay. I notice when you make the frosting, it's like a whippy, frothy layer on top. Do you think there's a magic ratio of frosting to cake, your ideal ratio?
JS: My ideal ratio is whatever is the most beautiful.
SU: Oh, okay.
JS: What about you?
SU: I could take a plain cake.
JS: Warm?
SU: No.
JS: No?
SU: I don't like warm cake. I know that's a trend on the internets these days but just tell me you can bake, babe.
JS: Oh, okay.
SU: Okay. How would you serve this cake?
JS: How would I serve it? I just put it on my counter and just like that's that. I think because of my oil addition.
SU: Oh, yeah?
JS: Yeah, I think that makes the butter based cakes stay moist for much, much longer. And it's not a lot of oil but it does huge lifting here.
SU: Do you think serving it with a pint of Guinness is good or excessive?
JS: You do you. You know what I mean?
SU: Okay. On that note, we're going to take a quick break.
JS: And when we get back, we'll answer some listener questions all about the chocolate Guinness cake.
Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
SU: Jesse, are you ready for some listener questions?
JS: I'm ready.
SU: Okay. We have lots of questions from our Substack which PS, you should go and subscribe to our Substack, BA Bake Club, if you haven't already. And this first question is from Katie, "Chocolate Guinness cake! It was so good. That frosting is amazing! I don't love smooshing butter with my fingers. Is there another way to do that? Otherwise, it was a pretty easy bake. I took the cake to a family dinner and everyone loved it." This is the type of neurosis that I love.
JS: It's like a compliment sandwich. Katie, I'd say toughen up. Just kidding. Okay? You can definitely do this in a stand mixer, that would totally be absolutely fine. I also had people ask me, "Can I do this in a food processor?" You know what? I say, sure. That's totally fine too, just tread lightly though. Food processor is pretty intense so as soon as you blitz it and it looks like the texture of moist sand, stop because it literally will work it to a point where it's like...
SU: Like a paste?
JS: Yes, just be careful. Either toughen up or use a mixer. But thank you for the nice words, Katie.
SU: Wait, I want to stay on this point for a moment. If somebody made in a stand mixer or the food processor, would you ask them to... You mix the butter in using the machine until it's like fine sand.
JS: I know you're going to ask. Yeah.
SU: Yeah. And then after that, do you just want them to incorporate the liquid in by hand or continue with the machine?
JS: By hand.
SU: Oh.
JS: Okay. You've incorporated your butter into the food processor?
SU: Yes.
JS: Okay. I want you to take it out, put it in a bowl, and I want you to mix the wet in. You can. You can add the wet to the food processor, it's just...
SU: I was about to critique you, Jesse. And then I realized I do the exact same thing with the pistachio bunt cake so this is great. Moving on.
JS: You can but do I trust people not to go crazy?
SU: Oh, yeah. No, you're right. A food processor is surprisingly very powerful.
JS: Crazy. The mixer, I think you can add the wet and just mix it very lightly. It should be dine. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: No, you know. You have a good answer.
JS: You have my logic and I will let you guys take the path.
SU: If using a stand mixer, go ahead and do it from A to Z. If using a food processor, only incorporate the butter and then move it to a bowl and incorporate the liquid in waiting steps.
JS: Beautiful.
SU: Jesse's speech.
JS: Thank you.
SU: Next from Michelle, "Can you substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk powder? Say in your malted brownie biscotti, I suppose you'd have to adjust liquid amounts. Michelle."
JS: Okay. Deep cut, Michelle.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Wow.
SU: And for everyone, Michelle is referring to the malted brownie biscotti in Jesse's cookie book.
JS: Damn, she read my book.
SU: Wow. Deep cuts.
JS: Okay. I feel like this would require me to redevelop some things.
SU: I don't think you can.
JS: Okay. No. The answer is no. But what I can say maybe is helpful is that malted milk powder is a very interesting ingredient to work with. It's very drying. It really sucks up water.
SU: Hygroscopic.
JS: There you go. It really sucks up liquid and it creates almost a tacky texture so you really have to be careful with it. I wouldn't substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk butter. I do think you can substitute Guinness Stout for another dark beer. That'd be totally fine and low risk, no biggie. I can't say for sure because I haven't done it but I almost feel like Coca-Cola, coffee, things of that nature would probably work quite well. What was that soda? Malta.
SU: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Malta.
JS: That might be great actually.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I think these are pretty low risk substitutions. But malted milk butter is weird.
SU: Yeah, it can just...
JS: Yeah, it's a tough one.
SU: Okay. We have another question. I think it's more related to the Guinness rather than the frosting. [inaudible 00:18:31] asks, "Hello, I love a brown butter frosting. Would this work if the Stout was non-alcoholic?"
JS: I think for sure.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I don't think the alcohol is doing anything in the frosting.
SU: Got it.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Okay. We have one that requires a bit of diagnosis.
JS: Okay.
SU: Okay. Christina C writes, "This cake is so good!! I'm not totally sure what went wrong with the frosting but I suspect that it's because I used a box of "powdered sugar" that came in a gingerbread house kit."
JS: I love this.
SU: "And it may not be all sugar. I weighed everything I could and the cake was completely cool so the sugar is all I can think of. Even the leftovers today are not totally set. Luckily it tastes great. I plan on trying again so we'll see if I'm the problem or if it's the sugar." Christina.
JS: No, you're not the problem.
SU: I love that you use gingerbread kit sugar.
JS: That's some stuff I would do. Okay. There is a picture and I believe it's a before and after, directly applied frosting and then sometime after. The directly before, it looks pretty good. And then the after, it flowed off.
SU: Looks like it melted. I don't think it helped using gingerbread house kit sugar.
JS: Yeah. This is just throwing a wrench into my answer. Acting like that never happened, I would say that the culprits are one of two things, it's that perhaps it wasn't whisked enough. But I don't know, because the before picture looks pretty good. And Christina, I don't want to blame you and I don't think you would do this, but perhaps the cake was slightly warm still and then it did melt. But I don't think you would do that. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: This one, we're puzzled. From Sean, also on Substack, Guys, that's where Bake Club is, on Substack.
JS: That's where you can harass us.
SU: "I baked the Guinness cake today to take to book club tonight. It came together really easily and it smells divine. Question about the frosting, it tastes great but definitely has flex with the brown butter solids. Was that supposed to happen or did I take it a step too far? No bitterness like others reported. Also..."
JS: Yeah. Sean is saying this because other people thought they pushed it too far. Okay?
SU: "Also, my Morton's kosher salt really didn't melt into the frosting. I find little salt grains now and then. Not unpleasant but I was surprised."
JS: Fair.
SU: And Sean included a lovely little picture.
JS: Sean's frosting looks perfect.
SU: Beautiful.
JS: Great swooshes.
SU: Yeah, on a lovely platter.
JS: Okay. On the brown butter note because a lot of people ask this, but the thing that's providing flavor through this process are the milk solids. You're literally toasting them and transforming them so those little bits is exactly what you want.
SU: And to be fair to Sean, it is true that in lots of classic French cooking-
JS: Sure. Like fine dining, they strain it out.
SU: ...they strain it out. After making the brown butter, they do strain out those brown butter solids. And listen, if you've gone a little too far and your butter is burnt, charred, then yes, I wouldn't use it either. I would strain that out. But in baking especially, I think it's really nice to include the solids because most baking recipes have other additional ingredients like fat and flour, et cetera, to weigh things down and weigh flavors down so you really want as much punch as possible. And as Jesse said, the flavor is in those solids.
JS: Yeah. Sean, you did great.
SU: You did do great.
JS: In terms of the salt...
SU: There's a reason we recommend Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Which Diamond Crystal, you haven't yet sponsored us and we are waiting.
JS: Yeah. Diamond Crystal, I think they're actually larger but they're a bit more flaky, delicate-y. You can take them in your fingers almost and they go smoosh them up a little bit. And you know how you can take dried herbs and do that? Like dry thyme.
SU: Mm-hmm.
JS: You can do that with the salt too. Maybe search out some Diamond Crystals. It can be hard to find though but it's worth seeking out.
SU: Final question from Eliana. She asks, "How do we store this cake? Because of the frosting, I think the fridge is best but I'm worried it'll dry out the cake." That's a good question.
JS: Okay. Shilpa and I talk about refrigerated cake often actually. I hate refrigerated cake.
SU: I love refrigerated cake.
JS: She does, yes.
SU: Whole cake.
JS: We're quite divided. I would just leave it on your counter because it doesn't have cream cheese or anything in the frosting so I think it's low risk. Live life on the edge. You're fine.
SU: Yeah.
JS: If you have a cloche, put it on it.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: And if you don't have a cloche, find a really big bowl.
SU: Yeah. That's how we do it in the test kitchen, a really big, big ass bowl.
JS: And put a note on it. Yeah.
SU: Yes, "Don't touch, cake underneath."
JS: Exactly.
SU: On that note, we're going to take another break.
JS: And when we get back, we're going to introduce you to a baker you should know.
SU: Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
JS: It is one of my favorite parts of the show. It is time for us to introduce you to a baker whose work we think our listeners should know about.
SU: Today we've reached out to a baker many of you probably already know, someone who can certainly diagnose a cake problem and a true icon within the baking world, HG. She is a baking columnist, co-author of Ottolenghi Sweet and Comfort. She's a psychologist. And most recently she's the author of the book, Baking and the Meaning of Life.
JS: Helen, welcome to BA Bake Club.
HG: Hello. It's so great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.
JS: We are so excited. We are both such fans. We have been fans for a long time so this is amazing.
SU: This is a dream come true moment.
JS: Yeah, thank you.
HG: This is a dream come true for me. I can't tell you.
JS: Oh, please.
SU: Okay. I know we just mentioned that your latest book just came out, it's called Baking and the Meaning of Life. And I will say, Jesse and I were going to the book earlier and it has perhaps the most unusual introduction to a baking book that we've ever read. And I think that's informed by your background but it really struck me a certain question that you asked and you said. In the book you write, "How is it that baking actually helps create meaning in our lives?" And then you go on to answer this in the book but actually I would love for our listeners to hear it from you now because I found that very powerful.
HG: It's quite a grandiose title, Baking and the Meaning of Life. Who knows what the meaning of life is? First of all, the title actually comes from a book by a psychoanalyst, a New York psychoanalyst called Irvin Yalom. And his book was called Momma and the Meaning of Life. And when I was training as a psychologist, I was very captured by all his writing but particularly this one. What I took away from the book was this idea that all the ordinary moments in life stitched together makes for a meaningful life. And that's always stuck with me. And the work at Ottolenghi that I've done over nearly a decade, it's very forward-looking. We're always thinking, trying to be ahead, trying to think of innovation and creativity, and it's wonderful.
But after doing Sweet and Comfort, I came away feeling that what about all the little minutiae, the little moments that I've cooked just for me, just for my friends, just for my family. And I began to see that actually when I look back at the moments that I've baked for other people, those moments meant something. I think with cake, there's usually a context around it. Very few people make or bake just for themselves, there's usually a relationship involved. And that when I look back at my life, that was certainly the case. And it made me think of how that baking has amplified my life in a way that I've not thought about. I thought about cakes in terms of creativity and mastering a skill and my job, but I'd not considered that it was actually what really gave my life... It amplified things in my life. And I guess for the first time, I had used my psychological training to inspect this idea of why we baked. It's always just been so much about the craft for me and suddenly I was more tuned in to why we actually do it.
JS: Helen, how did your love of baking and psychology come together?
HG: I've been a psychologist and a baker for many years and I've kept them separate for all my working life for two reasons. Partly because for me, they served very different parts of me as a person. But also because mainly I was terrified that my patients would think that I spent all my time baking rather than reading psychological journals, that I wasn't a real therapist.
JS: Interesting.
HG: I kept them very separate and I never saw any need to merge the two. When Yotam and I were touring for Sweet, that was in 2017, and we had a lot of fun. And he's prone to outing me, "Helen is very messy. She's got a slightly bad temper." But what he also said was, he revealed that I was a psychologist. And a number of publishers had contacted me then to ask about this idea of combining the two, a book that combines psychology and baking.
And at the time, I just didn't see it. I always felt that yes, there was something very therapeutic about baking. I'm sure you two have come across that, right? This feeling of how people baked as a stress relief. I acknowledged that. I think that is true but I just didn't see how I could write a whole book about it. For that reason, it laid dormant in my mind until after Comfort was released when I felt that I just needed to retreat a little bit. And that was when I became tuned into this more philosophical idea of why we bake.
SU: I just want to ask, you're practicing all through the time that you were working in the test kitchen at Ottolenghi and developing recipes and [inaudible 00:29:01]
HG: For me, I've always had the two. And even right from the beginning when I decided to... I had already a Bachelor of Science with a major in psychology but I was told by the faculty that I was too young to really focus on it. And, "Go away, take a gap year and just have a bit more life experience before coming back and doing the postgraduate." I did do that, it was good advice. But I actually didn't go for one year, I went for 10 years because I discovered baking. And I needed to work to fund my postgraduate studies so I went to school during the day and cooked in the evening in the pastry section at a very large restaurant in Melbourne. And after I graduated, I still felt that I wasn't ready to let go of baking and so I moonlighted.
And then when I moved to London and... Anyway, it's a long story. But to be able to practice in London, I needed to convert my Australian registration to a British registration. And that process was so arduous and so long. And I decided, "Well, what I could do at that time is to bake." And my husband, who had lived in London for some time, suggested that I might want to check out this cute little cafe down the road in Notting Hill. And so I went to that, and of course that was Ottolenghi. I really fell in love with that sort of Aladdin's cave. And I met Yotam and we just hit it off from day one and we haven't stopped talking about food and life in general since then. When I finally got my registration and I said to Yotam, "It's time. I now need to leave." He said to me, "Well, you're not going to be studying all the time so you can bake on your days off."
SU: Wow.
JS: Helen, the amount you get done in a day is probably how much I get done in a month.
SU: I know. Literally listening to you I'm like, "Come and organize our lives."
JS: Oh, please.
HG: Not at all. I think it was actually I've been very blessed by the generosity of people. Yotam said, "Well, you can work whenever you have time, and you can bill me when you work and don't bill me when you don't work." That made it possible to combine the two.
SU: Do you ever prescribe baking to your patients? Do you ever tell them like, "Go bake this."
HG: I think they've sensed this other life because when Sweet came out and of course when I was going on tour, I did tell my patients then that you may see me on the radio. Don't be freaked out if I start talking about cake, it is me. I did have to confess. And most of them said, "Oh, we knew anyway."
JS: Oh, yeah. I Googled my therapist.
HG: Yes.
JS: We all know.
HG: And they were just extremely kind in preserving my dual life. I've never prescribed cake baking, although I think it can take you away from that... If you're prone to ruminating or anxiety about the future, I think it can very much focus you in the present. And in that way, I think baking can help people.
JS: Helen, I'm fascinated by your career. But okay, we're going to talk about chocolate cake now [inaudible 00:32:27]
SU: Now we're going to talk [inaudible 00:32:27]
JS: Okay.
HG: Let's do it.
JS: This month we all baked a chocolate Guinness cake. I'm curious, what are the qualities that you look for in a proper chocolate cake?
HG: Well, I look for a depth of flavor with the chocolate. When I'm craving a chocolate cake, I want that texture almost not fudgy exactly but damp, luxurious, deep, dark chocolate. And I think what I love about the chocolate Guinness cake is that it delivers all of that but also it's so easy to make, right?
JS: Yes. Helen, we've brought you on also to help out with a listener question if you're down.
HG: Absolutely.
JS: Okay. This question comes from Leedbird and they said, "I was very sad that although the Guinness cake looked moist, it came out dry. I used a scale to measure everything but I could not find Dutch-processed cocoa powder in the stores here. Would that be the reason that it came out dry? I'm going to try again once I get Dutch-processed." And then later they said, "I had to try to bake the cake again and I finally found Dutch-processed cocoa. The cake did not turn out dry and I added chopped dark chocolate into the batter. The frosting is so good." Shilpa and I wanted to ask you because one of the questions we had over and over again is the difference between Dutch-processed and natural cocoa powder.
SU: And does it make a difference?
JS: And yes, does it make a difference?
HG: Well, first of all, Leedbird, I hear you. This has happened to me as well. Yes, I think it almost certainly has to do with the cocoa powder. You've got natural cocoa powder and Dutch-processed, and natural cocoa powder is just the cocoa pod is ground. It's quite acidic, the pH is five to six. It's very floral and fruity and has that acidity. And Dutch-processed cocoa powder has undergone an alkalizing treatment, I think it's potassium carbonate that is used to smooth it out. It has a smoother mouth feel, it's a darker color and it's less acidic. I think the pH is maybe six to eight.
Let's take the recipe. It's chocolate Guinness cake, it already has the Guinness which is carbonated and slightly acidic. Baking soda always sounds to me acidic but it's actually an alkali, and that all reacts very nicely. But when cocoa powder or natural cocoa powder is used, it has an extra acidic component. And I think what happens is that the cake just rises because of all that bubbling, all that interaction. I think it rises too quickly and incorporates too much air into it. Instead of a very damp, dense, dark cake, you get a slightly lighter cake. And you know when air is added, yes, it can be light but it also... The amount of air that's added in it also makes it drier.
Does that make sense?
JS: Yeah, it totally makes sense.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. Because I don't think people realize that it's not just a flavor thing, there's chemistry going on here.
HG: Yes, that's right. When you use Dutch-processed, not only is it a darker, deeper cake, you also get less of a reaction because it's less acidic and the acid doesn't react so much with the baking soda. I've always felt that Dutch-processed has a better mouth feel and I've always veered towards it without really understanding the science behind it. But I was doing a bake sale that was for a charity for the Red Cross when there was this earthquake in Turkey, I think it was 2003, and I think I made about 200 cupcakes and it was the Guinness cake that I was making. And because I was making so many cakes, I was just using up all the cocoa powder that I had in my pantry. And some of it was natural and some of it was Dutch-processed and I definitely saw the difference there, and that was when I was tuned into why and wherefore of the cocoa powder.
SU: Okay. Thanks, Helen.
HG: Sure.
SU: We actually have a bunch of rapid fire questions that we'd love to ask you.
HG: Yes.
SU: On a scale of 1 to 10, how tidy is your spice cabinets?
HG: Oh, it's alphabetized so I'm going to say nine.
JS: Oh.
SU: We are asking a doctor.
JS: Yeah. I love that. I love that.
HG: But if you were to ask about the rest of the kitchen, that would be four.
JS: That's another story.
HG: But for me, there's just nothing worse than when you need a spice quickly, just rummaging through the drawer. I hate having to rummage through my drawers to locate a spice so the alphabetizing is not so much because I'm neat by nature but because I'm impatient.
JS: What's the hardest baking skill you think you've mastered?
HG: I think tempering chocolate.
JS: Oh, that's a good one.
HG: I don't know why but I find that tricky.
JS: It is tricky.
HG: I think I'm doing all the right things and then it doesn't. And then sometimes I think, "Oh, I don't need to temper this." And then it comes out perfect.
JS: Truly. That's always how it works.
HG: Right.
SU: Do you have a motto or words that you live by, Helen?
HG: Oh. In the kitchen, my motto is always buy two so you always have one because I live in fear of running out of something.
SU: Oh, wow.
JS: That's fair. That's valid.
SU: You're like my husband.
HG: Right.
JS: Where is an unexpected place that you find inspiration?
HG: You know, clothes and shoes. For example, I had these sandals that I bought with one of my first pay packets and it had green crystals, encrusted in green crystals. And the sandal eventually fell apart but I love those green crystals so much that I developed a cake with basil sugar. It was a nectarine cake with basil sugar on top because I just obsessed with these green crystals.
JS: I love that.
SU: Wow.
JS: I love that.
SU: What is the most underrated ingredient do you think when it comes to baking?
HG: Oh, I think sour cream.
JS: That's a good one.
HG: I think it gives a crumb a really plush texture. And also flavor, I think adding that slight tang counteracts that sweetness. And also what it does to batters, it gives it that tender crumb.
JS: That's a good one. Okay. Last rapid fire, what is the best compliment that you've ever received on a bake?
HG: Oh, gosh. Anything my mother says that's good because she's more tuned into what could be better. That's more...
JS: Yeah.
SU: What a polite way of saying that.
JS: I feel like with loved ones, the illusion is over.
SU: Yeah.
HG: I think that's the Asian mummy.
SU: 100%.
HG: How could you improve it, right?
SU: It's always that, yes. That also the highest compliments.
HG: Right? Right. Praise from an Asian mother, particularly if it's, "Oh, I like it because it's not too sweet." That's the catchcry for the Asian mum.
SU: 100%. Helen, where can people find you on the internet?
HG: Oh, I am on Instagram at helen_goh_bakes. It feels so strange to say that but yes, it's helen_goh_bakes on Instagram.
JS: Love it.
SU: Lovely.
JS: Thank you so much.
HG: Thank you both so much.
JS: That's it for this month's edition of BA Bake Club. Shilpa, can you tell our bakers about the April Bake Club recipe?
SU: I'll start by saying that this is become the unofficial birthday cake of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.
JS: It has, yes.
SU: It's a strawberry roll cake that I initially made for Hannah's birthday. And Hannah is Hannah Aspring, our Deputy Food Editor. And I initially made it for her birthday a couple of years ago. And then from there, I think then Sonya asked for it on her birthday.
JS: Yeah, we just kept talking about it.
SU: And then somebody else asked for it on their birthday. And then it was just so good at that time and we decided that we need to have it for Bake Club. We need to put it on the site. And April felt like a perfect time to do a strawberry roll cake to welcome spring.
JS: It's such a cute and delicious cake.
SU: Yeah.
JS: It's very cute. Is there any special equipment or ingredients that bakers should maybe have on hand?
SU: I would say take the trouble to source some really nice strawberries. And actually, I see this somewhere in all of the text that I wrote. I said if you can't find good strawberries, you can also do this with raspberries, and it's actually preferable than trying to use mediocre strawberries.
JS: They're consistent. Yeah.
SU: Yeah, they're consistent and they're lovely. Best strawberries, failing which good raspberries.
JS: Nice. Well, bake lovers, once you bake through this cake, you can send us your pictures and questions. There are so many different ways to get in touch.
SU: You can comment on the recipe on the Epicurious app or on the Bon Appetit website, you can comment on our Substack, or you can email us at [email protected]. And if you've made it and loved it, rate and review the recipe on our site.
JS: We're your host, JS.
SU: And Shilpa Uskokovic.
JS: Our Producer is Emily Elias, and we had editing by Michele O'Brien.
SU: Pran Bandi is our Studio Engineer.
JS: Research editing by Ryan Herrington Marisa Malanga.
SU: This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound.
JS: If you like this show, leave us a rating and review and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode.
SU: And if you're not already part of the club, head to bonappetit.com/bakeclub to find all the information you need to join.
JS: Thanks for listening to BA Bake Club. And we'll see you next month.
SU: I'm Shilpa Uskokovic.
JS: And I'm JS.
SU: We're both senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit.
JS: And this is BA Bake Club.
SU: Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers.
JS: We're creating the nerdiest and most wholesome corner of the baking internet.
SU: Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know.
JS: And then you'll go bake, send us any questions you might have or pictures of your finished creations.
SU: And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.
JS: The April Bake Club recipe, Strawberry Roll Cake is live now on bonappetit.com. And we'll tell you a bit more about that at the end of the episode.
SU: But today, today, Jesse, we're here to talk about your chocolate Guinness cake.
JS: Yes.
SU: Here are some of the comments we've got on this cake, in quotes, "Indulgent, truly obsessed, magic cake."
JS: Okay.
SU: Jesse, tell us. Tell us everything about this magical indulgent cake that everybody is truly obsessed about.
JS: Yeah. The truth is I feel like sometimes for Bake Club, we sit and we pull these ideas out of our head. And then sometimes we-
SU: That's not the body part I would've referred to.
JS: With the clean version. And then sometimes we identify these iconic beloved bakes that we don't have and we ask ourselves, how do we put our Bake Club spin on these? And with St. Patrick's Day and the season, we don't have a chocolate Guinness cake.
SU: Yeah. It's crazy to think about.
JS: Yeah. And that's where it came from.
SU: It was lovely. Before we get too far into the development process, why don't you tell us a few of the basic steps of how you make the cake. We're going to queue the instructional jaunty music.
JS: Oh, wow.
SU: There we go. Jesse, can you walk us through the steps of your recipe?
JS: Yeah, totally. It's a very simple cake. You make it by hand. It's a loaf cake with some frosting on top. To make the loaf cake, you whisk your wet ingredients together. You whisk eggs, the Guinness, of course, a little bit of vegetable oil, and some vanilla. And then in another bowl, you whisk up your dry ingredients so you have sugar, flour, Dutch-processed cocoa powder, salt, your leavener, powder, and soda. And then you add a stick of butter that's cut into cubes and you pinch it and massage it in, like you're making pie crust but you go all the way until essentially the butter disappears and you're left with moistened sand-like texture. And then you add the wet to that, you whisk it up, pour it into a loaf pan and bake it.
Once that is baked, you make the frosting. And the frosting is you brown a stick of butter and then you let it re-solidify a bit. It's soft and then you add powdered sugar, you add a little more [inaudible 00:02:58] some vanilla, some salt, and just whisk that up by hand. That's your frosting, swoosh it on top and that's it.
SU: I'm very intrigued because first of all, you use two kinds of fat.
JS: Yes.
SU: It's oil and butter.
JS: Yes.
SU: And that's very unusual, your approach. The oil and butter using two combination of fat is not uncommon. I know you love to use both.
JS: I do love to use both, yes.
SU: But what's your reasoning behind using both?
JS: Okay. Because I love the flavor of butter. I love the texture of an oil cake. This is like a little bit of both. Yeah, you're the best of both worlds.
SU: And then perhaps the most unusual thing about this cake is your technique of rubbing that butter into the dry ingredients like it's pie crust, as you said.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think you need to explain this a little bit more.
JS: Yeah. Okay. For our listeners who have been here for a while, I don't know if you guys remember the episode with [inaudible 00:03:54] But she popularized this technique called reverse creaming which was popular in professional bakeries, which is when you combine your fat source with your dry ingredients instead of creaming together your sugar with your fat first, you're coating the flour in fat. She took that and she made it for home cooks using butter, mixing your butter with the flour. And typically this is done in a mixer.
And I thought to myself, "I bet I could do this by hand." And that's exactly what I did. And what's happening is you're coating the flour molecules in a very thin layer of butter or fat. And it prohibits the gluten formation a bit. Then when you add your wet ingredients and you whisk it up, you're left with a very, very tender cake. And also it prevents you from over-mixing. Certainly you can over-mix but I think it would be really hard to over-mix a cake once you reverse cream the dry ingredients. That's that, I wanted an ultra plush cake and this was my take it in.
SU: I love how you did a technique that we normally associate with having to need a mixer.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think the breakthrough here was that you achieved it without the mixer. Everything is by hand, which I think is quite revolutionary.
JS: Yeah. No, I think it's fun. And then the frosting comes together by hand too so it's like a very laid back affair.
SU: What about the Guinness? First of all, do you like Guinness?
JS: I like beer. Yeah, sure. I do. Yeah, I like Guinness. I do. I know it's a bit polarizing. It's a classic combination with chocolate but I think it makes sense. Guinness is made with malted barley and then also malted milk powder, which a lot of bakers probably know is this magical ingredient that just makes things taste so much better but it's hard to find. They're sisters in my mind so this made a lot of sense to me. I'm like, "Oh, I think Guinness is actually quite easy to find." And maybe it would produce that same kind of magic that chocolate and malted milk powder does together. And I think it does. And Guinness tastes like chocolate, coffee, kind of nice bitter. I think of when people say, "Oh, add espresso powder to chocolate." I think it's doing the same thing. It's reinforcing and invigorating that chocolate flavor. Yeah.
SU: Well, that's interesting. I didn't realize that was your initial flavor inspiration, the malted milk powder. And that's clever.
JS: And Nigella.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: Yeah. I can't say chocolate Guinness cake without mentioning Nigella. She made her iconic cake, which is what stood the test of time.
SU: It really has. We love Nigella.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Jesse, speaking about the Guinness, is it doing anything more besides just adding flavor and obviously moisture?
JS: Sure. Mostly, it's moisture in that it's mostly water. It's in the place of milk or water often in cakes. But you also have to keep in mind, it's like coffee. It's quite acidic. You might not think of things like Coca-Cola or beer or these things as acidic but they are quite acidic so you have to calibrate your leaveners accordingly, and know that they will react with the baking soda and the baking powder to provide additional leavening, like brown sugar but even more in this case. You know what I mean? It is interesting.
SU: Okay. Another important or fun technique that you do in this recipe is you slash the cake.
JS: I do.
SU: And I know you wrote about this on our Substack.
JS: I did.
SU: Once you have the cake... To give everybody a little bit of context, once you make the batter, you pour it into a loaf tin, and then you do this one step before you put the cake in the oven.
JS: Yes, I take a knife. This is extra but I coat the knife in a little bit of oil and I just run it through the top to create a line. And what this does is it creates this fault line, this weak spot. And so as it bakes, it splits there. You know when you score a loaf of bread, you're scoring a cake. And yes, it makes it beautiful because you get this perfectly centered line in a bakery. But also I do think that when it has this weakened spot, it's able to expand and puff in a easier way. And I think it really does make for a slightly lighter cake. Yeah.
SU: I think there was a difference in the volume or the height of the cake when you slashed versus not.
JS: Totally.
SU: And the cake that was slashed did seem to rise higher and it certainly looked more nice.
JS: Yeah. I started doing this because I was a stylist and I was like, "Oh, it just looks good." I'm like, "Wait, I think this actually is important." So I started writing it in my recipes, coating it in a thin layer of oil is the key. But I've used anything from a butter knife to a very sharp pairing knife and it's all the same.
SU: And the oil is to prevent it from dragging through the cake batter and getting you a clean cut?
JS: Yeah. It almost leaves a oily residue in that line that then keeps the line in place. I've seen people actually... Have you seen...
SU: Oh, the pipe of butter in there?
JS: Yeah, the pipe like a line of butter. I guess it's the same exact thing.
SU: Yeah, I guess it's the same thing.
JS: And it sizzles in the time-lapse. You know what I'm talking about?
SU: Yeah, that is fun. Okay. Now the cake theoretically, this cake is in the oven. And then we're making our frosting.
JS: Sure.
SU: Why did you want to add Guinness to both the cake and the frosting? I don't know if this was your first choice.
JS: Okay. Okay.
SU: There's a story here, everyone is...
JS: Well, for everyone listening at home, the cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I don't know. I got lucky. The frosting, I feel like everyone in [inaudible 00:09:49] kitchen had an opinion on what it should be.
SU: I think because the cake came together so fast and nobody had a moment to air their opinions, the frosting was the poster child for everybody's grievances.
JS: Yeah. Yeah. I started with a ganache when we poured over.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: I was like, "Oh, it's tonal. It's dark on dark. It's moody." They did not love.
SU: No.
JS: And then Chris and Hannah, they both said it needs to be tan because I want it to look like the head of a beer.
SU: Yeah. When you see Guinness poured into a glass and then it has this frothy.
JS: And then it led me down like, "What the hell is a tan frosting?" I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings. And I ended up on a brown butter frosting that is reinforced with just a tad of Guinness, two tablespoons. I found it important to have Guinness in both places because it's like almost the glass. What is it called?
SU: Pint.
JS: Not a pint. What do they come in? A bottle. It's almost a bottle.
SU: I was like, "What?"
JS: There's almost a whole bottle worth of beer. I'm like, "Oh, I want to use up a little more." And also, I just like the idea of having it in both places. And I want actually a raw bite too, just a little bit.
SU: Okay. Because the Guinness is cooked in the batter and then you want it...
JS: Yes.
SU: Oh, interesting.
JS: I wanted it to express itself firmly.
SU: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And then also when you brown butter, you're losing some moisture so this is just adding that back. And then we ended up here.
SU: I remember this frosting journey.
JS: It was a journey.
SU: Because you were making it by hand and then you brown the butter. And then what texture was the butter before you add the rest of the ingredients?
JS: Like softened butter.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah, it's like just cooled enough.
SU: And an interesting thing happens to butter when it melts is even when it cools, it never comes back to that same structure as softened butter.
JS: No, you're left with often liquid with a cap of fat.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And I know that you really vigorously whisk this frosting.
JS: Yes.
SU: Do you think that's an essential part of this recipe, how much you mix the frosting?
JS: Yes, this actually acts very similarly to my chocolate olive oil cake frosting.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: In the sense that if you mix the ingredients together with the frosting, you'll be left with a textured spread.
SU: Yeah.
JS: And then when you switch to a whisk and you mechanically give it a little...
SU: You're full of noises these days in this podcast.
JS: I only have so many words to describe things. That's when it comes together, you need this mechanical action of actually vigorously whisking it to not only emulsify these ingredients together but to add air, which is an essential ingredient to give it body so that it stays in place and it's swooshable rather than dripping.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And that was a huge difference because I remember-
JS: Huge difference.
SU: ...there was times when you didn't whip it as much and it was like a more-
JS: And it's completely different.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yes.
SU: It was much more like blonde wood color like this...
JS: Yes. And then when you whisk it, there's this couple of second transformation when it becomes so much lighter.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yes. It holds onto the air.
SU: It's quite magical. You could do it both ways, not whip it as much and then smear it on the cake. But there's something very magical and light and fluffy about this frosting and its capacity to hold air.
JS: Yeah, you really need to whisk it.
SU: Okay. I notice when you make the frosting, it's like a whippy, frothy layer on top. Do you think there's a magic ratio of frosting to cake, your ideal ratio?
JS: My ideal ratio is whatever is the most beautiful.
SU: Oh, okay.
JS: What about you?
SU: I could take a plain cake.
JS: Warm?
SU: No.
JS: No?
SU: I don't like warm cake. I know that's a trend on the internets these days but just tell me you can bake, babe.
JS: Oh, okay.
SU: Okay. How would you serve this cake?
JS: How would I serve it? I just put it on my counter and just like that's that. I think because of my oil addition.
SU: Oh, yeah?
JS: Yeah, I think that makes the butter based cakes stay moist for much, much longer. And it's not a lot of oil but it does huge lifting here.
SU: Do you think serving it with a pint of Guinness is good or excessive?
JS: You do you. You know what I mean?
SU: Okay. On that note, we're going to take a quick break.
JS: And when we get back, we'll answer some listener questions all about the chocolate Guinness cake.
Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
SU: Jesse, are you ready for some listener questions?
JS: I'm ready.
SU: Okay. We have lots of questions from our Substack which PS, you should go and subscribe to our Substack, BA Bake Club, if you haven't already. And this first question is from Katie, "Chocolate Guinness cake! It was so good. That frosting is amazing! I don't love smooshing butter with my fingers. Is there another way to do that? Otherwise, it was a pretty easy bake. I took the cake to a family dinner and everyone loved it." This is the type of neurosis that I love.
JS: It's like a compliment sandwich. Katie, I'd say toughen up. Just kidding. Okay? You can definitely do this in a stand mixer, that would totally be absolutely fine. I also had people ask me, "Can I do this in a food processor?" You know what? I say, sure. That's totally fine too, just tread lightly though. Food processor is pretty intense so as soon as you blitz it and it looks like the texture of moist sand, stop because it literally will work it to a point where it's like...
SU: Like a paste?
JS: Yes, just be careful. Either toughen up or use a mixer. But thank you for the nice words, Katie.
SU: Wait, I want to stay on this point for a moment. If somebody made in a stand mixer or the food processor, would you ask them to... You mix the butter in using the machine until it's like fine sand.
JS: I know you're going to ask. Yeah.
SU: Yeah. And then after that, do you just want them to incorporate the liquid in by hand or continue with the machine?
JS: By hand.
SU: Oh.
JS: Okay. You've incorporated your butter into the food processor?
SU: Yes.
JS: Okay. I want you to take it out, put it in a bowl, and I want you to mix the wet in. You can. You can add the wet to the food processor, it's just...
SU: I was about to critique you, Jesse. And then I realized I do the exact same thing with the pistachio bunt cake so this is great. Moving on.
JS: You can but do I trust people not to go crazy?
SU: Oh, yeah. No, you're right. A food processor is surprisingly very powerful.
JS: Crazy. The mixer, I think you can add the wet and just mix it very lightly. It should be dine. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: No, you know. You have a good answer.
JS: You have my logic and I will let you guys take the path.
SU: If using a stand mixer, go ahead and do it from A to Z. If using a food processor, only incorporate the butter and then move it to a bowl and incorporate the liquid in waiting steps.
JS: Beautiful.
SU: Jesse's speech.
JS: Thank you.
SU: Next from Michelle, "Can you substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk powder? Say in your malted brownie biscotti, I suppose you'd have to adjust liquid amounts. Michelle."
JS: Okay. Deep cut, Michelle.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Wow.
SU: And for everyone, Michelle is referring to the malted brownie biscotti in Jesse's cookie book.
JS: Damn, she read my book.
SU: Wow. Deep cuts.
JS: Okay. I feel like this would require me to redevelop some things.
SU: I don't think you can.
JS: Okay. No. The answer is no. But what I can say maybe is helpful is that malted milk powder is a very interesting ingredient to work with. It's very drying. It really sucks up water.
SU: Hygroscopic.
JS: There you go. It really sucks up liquid and it creates almost a tacky texture so you really have to be careful with it. I wouldn't substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk butter. I do think you can substitute Guinness Stout for another dark beer. That'd be totally fine and low risk, no biggie. I can't say for sure because I haven't done it but I almost feel like Coca-Cola, coffee, things of that nature would probably work quite well. What was that soda? Malta.
SU: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Malta.
JS: That might be great actually.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I think these are pretty low risk substitutions. But malted milk butter is weird.
SU: Yeah, it can just...
JS: Yeah, it's a tough one.
SU: Okay. We have another question. I think it's more related to the Guinness rather than the frosting. [inaudible 00:18:31] asks, "Hello, I love a brown butter frosting. Would this work if the Stout was non-alcoholic?"
JS: I think for sure.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I don't think the alcohol is doing anything in the frosting.
SU: Got it.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Okay. We have one that requires a bit of diagnosis.
JS: Okay.
SU: Okay. Christina C writes, "This cake is so good!! I'm not totally sure what went wrong with the frosting but I suspect that it's because I used a box of "powdered sugar" that came in a gingerbread house kit."
JS: I love this.
SU: "And it may not be all sugar. I weighed everything I could and the cake was completely cool so the sugar is all I can think of. Even the leftovers today are not totally set. Luckily it tastes great. I plan on trying again so we'll see if I'm the problem or if it's the sugar." Christina.
JS: No, you're not the problem.
SU: I love that you use gingerbread kit sugar.
JS: That's some stuff I would do. Okay. There is a picture and I believe it's a before and after, directly applied frosting and then sometime after. The directly before, it looks pretty good. And then the after, it flowed off.
SU: Looks like it melted. I don't think it helped using gingerbread house kit sugar.
JS: Yeah. This is just throwing a wrench into my answer. Acting like that never happened, I would say that the culprits are one of two things, it's that perhaps it wasn't whisked enough. But I don't know, because the before picture looks pretty good. And Christina, I don't want to blame you and I don't think you would do this, but perhaps the cake was slightly warm still and then it did melt. But I don't think you would do that. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: This one, we're puzzled. From Sean, also on Substack, Guys, that's where Bake Club is, on Substack.
JS: That's where you can harass us.
SU: "I baked the Guinness cake today to take to book club tonight. It came together really easily and it smells divine. Question about the frosting, it tastes great but definitely has flex with the brown butter solids. Was that supposed to happen or did I take it a step too far? No bitterness like others reported. Also..."
JS: Yeah. Sean is saying this because other people thought they pushed it too far. Okay?
SU: "Also, my Morton's kosher salt really didn't melt into the frosting. I find little salt grains now and then. Not unpleasant but I was surprised."
JS: Fair.
SU: And Sean included a lovely little picture.
JS: Sean's frosting looks perfect.
SU: Beautiful.
JS: Great swooshes.
SU: Yeah, on a lovely platter.
JS: Okay. On the brown butter note because a lot of people ask this, but the thing that's providing flavor through this process are the milk solids. You're literally toasting them and transforming them so those little bits is exactly what you want.
SU: And to be fair to Sean, it is true that in lots of classic French cooking-
JS: Sure. Like fine dining, they strain it out.
SU: ...they strain it out. After making the brown butter, they do strain out those brown butter solids. And listen, if you've gone a little too far and your butter is burnt, charred, then yes, I wouldn't use it either. I would strain that out. But in baking especially, I think it's really nice to include the solids because most baking recipes have other additional ingredients like fat and flour, et cetera, to weigh things down and weigh flavors down so you really want as much punch as possible. And as Jesse said, the flavor is in those solids.
JS: Yeah. Sean, you did great.
SU: You did do great.
JS: In terms of the salt...
SU: There's a reason we recommend Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Which Diamond Crystal, you haven't yet sponsored us and we are waiting.
JS: Yeah. Diamond Crystal, I think they're actually larger but they're a bit more flaky delicatey. You can take them in your fingers almost and they go smoosh them up a little bit. And you know how you can take dried herbs and do that? Like dry thyme.
SU: Mm-hmm.
JS: You can do that with the salt too. Maybe search out some Diamond Crystals. It can be hard to find though but it's worth seeking out.
SU: Final question from Eliana. She asks, "How do we store this cake? Because of the frosting, I think the fridge is best but I'm worried it'll dry out the cake." That's a good question.
JS: Okay. Shilpa and I talk about refrigerated cake often actually. I hate refrigerated cake.
SU: I love refrigerated cake.
JS: She does, yes.
SU: Whole cake.
JS: We're quite divided. I would just leave it on your counter because it doesn't have cream cheese or anything in the frosting so I think it's low risk. Live life on the edge. You're fine.
SU: Yeah.
JS: If you have a cloche, put it on it.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: And if you don't have a cloche, find a really big bowl.
SU: Yeah. That's how we do it in the test kitchen, a really big, big ass bowl.
JS: And put a note on it. Yeah.
SU: Yes, "Don't touch, cake underneath."
JS: Exactly.
SU: On that note, we're going to take another break.
JS: And when we get back, we're going to introduce you to a baker you should know.
SU: Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
JS: It is one of my favorite parts of the show. It is time for us to introduce you to a baker whose work we think our listeners should know about.
SU: Today we've reached out to a baker many of you probably already know, someone who can certainly diagnose a cake problem and a true icon within the baking world, HG. She is a baking columnist, co-author of Ottolenghi Sweet and Comfort. She's a psychologist. And most recently she's the author of the book, Baking and the Meaning of Life.
JS: Helen, welcome to BA Bake Club.
HG: Hello. It's so great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.
JS: We are so excited. We are both such fans. We have been fans for a long time so this is amazing.
SU: This is a dream come true moment.
JS: Yeah, thank you.
HG: This is a dream come true for me. I can't tell you.
JS: Oh, please.
SU: Okay. I know we just mentioned that your latest book just came out, it's called Baking and the Meaning of Life. And I will say, Jesse and I were going to the book earlier and it has perhaps the most unusual introduction to a baking book that we've ever read. And I think that's informed by your background but it really struck me a certain question that you asked and you said. In the book you write, "How is it that baking actually helps create meaning in our lives?" And then you go on to answer this in the book but actually I would love for our listeners to hear it from you now because I found that very powerful.
HG: It's quite a grandiose title, Baking and the Meaning of Life. Who knows what the meaning of life is? First of all, the title actually comes from a book by a psychoanalyst, a New York psychoanalyst called Irvin Yalom. And his book was called Momma and the Meaning of Life. And when I was training as a psychologist, I was very captured by all his writing but particularly this one. What I took away from the book was this idea that all the ordinary moments in life stitched together makes for a meaningful life. And that's always stuck with me. And the work at Ottolenghi that I've done over nearly a decade, it's very forward-looking. We're always thinking, trying to be ahead, trying to think of innovation and creativity, and it's wonderful.
But after doing Sweet and Comfort, I came away feeling that what about all the little minutiae, the little moments that I've cooked just for me, just for my friends, just for my family. And I began to see that actually when I look back at the moments that I've baked for other people, those moments meant something. I think with cake, there's usually a context around it. Very few people make or bake just for themselves, there's usually a relationship involved. And that when I look back at my life, that was certainly the case. And it made me think of how that baking has amplified my life in a way that I've not thought about. I thought about cakes in terms of creativity and mastering a skill and my job, but I'd not considered that it was actually what really gave my life... It amplified things in my life. And I guess for the first time, I had used my psychological training to inspect this idea of why we baked. It's always just been so much about the craft for me and suddenly I was more tuned in to why we actually do it.
JS: Helen, how did your love of baking and psychology come together?
HG: I've been a psychologist and a baker for many years and I've kept them separate for all my working life for two reasons. Partly because for me, they served very different parts of me as a person. But also because mainly I was terrified that my patients would think that I spent all my time baking rather than reading psychological journals, that I wasn't a real therapist.
JS: Interesting.
HG: I kept them very separate and I never saw any need to merge the two. When Yotam and I were touring for Sweet, that was in 2017, and we had a lot of fun. And he's prone to outing me, "Helen is very messy. She's got a slightly bad temper." But what he also said was, he revealed that I was a psychologist. And a number of publishers had contacted me then to ask about this idea of combining the two, a book that combines psychology and baking.
And at the time, I just didn't see it. I always felt that yes, there was something very therapeutic about baking. I'm sure you two have come across that, right? This feeling of how people baked as a stress relief. I acknowledged that. I think that is true but I just didn't see how I could write a whole book about it. For that reason, it laid dormant in my mind until after Comfort was released when I felt that I just needed to retreat a little bit. And that was when I became tuned into this more philosophical idea of why we bake.
SU: I just want to ask, you're practicing all through the time that you were working in the test kitchen at Ottolenghi and developing recipes and [inaudible 00:29:01]
HG: For me, I've always had the two. And even right from the beginning when I decided to... I had already a Bachelor of Science with a major in psychology but I was told by the faculty that I was too young to really focus on it. And, "Go away, take a gap year and just have a bit more life experience before coming back and doing the postgraduate." I did do that, it was good advice. But I actually didn't go for one year, I went for 10 years because I discovered baking. And I needed to work to fund my postgraduate studies so I went to school during the day and cooked in the evening in the pastry section at a very large restaurant in Melbourne. And after I graduated, I still felt that I wasn't ready to let go of baking and so I moonlighted.
And then when I moved to London and... Anyway, it's a long story. But to be able to practice in London, I needed to convert my Australian registration to a British registration. And that process was so arduous and so long. And I decided, "Well, what I could do at that time is to bake." And my husband, who had lived in London for some time, suggested that I might want to check out this cute little cafe down the road in Notting Hill. And so I went to that, and of course that was Ottolenghi. I really fell in love with that sort of Aladdin's cave. And I met Yotam and we just hit it off from day one and we haven't stopped talking about food and life in general since then. When I finally got my registration and I said to Yotam, "It's time. I now need to leave." He said to me, "Well, you're not going to be studying all the time so you can bake on your days off."
SU: Wow.
JS: Helen, the amount you get done in a day is probably how much I get done in a month.
SU: I know. Literally listening to you I'm like, "Come and organize our lives."
JS: Oh, please.
HG: Not at all. I think it was actually I've been very blessed by the generosity of people. Yotam said, "Well, you can work whenever you have time, and you can bill me when you work and don't bill me when you don't work." That made it possible to combine the two.
SU: Do you ever prescribe baking to your patients? Do you ever tell them like, "Go bake this."
HG: I think they've sensed this other life because when Sweet came out and of course when I was going on tour, I did tell my patients then that you may see me on the radio. Don't be freaked out if I start talking about cake, it is me. I did have to confess. And most of them said, "Oh, we knew anyway."
JS: Oh, yeah. I Googled my therapist.
HG: Yes.
JS: We all know.
HG: And they were just extremely kind in preserving my dual life. I've never prescribed cake baking, although I think it can take you away from that... If you're prone to ruminating or anxiety about the future, I think it can very much focus you in the present. And in that way, I think baking can help people.
JS: Helen, I'm fascinated by your career. But okay, we're going to talk about chocolate cake now [inaudible 00:32:27]
SU: Now we're going to talk [inaudible 00:32:27]
JS: Okay.
HG: Let's do it.
JS: This month we all baked a chocolate Guinness cake. I'm curious, what are the qualities that you look for in a proper chocolate cake?
HG: Well, I look for a depth of flavor with the chocolate. When I'm craving a chocolate cake, I want that texture almost not fudgy exactly but damp, luxurious, deep, dark chocolate. And I think what I love about the chocolate Guinness cake is that it delivers all of that but also it's so easy to make, right?
JS: Yes. Helen, we've brought you on also to help out with a listener question if you're down.
HG: Absolutely.
JS: Okay. This question comes from Leedbird and they said, "I was very sad that although the Guinness cake looked moist, it came out dry. I used a scale to measure everything but I could not find Dutch-processed cocoa powder in the stores here. Would that be the reason that it came out dry? I'm going to try again once I get Dutch-processed." And then later they said, "I had to try to bake the cake again and I finally found Dutch-processed cocoa. The cake did not turn out dry and I added chopped dark chocolate into the batter. The frosting is so good." Shilpa and I wanted to ask you because one of the questions we had over and over again is the difference between Dutch-processed and natural cocoa powder.
SU: And does it make a difference?
JS: And yes, does it make a difference?
HG: Well, first of all, Leedbird, I hear you. This has happened to me as well. Yes, I think it almost certainly has to do with the cocoa powder. You've got natural cocoa powder and Dutch-processed, and natural cocoa powder is just the cocoa pod is ground. It's quite acidic, the pH is five to six. It's very floral and fruity and has that acidity. And Dutch-processed cocoa powder has undergone an alkalizing treatment, I think it's potassium carbonate that is used to smooth it out. It has a smoother mouth feel, it's a darker color and it's less acidic. I think the pH is maybe six to eight.
Let's take the recipe. It's chocolate Guinness cake, it already has the Guinness which is carbonated and slightly acidic. Baking soda always sounds to me acidic but it's actually an alkali, and that all reacts very nicely. But when cocoa powder or natural cocoa powder is used, it has an extra acidic component. And I think what happens is that the cake just rises because of all that bubbling, all that interaction. I think it rises too quickly and incorporates too much air into it. Instead of a very damp, dense, dark cake, you get a slightly lighter cake. And you know when air is added, yes, it can be light but it also... The amount of air that's added in it also makes it drier.
Does that make sense?
JS: Yeah, it totally makes sense.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. Because I don't think people realize that it's not just a flavor thing, there's chemistry going on here.
HG: Yes, that's right. When you use Dutch-processed, not only is it a darker, deeper cake, you also get less of a reaction because it's less acidic and the acid doesn't react so much with the baking soda. I've always felt that Dutch-processed has a better mouth feel and I've always veered towards it without really understanding the science behind it. But I was doing a bake sale that was for a charity for the Red Cross when there was this earthquake in Turkey, I think it was 2003, and I think I made about 200 cupcakes and it was the Guinness cake that I was making. And because I was making so many cakes, I was just using up all the cocoa powder that I had in my pantry. And some of it was natural and some of it was Dutch-processed and I definitely saw the difference there, and that was when I was tuned into why and wherefore of the cocoa powder.
SU: Okay. Thanks, Helen.
HG: Sure.
SU: We actually have a bunch of rapid fire questions that we'd love to ask you.
HG: Yes.
SU: On a scale of 1 to 10, how tidy is your spice cabinets?
HG: Oh, it's alphabetized so I'm going to say nine.
JS: Oh.
SU: We are asking a doctor.
JS: Yeah. I love that. I love that.
HG: But if you were to ask about the rest of the kitchen, that would be four.
JS: That's another story.
HG: But for me, there's just nothing worse than when you need a spice quickly, just rummaging through the drawer. I hate having to rummage through my drawers to locate a spice so the alphabetizing is not so much because I'm neat by nature but because I'm impatient.
JS: What's the hardest baking skill you think you've mastered?
HG: I think tempering chocolate.
JS: Oh, that's a good one.
HG: I don't know why but I find that tricky.
JS: It is tricky.
HG: I think I'm doing all the right things and then it doesn't. And then sometimes I think, "Oh, I don't need to temper this." And then it comes out perfect.
JS: Truly. That's always how it works.
HG: Right.
SU: Do you have a motto or words that you live by, Helen?
HG: Oh. In the kitchen, my motto is always buy two so you always have one because I live in fear of running out of something.
SU: Oh, wow.
JS: That's fair. That's valid.
SU: You're like my husband.
HG: Right.
JS: Where is an unexpected place that you find inspiration?
HG: You know, clothes and shoes. For example, I had these sandals that I bought with one of my first pay packets and it had green crystals, encrusted in green crystals. And the sandal eventually fell apart but I love those green crystals so much that I developed a cake with basil sugar. It was a nectarine cake with basil sugar on top because I just obsessed with these green crystals.
JS: I love that.
SU: Wow.
JS: I love that.
SU: What is the most underrated ingredient do you think when it comes to baking?
HG: Oh, I think sour cream.
JS: That's a good one.
HG: I think it gives a crumb a really plush texture. And also flavor, I think adding that slight tang counteracts that sweetness. And also what it does to batters, it gives it that tender crumb.
JS: That's a good one. Okay. Last rapid fire, what is the best compliment that you've ever received on a bake?
HG: Oh, gosh. Anything my mother says that's good because she's more tuned into what could be better. That's more...
JS: Yeah.
SU: What a polite way of saying that.
JS: I feel like with loved ones, the illusion is over.
SU: Yeah.
HG: I think that's the Asian mummy.
SU: 100%.
HG: How could you improve it, right?
SU: It's always that, yes. That also the highest compliments.
HG: Right? Right. Praise from an Asian mother, particularly if it's, "Oh, I like it because it's not too sweet." That's the catchcry for the Asian mum.
SU: 100%. Helen, where can people find you on the internet?
HG: Oh, I am on Instagram at helen_goh_bakes. It feels so strange to say that but yes, it's helen_goh_bakes on Instagram.
JS: Love it.
SU: Lovely.
JS: Thank you so much.
HG: Thank you both so much.
JS: That's it for this month's edition of BA Bake Club. Shilpa, can you tell our bakers about the April Bake Club recipe?
SU: I'll start by saying that this is become the unofficial birthday cake of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.
JS: It has, yes.
SU: It's a strawberry roll cake that I initially made for Hannah's birthday. And Hannah is Hannah Aspring, our Deputy Food Editor. And I initially made it for her birthday a couple of years ago. And then from there, I think then Sonya asked for it on her birthday.
JS: Yeah, we just kept talking about it.
SU: And then somebody else asked for it on their birthday. And then it was just so good at that time and we decided that we need to have it for Bake Club. We need to put it on the site. And April felt like a perfect time to do a strawberry roll cake to welcome spring.
JS: It's such a cute and delicious cake.
SU: Yeah.
JS: It's very cute. Is there any special equipment or ingredients that bakers should maybe have on hand?
SU: I would say take the trouble to source some really nice strawberries. And actually, I see this somewhere in all of the text that I wrote. I said if you can't find good strawberries, you can also do this with raspberries, and it's actually preferable than trying to use mediocre strawberries.
JS: They're consistent. Yeah.
SU: Yeah, they're consistent and they're lovely. Best strawberries, failing which good raspberries.
JS: Nice. Well, bake lovers, once you bake through this cake, you can send us your pictures and questions. There are so many different ways to get in touch.
SU: You can comment on the recipe on the Epicurious app or on the Bon Appetit website, you can comment on our Substack, or you can email us at [email protected]. And if you've made it and loved it, rate and review the recipe on our site.
JS: We're your host, JS.
SU: And Shilpa Uskokovic.
JS: Our Producer is Emily Elias, and we had editing by Michele O'Brien.
SU: Pran Bandi is our Studio Engineer.
JS: Research editing by Ryan Herrington Marisa Malanga.
SU: This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound.
JS: If you like this show, leave us a rating and review and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode.
SU: And if you're not already part of the club, head to bonappetit.com/bakeclub to find all the information you need to join.
JS: Thanks for listening to BA Bake Club. And we'll see you next month.
SU: I'm Shilpa Uskokovic.
JS: And I'm JS.
SU: We're both senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit.
JS: And this is BA Bake Club.
SU: Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers.
JS: We're creating the nerdiest and most wholesome corner of the baking internet.
SU: Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know.
JS: And then you'll go bake, send us any questions you might have or pictures of your finished creations.
SU: And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.
JS: The April Bake Club recipe, Strawberry Roll Cake is live now on bonappetit.com. And we'll tell you a bit more about that at the end of the episode.
SU: But today, today, Jesse, we're here to talk about your chocolate Guinness cake.
JS: Yes.
SU: Here are some of the comments we've got on this cake, in quotes, "Indulgent, truly obsessed, magic cake."
JS: Okay.
SU: Jesse, tell us. Tell us everything about this magical indulgent cake that everybody is truly obsessed about.
JS: Yeah. The truth is I feel like sometimes for Bake Club, we sit and we pull these ideas out of our head. And then sometimes we-
SU: That's not the body part I would've referred to.
JS: With the clean version. And then sometimes we identify these iconic beloved bakes that we don't have and we ask ourselves, how do we put our Bake Club spin on these? And with St. Patrick's Day and the season, we don't have a chocolate Guinness cake.
SU: Yeah. It's crazy to think about.
JS: Yeah. And that's where it came from.
SU: It was lovely. Before we get too far into the development process, why don't you tell us a few of the basic steps of how you make the cake. We're going to queue the instructional jaunty music.
JS: Oh, wow.
SU: There we go. Jesse, can you walk us through the steps of your recipe?
JS: Yeah, totally. It's a very simple cake. You make it by hand. It's a loaf cake with some frosting on top. To make the loaf cake, you whisk your wet ingredients together. You whisk eggs, the Guinness, of course, a little bit of vegetable oil, and some vanilla. And then in another bowl, you whisk up your dry ingredients so you have sugar, flour, Dutch-processed cocoa powder, salt, your leavener, powder, and soda. And then you add a stick of butter that's cut into cubes and you pinch it and massage it in, like you're making pie crust but you go all the way until essentially the butter disappears and you're left with moistened sand-like texture. And then you add the wet to that, you whisk it up, pour it into a loaf pan and bake it.
Once that is baked, you make the frosting. And the frosting is you brown a stick of butter and then you let it re-solidify a bit. It's soft and then you add powdered sugar, you add a little more [inaudible 00:02:58] some vanilla, some salt, and just whisk that up by hand. That's your frosting, swoosh it on top and that's it.
SU: I'm very intrigued because first of all, you use two kinds of fat.
JS: Yes.
SU: It's oil and butter.
JS: Yes.
SU: And that's very unusual, your approach. The oil and butter using two combination of fat is not uncommon. I know you love to use both.
JS: I do love to use both, yes.
SU: But what's your reasoning behind using both?
JS: Okay. Because I love the flavor of butter. I love the texture of an oil cake. This is like a little bit of both. Yeah, you're the best of both worlds.
SU: And then perhaps the most unusual thing about this cake is your technique of rubbing that butter into the dry ingredients like it's pie crust, as you said.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think you need to explain this a little bit more.
JS: Yeah. Okay. For our listeners who have been here for a while, I don't know if you guys remember the episode with [inaudible 00:03:54] But she popularized this technique called reverse creaming which was popular in professional bakeries, which is when you combine your fat source with your dry ingredients instead of creaming together your sugar with your fat first, you're coating the flour in fat. She took that and she made it for home cooks using butter, mixing your butter with the flour. And typically this is done in a mixer.
And I thought to myself, "I bet I could do this by hand." And that's exactly what I did. And what's happening is you're coating the flour molecules in a very thin layer of butter or fat. And it prohibits the gluten formation a bit. Then when you add your wet ingredients and you whisk it up, you're left with a very, very tender cake. And also it prevents you from over-mixing. Certainly you can over-mix but I think it would be really hard to over-mix a cake once you reverse cream the dry ingredients. That's that, I wanted an ultra plush cake and this was my take it in.
SU: I love how you did a technique that we normally associate with having to need a mixer.
JS: Yes.
SU: I think the breakthrough here was that you achieved it without the mixer. Everything is by hand, which I think is quite revolutionary.
JS: Yeah. No, I think it's fun. And then the frosting comes together by hand too so it's like a very laid back affair.
SU: What about the Guinness? First of all, do you like Guinness?
JS: I like beer. Yeah, sure. I do. Yeah, I like Guinness. I do. I know it's a bit polarizing. It's a classic combination with chocolate but I think it makes sense. Guinness is made with malted barley and then also malted milk powder, which a lot of bakers probably know is this magical ingredient that just makes things taste so much better but it's hard to find. They're sisters in my mind so this made a lot of sense to me. I'm like, "Oh, I think Guinness is actually quite easy to find." And maybe it would produce that same kind of magic that chocolate and malted milk powder does together. And I think it does. And Guinness tastes like chocolate, coffee, kind of nice bitter. I think of when people say, "Oh, add espresso powder to chocolate." I think it's doing the same thing. It's reinforcing and invigorating that chocolate flavor. Yeah.
SU: Well, that's interesting. I didn't realize that was your initial flavor inspiration, the malted milk powder. And that's clever.
JS: And Nigella.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: Yeah. I can't say chocolate Guinness cake without mentioning Nigella. She made her iconic cake, which is what stood the test of time.
SU: It really has. We love Nigella.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Jesse, speaking about the Guinness, is it doing anything more besides just adding flavor and obviously moisture?
JS: Sure. Mostly, it's moisture in that it's mostly water. It's in the place of milk or water often in cakes. But you also have to keep in mind, it's like coffee. It's quite acidic. You might not think of things like Coca-Cola or beer or these things as acidic but they are quite acidic so you have to calibrate your leaveners accordingly, and know that they will react with the baking soda and the baking powder to provide additional leavening, like brown sugar but even more in this case. You know what I mean? It is interesting.
SU: Okay. Another important or fun technique that you do in this recipe is you slash the cake.
JS: I do.
SU: And I know you wrote about this on our Substack.
JS: I did.
SU: Once you have the cake... To give everybody a little bit of context, once you make the batter, you pour it into a loaf tin, and then you do this one step before you put the cake in the oven.
JS: Yes, I take a knife. This is extra but I coat the knife in a little bit of oil and I just run it through the top to create a line. And what this does is it creates this fault line, this weak spot. And so as it bakes, it splits there. You know when you score a loaf of bread, you're scoring a cake. And yes, it makes it beautiful because you get this perfectly centered line in a bakery. But also I do think that when it has this weakened spot, it's able to expand and puff in a easier way. And I think it really does make for a slightly lighter cake. Yeah.
SU: I think there was a difference in the volume or the height of the cake when you slashed versus not.
JS: Totally.
SU: And the cake that was slashed did seem to rise higher and it certainly looked more nice.
JS: Yeah. I started doing this because I was a stylist and I was like, "Oh, it just looks good." I'm like, "Wait, I think this actually is important." So I started writing it in my recipes, coating it in a thin layer of oil is the key. But I've used anything from a butter knife to a very sharp pairing knife and it's all the same.
SU: And the oil is to prevent it from dragging through the cake batter and getting you a clean cut?
JS: Yeah. It almost leaves a oily residue in that line that then keeps the line in place. I've seen people actually... Have you seen...
SU: Oh, the pipe of butter in there?
JS: Yeah, the pipe like a line of butter. I guess it's the same exact thing.
SU: Yeah, I guess it's the same thing.
JS: And it sizzles in the time-lapse. You know what I'm talking about?
SU: Yeah, that is fun. Okay. Now the cake theoretically, this cake is in the oven. And then we're making our frosting.
JS: Sure.
SU: Why did you want to add Guinness to both the cake and the frosting? I don't know if this was your first choice.
JS: Okay. Okay.
SU: There's a story here, everyone is...
JS: Well, for everyone listening at home, the cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I don't know. I got lucky. The frosting, I feel like everyone in [inaudible 00:09:49] kitchen had an opinion on what it should be.
SU: I think because the cake came together so fast and nobody had a moment to air their opinions, the frosting was the poster child for everybody's grievances.
JS: Yeah. Yeah. I started with a ganache when we poured over.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: I was like, "Oh, it's tonal. It's dark on dark. It's moody." They did not love.
SU: No.
JS: And then Chris and Hannah, they both said it needs to be tan because I want it to look like the head of a beer.
SU: Yeah. When you see Guinness poured into a glass and then it has this frothy.
JS: And then it led me down like, "What the hell is a tan frosting?" I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings. And I ended up on a brown butter frosting that is reinforced with just a tad of Guinness, two tablespoons. I found it important to have Guinness in both places because it's like almost the glass. What is it called?
SU: Pint.
JS: Not a pint. What do they come in? A bottle. It's almost a bottle.
SU: I was like, "What?"
JS: There's almost a whole bottle worth of beer. I'm like, "Oh, I want to use up a little more." And also, I just like the idea of having it in both places. And I want actually a raw bite too, just a little bit.
SU: Okay. Because the Guinness is cooked in the batter and then you want it...
JS: Yes.
SU: Oh, interesting.
JS: I wanted it to express itself firmly.
SU: Yeah. Yeah.
JS: And then also when you brown butter, you're losing some moisture so this is just adding that back. And then we ended up here.
SU: I remember this frosting journey.
JS: It was a journey.
SU: Because you were making it by hand and then you brown the butter. And then what texture was the butter before you add the rest of the ingredients?
JS: Like softened butter.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah, it's like just cooled enough.
SU: And an interesting thing happens to butter when it melts is even when it cools, it never comes back to that same structure as softened butter.
JS: No, you're left with often liquid with a cap of fat.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And I know that you really vigorously whisk this frosting.
JS: Yes.
SU: Do you think that's an essential part of this recipe, how much you mix the frosting?
JS: Yes, this actually acts very similarly to my chocolate olive oil cake frosting.
SU: Oh, yeah.
JS: In the sense that if you mix the ingredients together with the frosting, you'll be left with a textured spread.
SU: Yeah.
JS: And then when you switch to a whisk and you mechanically give it a little...
SU: You're full of noises these days in this podcast.
JS: I only have so many words to describe things. That's when it comes together, you need this mechanical action of actually vigorously whisking it to not only emulsify these ingredients together but to add air, which is an essential ingredient to give it body so that it stays in place and it's swooshable rather than dripping.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah.
SU: And that was a huge difference because I remember-
JS: Huge difference.
SU: ...there was times when you didn't whip it as much and it was like a more-
JS: And it's completely different.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yes.
SU: It was much more like blonde wood color like this...
JS: Yes. And then when you whisk it, there's this couple of second transformation when it becomes so much lighter.
SU: Yes.
JS: Yes. It holds onto the air.
SU: It's quite magical. You could do it both ways, not whip it as much and then smear it on the cake. But there's something very magical and light and fluffy about this frosting and its capacity to hold air.
JS: Yeah, you really need to whisk it.
SU: Okay. I notice when you make the frosting, it's like a whippy, frothy layer on top. Do you think there's a magic ratio of frosting to cake, your ideal ratio?
JS: My ideal ratio is whatever is the most beautiful.
SU: Oh, okay.
JS: What about you?
SU: I could take a plain cake.
JS: Warm?
SU: No.
JS: No?
SU: I don't like warm cake. I know that's a trend on the internets these days but just tell me you can bake, babe.
JS: Oh, okay.
SU: Okay. How would you serve this cake?
JS: How would I serve it? I just put it on my counter and just like that's that. I think because of my oil addition.
SU: Oh, yeah?
JS: Yeah, I think that makes the butter based cakes stay moist for much, much longer. And it's not a lot of oil but it does huge lifting here.
SU: Do you think serving it with a pint of Guinness is good or excessive?
JS: You do you. You know what I mean?
SU: Okay. On that note, we're going to take a quick break.
JS: And when we get back, we'll answer some listener questions all about the chocolate Guinness cake.
Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
SU: Jesse, are you ready for some listener questions?
JS: I'm ready.
SU: Okay. We have lots of questions from our Substack which PS, you should go and subscribe to our Substack, BA Bake Club, if you haven't already. And this first question is from Katie, "Chocolate Guinness cake! It was so good. That frosting is amazing! I don't love smooshing butter with my fingers. Is there another way to do that? Otherwise, it was a pretty easy bake. I took the cake to a family dinner and everyone loved it." This is the type of neurosis that I love.
JS: It's like a compliment sandwich. Katie, I'd say toughen up. Just kidding. Okay? You can definitely do this in a stand mixer, that would totally be absolutely fine. I also had people ask me, "Can I do this in a food processor?" You know what? I say, sure. That's totally fine too, just tread lightly though. Food processor is pretty intense so as soon as you blitz it and it looks like the texture of moist sand, stop because it literally will work it to a point where it's like...
SU: Like a paste?
JS: Yes, just be careful. Either toughen up or use a mixer. But thank you for the nice words, Katie.
SU: Wait, I want to stay on this point for a moment. If somebody made in a stand mixer or the food processor, would you ask them to... You mix the butter in using the machine until it's like fine sand.
JS: I know you're going to ask. Yeah.
SU: Yeah. And then after that, do you just want them to incorporate the liquid in by hand or continue with the machine?
JS: By hand.
SU: Oh.
JS: Okay. You've incorporated your butter into the food processor?
SU: Yes.
JS: Okay. I want you to take it out, put it in a bowl, and I want you to mix the wet in. You can. You can add the wet to the food processor, it's just...
SU: I was about to critique you, Jesse. And then I realized I do the exact same thing with the pistachio bunt cake so this is great. Moving on.
JS: You can but do I trust people not to go crazy?
SU: Oh, yeah. No, you're right. A food processor is surprisingly very powerful.
JS: Crazy. The mixer, I think you can add the wet and just mix it very lightly. It should be dine. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: No, you know. You have a good answer.
JS: You have my logic and I will let you guys take the path.
SU: If using a stand mixer, go ahead and do it from A to Z. If using a food processor, only incorporate the butter and then move it to a bowl and incorporate the liquid in waiting steps.
JS: Beautiful.
SU: Jesse's speech.
JS: Thank you.
SU: Next from Michelle, "Can you substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk powder? Say in your malted brownie biscotti, I suppose you'd have to adjust liquid amounts. Michelle."
JS: Okay. Deep cut, Michelle.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Wow.
SU: And for everyone, Michelle is referring to the malted brownie biscotti in Jesse's cookie book.
JS: Damn, she read my book.
SU: Wow. Deep cuts.
JS: Okay. I feel like this would require me to redevelop some things.
SU: I don't think you can.
JS: Okay. No. The answer is no. But what I can say maybe is helpful is that malted milk powder is a very interesting ingredient to work with. It's very drying. It really sucks up water.
SU: Hygroscopic.
JS: There you go. It really sucks up liquid and it creates almost a tacky texture so you really have to be careful with it. I wouldn't substitute Guinness Stout for malted milk butter. I do think you can substitute Guinness Stout for another dark beer. That'd be totally fine and low risk, no biggie. I can't say for sure because I haven't done it but I almost feel like Coca-Cola, coffee, things of that nature would probably work quite well. What was that soda? Malta.
SU: Oh, yeah. Yeah, Malta.
JS: That might be great actually.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I think these are pretty low risk substitutions. But malted milk butter is weird.
SU: Yeah, it can just...
JS: Yeah, it's a tough one.
SU: Okay. We have another question. I think it's more related to the Guinness rather than the frosting. [inaudible 00:18:31] asks, "Hello, I love a brown butter frosting. Would this work if the Stout was non-alcoholic?"
JS: I think for sure.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. I don't think the alcohol is doing anything in the frosting.
SU: Got it.
JS: Yeah.
SU: Okay. We have one that requires a bit of diagnosis.
JS: Okay.
SU: Okay. Christina C writes, "This cake is so good!! I'm not totally sure what went wrong with the frosting but I suspect that it's because I used a box of "powdered sugar" that came in a gingerbread house kit."
JS: I love this.
SU: "And it may not be all sugar. I weighed everything I could and the cake was completely cool so the sugar is all I can think of. Even the leftovers today are not totally set. Luckily it tastes great. I plan on trying again so we'll see if I'm the problem or if it's the sugar." Christina.
JS: No, you're not the problem.
SU: I love that you use gingerbread kit sugar.
JS: That's some stuff I would do. Okay. There is a picture and I believe it's a before and after, directly applied frosting and then sometime after. The directly before, it looks pretty good. And then the after, it flowed off.
SU: Looks like it melted. I don't think it helped using gingerbread house kit sugar.
JS: Yeah. This is just throwing a wrench into my answer. Acting like that never happened, I would say that the culprits are one of two things, it's that perhaps it wasn't whisked enough. But I don't know, because the before picture looks pretty good. And Christina, I don't want to blame you and I don't think you would do this, but perhaps the cake was slightly warm still and then it did melt. But I don't think you would do that. Yeah. I don't know.
SU: This one, we're puzzled. From Sean, also on Substack, Guys, that's where Bake Club is, on Substack.
JS: That's where you can harass us.
SU: "I baked the Guinness cake today to take to book club tonight. It came together really easily and it smells divine. Question about the frosting, it tastes great but definitely has flex with the brown butter solids. Was that supposed to happen or did I take it a step too far? No bitterness like others reported. Also..."
JS: Yeah. Sean is saying this because other people thought they pushed it too far. Okay?
SU: "Also, my Morton's kosher salt really didn't melt into the frosting. I find little salt grains now and then. Not unpleasant but I was surprised."
JS: Fair.
SU: And Sean included a lovely little picture.
JS: Sean's frosting looks perfect.
SU: Beautiful.
JS: Great swooshes.
SU: Yeah, on a lovely platter.
JS: Okay. On the brown butter note because a lot of people ask this, but the thing that's providing flavor through this process are the milk solids. You're literally toasting them and transforming them so those little bits is exactly what you want.
SU: And to be fair to Sean, it is true that in lots of classic French cooking-
JS: Sure. Like fine dining, they strain it out.
SU: ...they strain it out. After making the brown butter, they do strain out those brown butter solids. And listen, if you've gone a little too far and your butter is burnt, charred, then yes, I wouldn't use it either. I would strain that out. But in baking especially, I think it's really nice to include the solids because most baking recipes have other additional ingredients like fat and flour, et cetera, to weigh things down and weigh flavors down so you really want as much punch as possible. And as Jesse said, the flavor is in those solids.
JS: Yeah. Sean, you did great.
SU: You did do great.
JS: In terms of the salt...
SU: There's a reason we recommend Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Which Diamond Crystal, you haven't yet sponsored us and we are waiting.
JS: Yeah. Diamond Crystal, I think they're actually larger but they're a bit more flaky delicatey. You can take them in your fingers almost and they go smoosh them up a little bit. And you know how you can take dried herbs and do that? Like dry thyme.
SU: Mm-hmm.
JS: You can do that with the salt too. Maybe search out some Diamond Crystals. It can be hard to find though but it's worth seeking out.
SU: Final question from Eliana. She asks, "How do we store this cake? Because of the frosting, I think the fridge is best but I'm worried it'll dry out the cake." That's a good question.
JS: Okay. Shilpa and I talk about refrigerated cake often actually. I hate refrigerated cake.
SU: I love refrigerated cake.
JS: She does, yes.
SU: Whole cake.
JS: We're quite divided. I would just leave it on your counter because it doesn't have cream cheese or anything in the frosting so I think it's low risk. Live life on the edge. You're fine.
SU: Yeah.
JS: If you have a cloche, put it on it.
SU: Oh, yes.
JS: And if you don't have a cloche, find a really big bowl.
SU: Yeah. That's how we do it in the test kitchen, a really big, big ass bowl.
JS: And put a note on it. Yeah.
SU: Yes, "Don't touch, cake underneath."
JS: Exactly.
SU: On that note, we're going to take another break.
JS: And when we get back, we're going to introduce you to a baker you should know.
SU: Welcome back to BA Bake Club.
JS: It is one of my favorite parts of the show. It is time for us to introduce you to a baker whose work we think our listeners should know about.
SU: Today we've reached out to a baker many of you probably already know, someone who can certainly diagnose a cake problem and a true icon within the baking world, Helen Goh. She is a baking columnist, co-author of Ottolenghi Sweet and Comfort. She's a psychologist. And most recently she's the author of the book, Baking and the Meaning of Life.
JS: Helen, welcome to BA Bake Club.
Helen Goh: Hello. It's so great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.
JS: We are so excited. We are both such fans. We have been fans for a long time so this is amazing.
SU: This is a dream come true moment.
JS: Yeah, thank you.
HG: This is a dream come true for me. I can't tell you.
JS: Oh, please.
SU: Okay. I know we just mentioned that your latest book just came out, it's called Baking and the Meaning of Life. And I will say, Jesse and I were going to the book earlier and it has perhaps the most unusual introduction to a baking book that we've ever read. And I think that's informed by your background but it really struck me a certain question that you asked and you said. In the book you write, "How is it that baking actually helps create meaning in our lives?" And then you go on to answer this in the book but actually I would love for our listeners to hear it from you now because I found that very powerful.
HG: It's quite a grandiose title, Baking and the Meaning of Life. Who knows what the meaning of life is? First of all, the title actually comes from a book by a psychoanalyst, a New York psychoanalyst called Irvin Yalom. And his book was called Momma and the Meaning of Life. And when I was training as a psychologist, I was very captured by all his writing but particularly this one. What I took away from the book was this idea that all the ordinary moments in life stitched together makes for a meaningful life. And that's always stuck with me. And the work at Ottolenghi that I've done over nearly a decade, it's very forward-looking. We're always thinking, trying to be ahead, trying to think of innovation and creativity, and it's wonderful.
But after doing Sweet and Comfort, I came away feeling that what about all the little minutiae, the little moments that I've cooked just for me, just for my friends, just for my family. And I began to see that actually when I look back at the moments that I've baked for other people, those moments meant something. I think with cake, there's usually a context around it. Very few people make or bake just for themselves, there's usually a relationship involved. And that when I look back at my life, that was certainly the case. And it made me think of how that baking has amplified my life in a way that I've not thought about. I thought about cakes in terms of creativity and mastering a skill and my job, but I'd not considered that it was actually what really gave my life... It amplified things in my life. And I guess for the first time, I had used my psychological training to inspect this idea of why we baked. It's always just been so much about the craft for me and suddenly I was more tuned in to why we actually do it.
JS: Helen, how did your love of baking and psychology come together?
HG: I've been a psychologist and a baker for many years and I've kept them separate for all my working life for two reasons. Partly because for me, they served very different parts of me as a person. But also because mainly I was terrified that my patients would think that I spent all my time baking rather than reading psychological journals, that I wasn't a real therapist.
JS: Interesting.
HG: I kept them very separate and I never saw any need to merge the two. When Yotam and I were touring for Sweet, that was in 2017, and we had a lot of fun. And he's prone to outing me, "Helen is very messy. She's got a slightly bad temper." But what he also said was, he revealed that I was a psychologist. And a number of publishers had contacted me then to ask about this idea of combining the two, a book that combines psychology and baking.
And at the time, I just didn't see it. I always felt that yes, there was something very therapeutic about baking. I'm sure you two have come across that, right? This feeling of how people baked as a stress relief. I acknowledged that. I think that is true but I just didn't see how I could write a whole book about it. For that reason, it laid dormant in my mind until after Comfort was released when I felt that I just needed to retreat a little bit. And that was when I became tuned into this more philosophical idea of why we bake.
SU: I just want to ask, you're practicing all through the time that you were working in the test kitchen at Ottolenghi and developing recipes and [inaudible 00:29:01]
HG: For me, I've always had the two. And even right from the beginning when I decided to... I had already a Bachelor of Science with a major in psychology but I was told by the faculty that I was too young to really focus on it. And, "Go away, take a gap year and just have a bit more life experience before coming back and doing the postgraduate." I did do that, it was good advice. But I actually didn't go for one year, I went for 10 years because I discovered baking. And I needed to work to fund my postgraduate studies so I went to school during the day and cooked in the evening in the pastry section at a very large restaurant in Melbourne. And after I graduated, I still felt that I wasn't ready to let go of baking and so I moonlighted.
And then when I moved to London and... Anyway, it's a long story. But to be able to practice in London, I needed to convert my Australian registration to a British registration. And that process was so arduous and so long. And I decided, "Well, what I could do at that time is to bake." And my husband, who had lived in London for some time, suggested that I might want to check out this cute little cafe down the road in Notting Hill. And so I went to that, and of course that was Ottolenghi. I really fell in love with that sort of Aladdin's cave. And I met Yotam and we just hit it off from day one and we haven't stopped talking about food and life in general since then. When I finally got my registration and I said to Yotam, "It's time. I now need to leave." He said to me, "Well, you're not going to be studying all the time so you can bake on your days off."
SU: Wow.
JS: Helen, the amount you get done in a day is probably how much I get done in a month.
SU: I know. Literally listening to you I'm like, "Come and organize our lives."
JS: Oh, please.
HG: Not at all. I think it was actually I've been very blessed by the generosity of people. Yotam said, "Well, you can work whenever you have time, and you can bill me when you work and don't bill me when you don't work." That made it possible to combine the two.
SU: Do you ever prescribe baking to your patients? Do you ever tell them like, "Go bake this."
HG: I think they've sensed this other life because when Sweet came out and of course when I was going on tour, I did tell my patients then that you may see me on the radio. Don't be freaked out if I start talking about cake, it is me. I did have to confess. And most of them said, "Oh, we knew anyway."
JS: Oh, yeah. I Googled my therapist.
HG: Yes.
JS: We all know.
HG: And they were just extremely kind in preserving my dual life. I've never prescribed cake baking, although I think it can take you away from that... If you're prone to ruminating or anxiety about the future, I think it can very much focus you in the present. And in that way, I think baking can help people.
JS: Helen, I'm fascinated by your career. But okay, we're going to talk about chocolate cake now [inaudible 00:32:27]
SU: Now we're going to talk [inaudible 00:32:27]
JS: Okay.
HG: Let's do it.
JS: This month we all baked a chocolate Guinness cake. I'm curious, what are the qualities that you look for in a proper chocolate cake?
HG: Well, I look for a depth of flavor with the chocolate. When I'm craving a chocolate cake, I want that texture almost not fudgy exactly but damp, luxurious, deep, dark chocolate. And I think what I love about the chocolate Guinness cake is that it delivers all of that but also it's so easy to make, right?
JS: Yes. Helen, we've brought you on also to help out with a listener question if you're down.
HG: Absolutely.
JS: Okay. This question comes from Leedbird and they said, "I was very sad that although the Guinness cake looked moist, it came out dry. I used a scale to measure everything but I could not find Dutch-processed cocoa powder in the stores here. Would that be the reason that it came out dry? I'm going to try again once I get Dutch-processed." And then later they said, "I had to try to bake the cake again and I finally found Dutch-processed cocoa. The cake did not turn out dry and I added chopped dark chocolate into the batter. The frosting is so good." Shilpa and I wanted to ask you because one of the questions we had over and over again is the difference between Dutch-processed and natural cocoa powder.
SU: And does it make a difference?
JS: And yes, does it make a difference?
HG: Well, first of all, Leedbird, I hear you. This has happened to me as well. Yes, I think it almost certainly has to do with the cocoa powder. You've got natural cocoa powder and Dutch-processed, and natural cocoa powder is just the cocoa pod is ground. It's quite acidic, the pH is five to six. It's very floral and fruity and has that acidity. And Dutch-processed cocoa powder has undergone an alkalizing treatment, I think it's potassium carbonate that is used to smooth it out. It has a smoother mouth feel, it's a darker color and it's less acidic. I think the pH is maybe six to eight.
Let's take the recipe. It's chocolate Guinness cake, it already has the Guinness which is carbonated and slightly acidic. Baking soda always sounds to me acidic but it's actually an alkali, and that all reacts very nicely. But when cocoa powder or natural cocoa powder is used, it has an extra acidic component. And I think what happens is that the cake just rises because of all that bubbling, all that interaction. I think it rises too quickly and incorporates too much air into it. Instead of a very damp, dense, dark cake, you get a slightly lighter cake. And you know when air is added, yes, it can be light but it also... The amount of air that's added in it also makes it drier.
Does that make sense?
JS: Yeah, it totally makes sense.
SU: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. Because I don't think people realize that it's not just a flavor thing, there's chemistry going on here.
HG: Yes, that's right. When you use Dutch-processed, not only is it a darker, deeper cake, you also get less of a reaction because it's less acidic and the acid doesn't react so much with the baking soda. I've always felt that Dutch-processed has a better mouth feel and I've always veered towards it without really understanding the science behind it. But I was doing a bake sale that was for a charity for the Red Cross when there was this earthquake in Turkey, I think it was 2003, and I think I made about 200 cupcakes and it was the Guinness cake that I was making. And because I was making so many cakes, I was just using up all the cocoa powder that I had in my pantry. And some of it was natural and some of it was Dutch-processed and I definitely saw the difference there, and that was when I was tuned into why and wherefore of the cocoa powder.
SU: Okay. Thanks, Helen.
HG: Sure.
SU: We actually have a bunch of rapid fire questions that we'd love to ask you.
HG: Yes.
SU: On a scale of 1 to 10, how tidy is your spice cabinets?
HG: Oh, it's alphabetized so I'm going to say nine.
JS: Oh.
SU: We are asking a doctor.
JS: Yeah. I love that. I love that.
HG: But if you were to ask about the rest of the kitchen, that would be four.
JS: That's another story.
HG: But for me, there's just nothing worse than when you need a spice quickly, just rummaging through the drawer. I hate having to rummage through my drawers to locate a spice so the alphabetizing is not so much because I'm neat by nature but because I'm impatient.
JS: What's the hardest baking skill you think you've mastered?
HG: I think tempering chocolate.
JS: Oh, that's a good one.
HG: I don't know why but I find that tricky.
JS: It is tricky.
HG: I think I'm doing all the right things and then it doesn't. And then sometimes I think, "Oh, I don't need to temper this." And then it comes out perfect.
JS: Truly. That's always how it works.
HG: Right.
SU: Do you have a motto or words that you live by, Helen?
HG: Oh. In the kitchen, my motto is always buy two so you always have one because I live in fear of running out of something.
SU: Oh, wow.
JS: That's fair. That's valid.
SU: You're like my husband.
HG: Right.
JS: Where is an unexpected place that you find inspiration?
HG: You know, clothes and shoes. For example, I had these sandals that I bought with one of my first pay packets and it had green crystals, encrusted in green crystals. And the sandal eventually fell apart but I love those green crystals so much that I developed a cake with basil sugar. It was a nectarine cake with basil sugar on top because I just obsessed with these green crystals.
JS: I love that.
SU: Wow.
JS: I love that.
SU: What is the most underrated ingredient do you think when it comes to baking?
HG: Oh, I think sour cream.
JS: That's a good one.
HG: I think it gives a crumb a really plush texture. And also flavor, I think adding that slight tang counteracts that sweetness. And also what it does to batters, it gives it that tender crumb.
JS: That's a good one. Okay. Last rapid fire, what is the best compliment that you've ever received on a bake?
HG: Oh, gosh. Anything my mother says that's good because she's more tuned into what could be better. That's more...
JS: Yeah.
SU: What a polite way of saying that.
JS: I feel like with loved ones, the illusion is over.
SU: Yeah.
HG: I think that's the Asian mummy.
SU: 100%.
HG: How could you improve it, right?
SU: It's always that, yes. That also the highest compliments.
HG: Right? Right. Praise from an Asian mother, particularly if it's, "Oh, I like it because it's not too sweet." That's the catchcry for the Asian mum.
SU: 100%. Helen, where can people find you on the internet?
HG: Oh, I am on Instagram at helen_goh_bakes. It feels so strange to say that but yes, it's helen_goh_bakes on Instagram.
JS: Love it.
SU: Lovely.
JS: Thank you so much.
HG: Thank you both so much.
JS: That's it for this month's edition of BA Bake Club. Shilpa, can you tell our bakers about the April Bake Club recipe?
SU: I'll start by saying that this is become the unofficial birthday cake of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.
JS: It has, yes.
SU: It's a strawberry roll cake that I initially made for Hannah's birthday. And Hannah is Hannah Aspring, our Deputy Food Editor. And I initially made it for her birthday a couple of years ago. And then from there, I think then Sonya asked for it on her birthday.
JS: Yeah, we just kept talking about it.
SU: And then somebody else asked for it on their birthday. And then it was just so good at that time and we decided that we need to have it for Bake Club. We need to put it on the site. And April felt like a perfect time to do a strawberry roll cake to welcome spring.
JS: It's such a cute and delicious cake.
SU: Yeah.
JS: It's very cute. Is there any special equipment or ingredients that bakers should maybe have on hand?
SU: I would say take the trouble to source some really nice strawberries. And actually, I see this somewhere in all of the text that I wrote. I said if you can't find good strawberries, you can also do this with raspberries, and it's actually preferable than trying to use mediocre strawberries.
JS: They're consistent. Yeah.
SU: Yeah, they're consistent and they're lovely. Best strawberries, failing which good raspberries.
JS: Nice. Well, bake lovers, once you bake through this cake, you can send us your pictures and questions. There are so many different ways to get in touch.
SU: You can comment on the recipe on the Epicurious app or on the Bon Appetit website, you can comment on our Substack, or you can email us at [email protected]. And if you've made it and loved it, rate and review the recipe on our site.
JS: We're your host, JS.
SU: And Shilpa Uskokovic.
JS: Our Producer is Emily Elias, and we had editing by Michele O'Brien.
SU: Pran Bandi is our Studio Engineer.
JS: Research editing by Ryan Herrington Marisa Malanga.
SU: This episode was mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound.
JS: If you like this show, leave us a rating and review and hit that follow button so you never miss an episode.
SU: And if you're not already part of the club, head to bonappetit.com/bakeclub to find all the information you need to join.
JS: Thanks for listening to BA Bake Club. And we'll see you next month.