The Lords Work ft. Claire Saffitz

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Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is HyperFixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them.
Or at least I try.

Speaker 1 And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, the Lord's Work.

Speaker 1 In the way that falling leaves signify autumn and flowers signify spring, in the Solomon family house, there's just one thing that signifies celebration.

Speaker 2 It's a hard eye. layer cake with a yellow sponge and a chocolate buttercream, but it's not like overly chocolate.
It's almost like they make vanilla and they mix chocolate into it.

Speaker 1 This is Rebecca Solomon. She's a dentist and a native New Yorker, and what she's describing is her family's favorite cake.

Speaker 1 Rebecca told me that the cake doesn't really even have a name, but that it's kind of like a Jewish seven-layer cake, and when you order it as a slice, it's called a French pastry.

Speaker 1 But names have never been super important when it comes to this cake. Because when Rebecca would call the bakery, they always knew what she wanted.

Speaker 1 And for as long as she can remember, there's only ever been one bakery where her family would order this cake. Lord's Bakery in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Speaker 2 It's kind of like a fixture of the Flatbush Junction. And so it's been there for like decades longer than you and me have been alive.
It's just always existed for us.

Speaker 1 No one can agree how long Lord's has been there. Some say over 40 years.
The New York Daily News says 60. Others have their own estimates.

Speaker 1 But without a doubt, the secret to Lord's longevity has been its ability to cater to the changing tastes of the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 Rebecca told us that anytime you'd walk into this place, the cases would be full of both Jewish and Caribbean desserts, all being offered for a very reasonable price.

Speaker 1 And even though the Solomons love all of Lord's little treats, there's only ever been one item that felt like celebration.

Speaker 1 Because there's only ever been one item that made Hope Solomon, the family matriarch, really,

Speaker 1 really happy. This cake without a name.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, this cake, this cake, once you have this cake, no other cake will do.

Speaker 1 This is Hope, Rebecca's mom.

Speaker 2 I'm not lying. It's so light and fluffy.

Speaker 2 And the buttercream frosting is like just the perfect consistency, the perfect taste, the perfect color. And it's so fresh that when you cut it, it like literally like almost folds down.

Speaker 2 You have to catch it right away to put it in your plate. My mom is very health conscious.
Like my mom, when she retired, now she spends four hours hours a day in the gym.

Speaker 2 Like sweets aren't necessarily something that gets my mom excited. And this is the one thing that she enjoys like wholeheartedly.
And like you see the smile on her face. Like she absolutely loves it.

Speaker 1 Seeing that smile on Hope's face was what made the occasion a celebration. And the cake was what made her smile.
So over the years, the Solomon family started inventing reasons to order the cake.

Speaker 1 They'd order it for Thanksgiving, New Year's, retirements, when someone passed a test.

Speaker 1 They'd even order it for Passover, a Jewish holiday where you're explicitly not supposed to eat anything leavened and made with flour. The cake was like a member of the family.

Speaker 1 It might have even been the most beloved member of the family. And then, one day, with no warning or fanfare, the cake was suddenly gone.

Speaker 1 In March of 2024, Lord's Bakery closed its doors. There were reports of unpaid bills, but the closure was so sudden, no reason was ever actually given to the public.

Speaker 1 And so, seemingly overnight, the Solomons were cut off from their favorite cake, and Hope was devastated.

Speaker 2 I expected them to be there forever, like my grandmother, and never,

Speaker 2 you know, never thinking it's ever leaving. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The family tried to console her by ordering the only other cake that made Hope even moderately happy: Carvell's marine mammal-shaped ice cream cake, Fudgy the Whale.

Speaker 1 But, and I say this with no disrespect to the Carvelle Corporation, and having never tasted Hope's beloved Lord's cake, Fudgie the Whale is a poor substitute.

Speaker 1 So, Rebecca, being a dutiful daughter and the only one of her siblings that's still in New York, decided that she was going to be the one to find this cake for her mom.

Speaker 1 But so far, it has not been going well.

Speaker 1 In part, because Hope is the toughest critic in the world.

Speaker 2 I went to all the kosher bakeries. Disgusting.
I go to like Ladybird in Brooklyn. Very good bakery.
It's not worth the calories.

Speaker 2 Then I went all over like Borough Park, Sat Mar Williamsburg, buying these seven layer cakes. Why should I eat this when it's not even good? Wrong cake.
Layers of disappointment. My mom, not happy.

Speaker 1 So Rebecca's like, okay, maybe my descriptions of this nameless cake aren't working so well. Maybe I'll just try to make this cake myself.
And that

Speaker 1 also didn't go well. It was wild.

Speaker 2 I told her I saved it, but I threw it out right in the garbage pail. It was terrible.

Speaker 1 How does it feel having your mom sit right next to you and tell you how awful your cake was?

Speaker 2 Do you know what my mom would tell us as children? She would say, every mother cockroach thinks their baby cockroach is beautiful. But have you ever seen a beautiful baby cockroach?

Speaker 1 What am I supposed to learn to take away from that saying?

Speaker 2 That means they were ugly, but if a mother has a baby and it could be the ugliest bastard in the world, the mother's still going to say it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 So like my brothers and I, when they say we, would we be surprised that I made a cake and she said it tasted like

Speaker 2 absolutely not why would i

Speaker 2 isn't it better to be honest far for the course

Speaker 1 so then rebecca accepts that no one can make this cake except the people who used to work at lourdes so she turns to some light internet stalking to find the last names of the people she used to know there and when she finds their last names she starts searching for their home phone numbers and when she finds their home phone numbers well That's when her parents put the kibosh on this whole endeavor.

Speaker 2 I don't want them to get in trouble. People like you're going to sound so crazy.
I mean, what if they think she's crazy, a stalk or she loses her license as a dentist?

Speaker 2 Crazy woman.

Speaker 1 That feels like it might be a little extreme.

Speaker 2 But then I was listening to 99% Invisible, and they featured your podcast on their refrigerators.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they do.

Speaker 2 It's like, if he can solve this.

Speaker 1 You know, calling people's landlines is like literally my job. So they can think I'm crazy.

Speaker 1 They don't have to think you're crazy.

Speaker 1 So what would make this solve for you? It sounds like there aren't any bakeries that will be able to replicate this.

Speaker 2 I'm the baker and pay him to make the cake. Or get the recipe.
Well, I don't know if they'll give us a good recipe. You're a good baker.

Speaker 2 I am a good baker, but I don't think they'll give us the recipe.

Speaker 2 If we had the recipe, we think, I mean, it wouldn't be the same, but we think at least we could make something like closer than these bakeries where I keep striking out like every two months.

Speaker 1 I mean, someone out there still has to know the recipe. All I have to do is just convince them that it's important enough to you guys.
And, like, what are they holding on to it for?

Speaker 1 It's not like they've got a bakery anymore. As sad as that is.

Speaker 2 If they are at another bakery, we'll follow that. We'll go to that bakery and have them make the, you know what I'm saying? If they did go somewhere else, that would be great too.

Speaker 2 We would follow them anyway. Yeah, we have a car.

Speaker 2 Gas in the car and go.

Speaker 1 Um, okay, so I think that's all we need. Uh, we're gonna dig dig into this, and we'll follow up with you guys if we figure anything out.

Speaker 2 Whatever you could do is really appreciate it, and we thank you. I hope you're successful, but if not, I understand.
I'm not going to be upset, really. We really are.
Just a little upset.

Speaker 1 When we say goodbye to Hope and Rebecca, we thought this might actually be a pretty easy one to solve.

Speaker 1 Rebecca had already built us a contact list, and she built us a keynote presentation with photos that she'd taken of the cake over the years.

Speaker 1 And sure, she didn't have any photos of the inside of the cake, because why would you take a photo of a cake with a bunch of slices taken out of it?

Speaker 1 And yeah, we didn't know what the cake was called, besides a hard-iced layer cake with buttercream and white or maybe yellow sponge.

Speaker 1 But we figured, like, once we show this to the former Lord's Bakery folks, they're gonna know what to do. But as usual, we were wrong.

Speaker 1 If you're a member of our premium feed, you already know that we spent months investigating this story and we were unable to make any, literally any, headway.

Speaker 1 We called all the phone numbers for all the people Rebecca had found. Many were disconnected, and in the case of those that weren't, nobody picked up and nobody returned our calls.

Speaker 1 We went on ancestry.com to find relatives of people associated with the bakery and posted on Flatbush Facebook groups and emailed people who reported on the Lourdes Bakery closure. Again, nothing.

Speaker 1 We sent Hyperfix producer Amore Yates into the streets of Flatbush, where she wandered in and out of every shop in the vicinity of the Lourdes Building, asking if anyone knew who used to work there.

Speaker 1 One guy told us he had a phone number for one of the Lord's old employees, but when we called the number, we discovered it was actually just the number for the old bakery, which is now inactive.

Speaker 1 Still, we refused to give up because this seemed like such an eminently solvable mystery. Lord's wasn't just some flash in the pan kind of establishment.

Speaker 1 It was an institution that had been around for decades. And in that time, there were presumably dozens of people who had taken a turn working in their kitchens.

Speaker 1 And surely some of those people knew the recipe for the cake or knew how to contact someone who could get it.

Speaker 1 So we put out an episode on our premium feed explaining the situation and asking our audience if anyone knew anyone who worked at Lord's Bakery at any time.

Speaker 1 And then,

Speaker 1 right after we released the episode, something happened.

Speaker 1 Amore sent me a Slack message asking me to meet her in a Zoom. There was an update on the Lord's Bakery story, and she wanted to share it with me.

Speaker 4 I have a bit of good news and a bit of bad news.

Speaker 1 All right, I'm ready.

Speaker 4 So I got an email from Rebecca. And the good news is that she found the manager of Lord's Bakery.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 How did that happen?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, it truly was Kismet. So Rebecca was just walking around town with her friend and they decide they want to go to a bakery in the neighborhood.

Speaker 4 And she walks into this bakery and lo and behold, the manager of Lord's Bakery is working at the counter.

Speaker 1 Unbelievable.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. So she obviously asks him immediately like, oh my God, we've missed the cake so much.
Can you please make the cake that we would always get? And he's like, yeah, of course.

Speaker 4 Like, I know what you order. I know what you get.
And Rebecca pre-orders the cake and it'll be ready for pickup on Father's Day.

Speaker 1 Okay. That sounds all great.

Speaker 1 Did she ask if we could interview him about what makes this cake so unique?

Speaker 4 So that's the bad news.

Speaker 4 Rebecca's a little afraid and hesitant to ask him about it because from her perspective, like all of this is just really weird, right?

Speaker 4 Like the fact that she reached out to a podcast and then a podcast tried to call him and like like she found all these personal numbers.

Speaker 4 Like basically it exposes just kind of all the weird stuff that weird to her, not weird to us, but all the things that she did in her attempt to find this cake.

Speaker 4 And like all she wanted was to have access to this cake again. Right.
And so now that Rebecca kind of has that access, she's afraid of doing anything that might jeopardize the access.

Speaker 1 Oh, so basically she's scared that the weird podcast guy is going to freak this guy out and he's going to ghost.

Speaker 4 Yes. Yeah.
100%.

Speaker 1 I mean, I get that, but I guess my thinking is like Lourdes was this institution that closed without warning.

Speaker 1 And so she's able to order the cake right now, but that doesn't mean she's gonna be able to get it in the future. What if the manager moves on to a new job? What if this bakery closes suddenly?

Speaker 1 It seems like the only way to ensure that they'll have this cake forever is for them to get the recipe.

Speaker 4 That's what I'm thinking, too.

Speaker 4 But for now, all we can do is wait and wait and see how this new cake measures up against the original.

Speaker 2 Nothing was the same.

Speaker 1 Nothing?

Speaker 2 Nothing. Very, very upsetting to me.

Speaker 1 When we reconnected with the Solomons, hope sounded heartbroken. It had been a little over a year since she'd lost her beloved Lord's cake.

Speaker 1 A year without that hard chocolate shell and that not-too-chocolatey buttercream and that white or was it yellow sponge.

Speaker 1 A year without smiling that smile that only emerged when all those ingredients combined into the perfect bite.

Speaker 1 So, when Rebecca told her that she'd randomly run into the manager of Lourdes right after our episode was released, it felt like it was meant to be. Her prayers were about to be answered.

Speaker 1 But as soon as she took a bite of the new cake, Hope realized this cake was not her family's cake, it was a stranger's cake, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

Speaker 4 It was a delicious cake, Mark.

Speaker 2 No, no, it was a nice cake, but it wasn't, it wasn't even 5% close,

Speaker 2 you know to be honest

Speaker 2 what do you want me to say i can't lie did you finish your slice or were you just like get this out of my face you had three slices thin they were three thin slices

Speaker 2 thin i figure all right let me taste the next one maybe it's just that

Speaker 2 i mean it was a beautiful cake lovely cake But the texture of the sponge was different. The icing was different.
The cream was different.

Speaker 2 The only thing that was the same was the yellow flowers on the top. Guys, I'm really sad about it.

Speaker 1 To hope, this felt like the end of the line. She told me she'd resigned herself to a future of tragic birthdays with nothing to look forward to but Fudgy the Whale, which looks anemic now, by the way.

Speaker 1 Not like it used to years ago, when you could get a nice fudgie.

Speaker 1 But as you've probably guessed, based purely on the fact that we're only halfway through the story, that is not how things turned out.

Speaker 1 Because the thing we hadn't yet told the Solomons is that even though they'd essentially told us to stand down, told us that they'd found a source for the cake, and they no longer needed our services, we never stopped working on this story.

Speaker 1 And while the Solomon search hit a dead end, our search was just beginning to heat up.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's rewind a bit.

Speaker 1 So, you know how we said we put out an early version of this story on the premium feed, asking if anyone in our audience knew someone that had worked at Lord's who might be able to hook us up with a recipe.

Speaker 1 Right. So that question turned up nothing.
But on our HyperFix Discord, a new idea was emerging.

Speaker 1 And the consensus was that if we couldn't find the recipe, there was one person who might be able to reverse engineer it for us.

Speaker 4 Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Saffetz.
Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Saffets.
Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Saffitz.
Welcome to my home kitchen.

Speaker 4 On today's episode of Claire Recreates, I'm making nutter butter, rice krispy treats, little Debbie oatmeal cream pies.

Speaker 1 If you don't know who this is, it is my true delight to introduce you to the sugar savant that is Claire Saffett's. Claire is an award-winning cookbook author and recipe developer.

Speaker 1 She hosts a YouTube show with over a million subscribers. And the reason her name kept coming up in relation to this is she's also a bit of a dessert detective.

Speaker 1 Over the last several years, Claire has become famous for her ability to reverse engineer classic infections like Twinkies and Malamars, Nutter Butters, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1 And the way she does this is truly Sherlock Holmesian.

Speaker 1 Because when Claire sets out to recreate something, she doesn't just taste it, she dissects it, she analyzes it. And when she can, Claire even studies the factory in which it was made.

Speaker 1 Because Claire isn't just trying to figure out the mechanics of how something's made, she's searching for clues that can help her understand the essence of a thing so well that she can recast it as a homemade treat.

Speaker 1 The whole thing is an intensely detailed scientific process, which is why she seemed like the perfect person, maybe the only person, to help us figure out what might have gone into this cake.

Speaker 1 Problem was, of course, that she's a giant celebrity, and we are little ants that swoon over her crumbs. But we didn't want to give up on the story, and we were running out of moves.

Speaker 1 And in the immortal words of Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Speaker 1 So Amore sent an email to Claire's reps explaining the situation, along with Rebecca's Rebecca's keynote presentation and the Unsolved Mysteries episode we released to our premium listeners.

Speaker 1 And guys, the very next day, Claire wrote back. Claire, thank you so much.
This is very exciting for us.

Speaker 1 We've been banging our heads against the wall on this one, so any help you could give us would be tremendously appreciated.

Speaker 4 Oh my gosh, thank you. I'm very flattered that you asked.

Speaker 1 Okay, so... I know Amore sent you a bunch of the materials we've compiled, including Rebecca's Slideshow of the Cake and the Unsolved Mysteries episode we put out.

Speaker 1 And I understand that it is really hard to remake something if you've never tasted it. But I'm curious if you found any clues that help you deduce what the ingredients of this cake would be.

Speaker 4 The answer is yes, you can. And I immediately had a couple thoughts upon seeing the photos.

Speaker 4 So one thing I noticed is that it does not look like the outer frosting is applied with a spatula in any way. It's not really frosted.
It looks like it's glazed.

Speaker 4 There aren't like facets that you would get from the stroke of a spatula. There's like a smoothness and rounded edges that to me is like very, it's very noticeably like a poured coating.

Speaker 1 And that kind of checks out with the way that Hope and Rebecca would order it, which is, I think, something along the lines of like a hard iced layer cake.

Speaker 4 And then interestingly,

Speaker 4 Rebecca noted that if it were sold as an individual slice,

Speaker 4 it was called a French pastry. And when I first heard this, I thought that seemed really weird.
Because like

Speaker 4 a slice of cake and a French pastry, like those are not the same thing.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, I'm a bit of a cake dummy. What's the difference between a French pastry and a cake?

Speaker 4 I mean, if I'm thinking of a French pastry, I'm thinking of like a little apple tart or like something that's pastry-based, meaning like a crust, basically.

Speaker 1 Right. So why would they be calling it a French pastry if there isn't any pastry in it?

Speaker 4 Right. But then it kind of made sense because I saw in the slideshow presentation a photo of a single slice which is fully coated

Speaker 4 in this chocolate glaze and it made me think of petifort.

Speaker 1 Oh, you're talking about those like little French cakes that you can pick up and eat like finger foods?

Speaker 4 No, yeah. It's usually a little piece of cake, often in a rectangle or a square, that is covered in what's called a poured fondant, which does harden and become something you can pick up.

Speaker 4 So it kind of made sense to me that maybe this cake is iced in this kind of chocolate-flavored poured fondant. This kind of drips down the sides.

Speaker 4 It creates a really smooth surface and then it hardens.

Speaker 4 And then the individual slice they kind of label like a pettifor, which in like a game of telephone became just like French pastry.

Speaker 1 Ah, I see.

Speaker 4 So that's what I'm thinking for the coating, which is about all I could tell from the photos because there's nothing of of the inside of the cake.

Speaker 1 You see what I mean about Claire's Sherlock Holmesiness?

Speaker 1 It was like she was using every piece of information at her disposal to form a logical deduction about how this chocolate shell was being made and what was being used to make it.

Speaker 1 But as for the other components of the cake, the sponge and the buttercream filling, we just had so little information to draw from.

Speaker 1 Claire told us that Lourdes was probably using an American-style buttercream instead of a fancier European style because it's less technical and less expensive to make.

Speaker 1 And that just makes sense for a bakery that's offering as many different things as Lourdes was offering at the price point they were offering them at.

Speaker 1 As for the sponge, the fact that Rebecca kept referencing Jewish seven layer cakes made her think that maybe they were using some kind of sponge cake, since that's the type traditionally used in Jewish seven layer cakes.

Speaker 1 But again, without more information, there was really no way to know.

Speaker 1 Now, up to this point, our conversation had been purely academic. When we reached out to Claire, we really didn't think she would respond.

Speaker 1 And when she did respond, we were really just hoping to get a sense of how much we could learn with the little we had.

Speaker 1 But the longer we were talking, the more we heard Claire referencing specific questions that she wanted to ask the Solomons. Questions she thought would help her, quote, crack the case.

Speaker 1 Questions that would only really be useful if she was planning to bake this cake.

Speaker 1 So naturally, we had to ask her one final question.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I have a big ask. I want to preface this by saying,

Speaker 1 again, this is not life to tape. It is totally fine for you to say no.
This will be erased from the entire show if you're not interested.

Speaker 4 Listen, I already know what you're going to ask, and the answer is yes.

Speaker 1 Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I was hoping you would ask me to do it. I love a challenge.

Speaker 4 I love a challenge so much. I'm nervous.
I'm nervous. I'm telling you.

Speaker 4 I'm guessing you're going to ask me if I can, if I can make, if I can make what I think the cake is and have them try it.

Speaker 1 And I understand that you need hope and Rebecca's help to give you more information. We'd love to get you guys on a call just so you can ask the questions you need to ask.

Speaker 1 But oh my God, this is going to be, I am so excited. Thank you so much, Chris.

Speaker 4 Oh my gosh. I feel, it's like I couldn't not, like once the challenge is kind of like out there.

Speaker 4 And I feel like I have, I have the capability to at least try.

Speaker 1 And just like that, our Lord's Bakery story was back on. So we agreed to set up a call with the Solomons and Claire so Claire could get the answers to her very specific questions.

Speaker 1 But before we said goodbye, Claire said one more thing.

Speaker 4 I don't think I'm going to nail it. I think it is so impossible for a cake as beloved as this that they have been eating their entire lives.
Right.

Speaker 4 You know, that hope is had for every family occasion for the last like, you know, three decades or whatever it is.

Speaker 4 And it's not about recreating the cake it is about recreating the memory of the cake how she remembers it which is impossible ah that's a very good point that is an incredibly subtle but incredibly important distinction i'm just aware of the power of nostalgia you're never going to match up to the memory of this cake and what it means to them but i can definitely try and i can try to get close and that's as probably as much as i can hope to do but now that the challenge is there like I really want to try.

Speaker 4 So I just gave myself an out for like not actually nailing the final cake, which I feel better about.

Speaker 1 After the break, New York's toughest dessert critic meets the world's greatest dessert detective.

Speaker 1 Hey, this is Alex, and I am here to recommend you a podcast. And the podcast that I'm recommending to you is 99% Invisible.

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Speaker 1 You can find 99% Invisible wherever you get your podcasts or at 99pi.org. You should go check it out.
You won't regret it.

Speaker 1 They've made some of the greatest podcast episodes I have ever heard in my life. It's a wonderful show.
Please go listen. Thanks so much.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to the show. So, before the break, we were given what seemed like a very simple problem.
Help find a recipe for a cake. And we spent months vainly attempting to figure it out.

Speaker 1 And then we enlisted the help of Claire Saffets, the dessert detective, the Sherlock Holmes of Sugar, the woman who puts the PI in pie. Jesus Christ!

Speaker 1 And she told us that with the right clues and the right know-how, it is possible to recreate a cake that you never tasted.

Speaker 1 But because we had so few photos of this cake, All she was able to figure out was the composition of the hard icing.

Speaker 1 To fill in the rest of the details, Claire would need to interview the Solomons, asking specific questions about taste, texture, smell, and yes, even the sound of this cake.

Speaker 1 And from the answers to those questions, plus some additional research, Claire was hoping to deduce the qualities and composition of the two other elements of the cake, or at least something close to them.

Speaker 1 So Claire prepared a list of questions, and on a Friday in July, she joined us for a Zoom meeting with Hope and Rebecca.

Speaker 2 Hi, Rebecca. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Sorry, my mom is coming now.

Speaker 1 No, no, no worries. Take your time.
It had been a month since our first call with Claire, and a month since Hope and Rebecca got their last disappointing cake from the Lord's Bakery Manager.

Speaker 1 And we were all eager to see if this collaboration would bear fruit or chocolate buttercream.

Speaker 1 But before Claire could even ask her first question, there seemed to be something that Rebecca wanted to say.

Speaker 2 Rebecca, tell them. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 2 I did some homework because I didn't want to come, you know, unprepared.

Speaker 1 Knowing that this conversation with Claire may be her best and last chance to figure out how to make this cake for her mom, Rebecca decided to go back to the bakery where she ran into the Lord's manager and have a frank talk with him about why the cake they got was so different from the cake they remembered.

Speaker 1 And to everyone's surprise, he sent her home with some very detailed notes.

Speaker 2 And so I have like a rough sketch, which to me probably doesn't mean a lot, but I hope to you, Claire, you know, some of these things will make more sense.

Speaker 2 So what he said to me was the reason our cake was so different from where he is now is that they use margarine where he currently is, and they use frozen eggs.

Speaker 2 And he said, Lords always uses fresh or used fresh eggs and only uses butter. And then he

Speaker 2 used sweet butter or salt. So

Speaker 2 I got this. You got to tell them.
I'm going to tell you. Okay.

Speaker 2 I mean, we might as well give it correct. I have it.
I literally have it written in my. Okay, let me read two.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay. This is what I found out.
I found out that the outside, the hard icing, he says it's a vanilla fondant with chocolate in it that gets poured over it. And then the buttercream, he said, it's.

Speaker 2 a sweet butter with confectioner sugar and then they add cocoa in after the fact.

Speaker 2 And the cake itself, he says, is a plain chiffon cake and it doesn't have like any like, you know, sometimes people put like lemon or like whatever.

Speaker 2 he says it's just like fresh vanilla flavoring there's no preservatives and he said the flowers are just like straight buttercream and they put them on top of like these those cherries like um like the they take like a maraschino cherry and then they make the flour on top so that's what i discovered today i hope it's helpful

Speaker 3 okay that actually tells me in some ways like everything i need to know i still have questions that i want to ask but it's like we cut right to the like information oh really oh becky did did well.

Speaker 1 I think it's worth mentioning here that Claire did pretty well, too.

Speaker 1 On our first call with her, Claire had made three predictions or deductions about the components of this cake, and all of them turned out to be correct. The shell was a poured fondant.

Speaker 1 The filling was an American-style buttercream. And the sponge, which turned out to be chiffon, is a type of sponge cake.

Speaker 3 I do still have, like, knowing that like we can kind of identify what the components are, I still have a lot of questions about like each part of the cake to try to get even closer.

Speaker 3 Can I start more? Can I start?

Speaker 2 Go for it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, go for it. It's all yours.

Speaker 2 Okay, great. Okay.

Speaker 1 Over the next 30 minutes, Claire asked the Solomons a series of super specific questions about the cake.

Speaker 1 She asked if the hard icing would crack if they cut into it, and if they remember crumbs of chiffon falling off of each slice.

Speaker 1 She asked about the ratio of sponge to filling and if they remembered seeing a bit of browning on the top of each layer.

Speaker 1 She asked what the color of the buttercream was on a scale of brown to gray and if the texture would change when they refrigerated it.

Speaker 1 Each of these questions told her something specific about the inner life of the cake.

Speaker 1 And as the Solomons answered each of Claire's questions, I felt as if I could almost see her building a three-dimensional model of the cake in her mind.

Speaker 2 Okay, I think that answers all my questions.

Speaker 3 I might come up with something like really obscure in when I'm like putting pen to paper and like getting out the flower.

Speaker 3 But I have a lot to go on.

Speaker 3 And it does make me want to dig into sort of like mid-century recipes of like a really kind of old-fashioned like the settlement cookbook type of recipes from the olden days.

Speaker 2 Even like Joy of Cooking from,

Speaker 3 you know, from the 50s or 60s.

Speaker 2 Like would that have that recipe that Joy of Cook?

Speaker 3 It would probably have a chiffon cake recipe, I'm sure. And maybe like a chocolate buttercream.

Speaker 3 I mean, i have my own library of recipes that i've developed that i turn to over and over again but i want to cross-reference with something that i think could really kind of be representative of like what is the kind of recipe that a bakery like lord's would be using you know starting in this time period um as like a reference point so that's really helpful i think my my guess is that like there is nothing terribly unique about each of the components.

Speaker 3 It's really about the way that they come together and interact and balance each other out.

Speaker 3 And like that is the magic of all baking is it's like you just hit certain levels at these like optimal points and you create something like incredibly delicious, but it's not like

Speaker 3 they haven't like reinvented the lele.

Speaker 3 You know, it's still like a sponge cake with buttercream and icing, you know, but it's just like such a good version of that because of how everything works together.

Speaker 1 For the first time since we began this story in February of 2025, I was feeling really hopeful about it. But I was also trying hard to temper my expectations.

Speaker 1 I kept reminding myself about the thing that Claire said about the impossible task of being measured against a memory.

Speaker 1 About the fact that even when you have the perfect execution of the perfect recipe, you can still fall short of capturing the meaning it holds for the person that's eating it.

Speaker 1 And in this case, the person eating it was the toughest critic to ever walk the streets of New York. And yes, I am talking about you, Hope Solomon.

Speaker 1 But Claire agreed to take two swings at this cake, each timed about one month apart.

Speaker 1 And when Amore and her boyfriend Ian pulled up to Claire's house for the first time, she could see that Claire was smiling.

Speaker 1 Hi!

Speaker 1 How are you? Good, how are you?

Speaker 4 This is my boyfriend Ian.

Speaker 4 We made

Speaker 4 you. He's going to help me carry the cake because I didn't want all your hard work to go to waste.

Speaker 1 Claire lives in upstate New York in a renovated cabin surrounded by trees. There's a stream running by and chickens that roam freely all across her property.

Speaker 1 And just inside the door, a light-filled kitchen where she has homemade kombucha on tap.

Speaker 1 It's honestly pretty dreamy.

Speaker 4 Or sometimes more. This one is strawberry rhubarb chameleon.
Ooh, thank you.

Speaker 4 Okay, so I'll show you the cake.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 oh my god.

Speaker 4 It looks amazing. I kind of think I nailed it.
Like, I really, I really think I nailed it. But I don't know why I think that because I've never tasted the original.

Speaker 1 So I can't know that.

Speaker 4 It's so hard to know. The reason I think I nailed it is because I think the cake is really special.
So it's a chiffon cake.

Speaker 4 And I'll probably get into like all this, but I made the original chiffon cake recipe. There is literally like an original recipe.
It was like it's a very clear origin story.

Speaker 1 The backstory of the chiffon cake, which I'm going to tell you really quickly, just to make sure you can hear it, begins in the 1920s with an insurance salesman named Harry Baker, pun not intended, who moved from Ohio to Los Angeles and for whatever reason decided to invent a cake.

Speaker 1 The cake Harry wanted to make had the texture of a sponge cake, which contains no butter, but the richness of a butter cake, which obviously does.

Speaker 1 And according to legend, he tried about 400 different recipes before he got it right.

Speaker 1 The trick to giving the cake its richness was using vegetable oil instead of shortening or butter.

Speaker 1 The trick to its bouncy texture was whipping egg whites separately from the yolks and then folding them into the batter.

Speaker 1 Harry would bake his cakes in the kitchen of his apartment and then sell them to the Brown Derby restaurant in LA. And from there, the cakes exploded in popularity.

Speaker 1 Harry's chiffon cake was said to be a favorite dessert of actor Clark Gable.

Speaker 1 Barbara Stanwick would order them for her private parties. And at one point, even Eleanor Roosevelt was asking for the recipe.

Speaker 1 But Harry kept the recipe a secret until one day in 1940, when General Mills offered to take it off his hands for some undisclosed amount of money.

Speaker 1 The company renamed the cake Betty Crocker Chiffon, and in 1948, they published a recipe to the masses.

Speaker 1 Its popularity spread around the country, and bakeries like Lourdes built the cake into their repertoire.

Speaker 1 Claire told us that the chiffon cake has fallen out of favor somewhat with contemporary bakeries, which may explain why Hope and Rebecca have had such a hard time finding a bakery that could replicate their cake.

Speaker 1 But if you know where to look, you can still find that original 1948 recipe for Harry Baker's chiffon cake, which is what Claire did when she started working on this cake.

Speaker 1 And then she made some tweaks to it. She said she couldn't help herself.

Speaker 4 And I think the tweaks I made really did result in like an incredible cake. Very plain tasting, but with texture that is like amazing.
So fluffy. So

Speaker 4 like this is the kind of cake where I could see people getting obsessed with it. So meat donated makes sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, too.

Speaker 4 So it's like like this could be acidity, yeah. Right.
The other components we'll see. I think maybe the glaze is not quite set enough.
I think it could probably be a little more set.

Speaker 4 I think the like buttercream filling in the inside is probably darker in color than what they described. And that's just a function of having added more cocoa powder maybe than the original has.

Speaker 4 But I thought without it, it would be really sweet. So it's like, I think sweetness is my concern, but I don't know how sweet the original was.

Speaker 4 So it's like, if I were making this for myself, it would be a little sweet for my taste,

Speaker 4 everything together.

Speaker 4 But we'll see what Hope and Rebecca say. Yeah.
And we know Hope will be honest. Totally.
We know Hope. She's not.

Speaker 4 She will not hold back at all.

Speaker 1 Amore and Ian loaded the cake into the rental car and drove a couple hours to Hope's. And when she got there, the whole family was waiting to taste the cake.

Speaker 1 They passed around plates and utensils, and then Hope cut into the cake. And once everyone had eaten a slice, Amor called Claire to deliver the verdict.

Speaker 4 Hey, Claire. Here we've got Rebecca and Hope here.

Speaker 1 Hi.

Speaker 1 It was around a quarter to six, and Claire was right in the middle of feeding her baby an avocado. But when she saw that we were calling, she had to stop everything and answer the phone.

Speaker 4 I just, I'm dying to know what you guys thought.

Speaker 4 That cake is unbelievable. You nailed it on the sponge and like 85 to 88 percent on the buttercream.
It's freaking outrageous. Oh my God.
This is unbelievable.

Speaker 4 I had two pieces and I'm still woofing it down.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much. I can't believe how much you did.
I can't believe you did this.

Speaker 4 This is the closest that we've found the cake. I am so glad to hear that.
Like so thrilled. You know, I had a feeling about the cake.
I told him more.

Speaker 4 I said, I don't really know why I know this, but I really feel like I nailed the cake. You did.
You definitely did. The same texture, the same moisture, the flavor, right, Becca? It's perfect.

Speaker 1 There is perfect.

Speaker 4 Excellent. So, what should be a little bit different about the buttercream?

Speaker 1 As Claire predicted, the chocolate buttercream was darker than they were used to.

Speaker 1 And even though one member of the family suggested the change may have indeed made the cake more balanced, the objective here was true replication.

Speaker 1 So, for the next draft, Claire tweaked the buttercream. She used less cocoa.
And Hope gave the cake her highest score ever: 100% fidelity.

Speaker 1 It was a perfect replication, and I finally got to see that smile that only this cake would give her.

Speaker 1 But to be sure that the Solomons would always have access to the cake, there was still one more test.

Speaker 1 On October 27th, Hope celebrated her 64th birthday, her second birthday since Lourdes unexpectedly closed its doors.

Speaker 1 And Rebecca baked her special cake using the recipe that Claire reverse-engineered just for them.

Speaker 1 And this time, Hope didn't throw the cake in the trash. Instead, she looked at her daughter, and with a mouthful of cake and a heart full of gratitude, Hope said,

Speaker 1 You did it, Beck.

Speaker 1 You can find the recipe for Hope's cake on our website at hyperfixedpod.com/slash recipe. We'll also include that link in our show notes.
And you can find her on YouTube at CSAFets.

Speaker 1 This episode of Hyperfixed was produced and edited by Amore Yates, Sari Safer Sukek, and Emma Cortland. Additional editorial support from Megan Tan.

Speaker 1 Fact-checking from Naomi Barr. It was engineered by Tony Williams.
The music is by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder and me, Alex Goldman.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Ian Mooney for protecting Hope's cake while Amor drove in NYC traffic. And of course, a very special thanks to Claire Safetz.
We could not have done this without her.

Speaker 1 You can get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, and much more by becoming a premium HyperFix member at hyperfixedpod.com/slash join.

Speaker 1 It's the listeners who support the show that are really keeping us afloat, so thank you so much for your support.

Speaker 1 HyperFixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm.
Thanks so much for listening.

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