Selects: Cake: So Great. So, So Great

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Speaker 11 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 8 Do you want to learn about cake? It's called Cake.

Speaker 4 So Great.

Speaker 4 So, So Great.

Speaker 23 That had to be a Josh title.

Speaker 24 Cake, colon, so great.

Speaker 11 Period.

Speaker 24 So, comma, so great. Yeah, that's Josh.

Speaker 14 This is from November 30th, 2017.

Speaker 24 This is super size because somehow we did 73 minutes on cake, probably because we talked about cake a lot.

Speaker 24 Beyond just the facts and figures, I know our personal opinions came around in this episode. So I hope you enjoyed as much as you enjoyed

Speaker 1 pie.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 25 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. Three of us are together, which means it's time for stuff you should know about cake.

Speaker 25 Cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake.

Speaker 25 Cake.

Speaker 25 This made me

Speaker 25 just frankly want to put my face in a cake. I know.
She caking.

Speaker 25 Oh, man. Yep.
I know we had a discussion about cake or pie quite a while ago. I don't remember exactly where you landed on that.
I'm surprised you can only think of one.

Speaker 25 One time we've done that? Yeah.

Speaker 25 Cake or pie, both. Yeah, same here.

Speaker 25 Why choose between two wonderful things that you don't have to choose between? Agreed.

Speaker 25 As a matter of fact, every once in a while you'll hit like the birthday party jackpot where they'll have like cake and pie, and you're like,

Speaker 25 looks like I'm in heaven.

Speaker 25 But today, Chuck, we're not talking about pie. Although we can talk about one pie in particular because we're talking about cake.

Speaker 25 It turns out, I saw this somewhere, that Boston cream pie is actually a cake. Oh, really? Yeah.
Surprise Boston. Sorry to ruin your day.
They're probably the ones that are like, that are saying that.

Speaker 25 Oh, yeah, probably. Maybe.
I don't know.

Speaker 25 It's a cake, huh? The article on it was written in a thick Boston accent. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Yeah, it is a cake. I'm not sure why, but I just know it's a cake now.
And I want to give a hat tip here.

Speaker 25 I mean, we both worked off of the How Stuff Works article, but I also found a lot of good stuff on a site called What's Cooking America.

Speaker 25 Did you run across them? I did. They are good, man.
They have, you know, clearly their niche is cooking, baking, all things like culinary.

Speaker 25 But they've got some really well-researched articles on their site about the history of cakes and things like that. Yeah, that's good stuff.
Kudos to you. You remember kudos?

Speaker 25 The granola bar?

Speaker 25 Those are great. Oh, yeah.
Are those not around anymore? No.

Speaker 25 No? No, those are gone. And then R.I.P also bonkers candy.
So kudos went the way of the dodo.

Speaker 25 I never heard of bonkers. They were like a fruit chew, but like really had some chew to it.
Not like Starburst, you know, it just disintegrates. These were like...

Speaker 25 They were chewy. They were good.
They're about as good as it gets, really, candy-wise.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they need, I know you've noticed, they need to chill out here with the the sweets at work oh dude like they have little debbie star crunches and swiss cake rolls and stuff all over the place i know we don't need that in here there's like three or four people who are like walking around toothless now well just rotten right out of their heads well and also not you

Speaker 25 my toothlessness is for different reasons. Yours is from a crustini.

Speaker 25 And I've also noticed, though, there's this weird mix in our office now because they try to get super healthy.

Speaker 25 So there will be like Swiss cake rolls next to a bag of like clam chips or something. What chips? I don't know.
Clam chips sound kind of good.

Speaker 25 Seaweed strips. Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I know what you mean. Or like just figs.

Speaker 25 Yeah. You know? It's like a fig Newton without the good tasting part.

Speaker 25 We take figs and we mash them up. Then we wrap them in cellophane and you eat them for $5 a piece.
And your child spits them out because they know better. Right.

Speaker 25 uh no today uh yes i'm with you i do think it's gotten a little out of hand like it's basically just a huge test of willpower at the office like every moment you know yeah i don't i don't indulge i'm not getting into those uh swiss cake rolls but it is tough to walk by the miniature candy bar section right and not be like well just one of those little guys look how tiny it is right and then the next thing you know you've got like 10 rappers laying around your desk thinking like what have i done

Speaker 25 i know man post-halloween stuff too so maybe it'll it'll die down.

Speaker 25 I don't think that's going to happen.

Speaker 25 Yeah. But again, though, today, I guess if

Speaker 25 you replaced all of those candy bars with cakes that were just sitting around, you get zero complaints from me.

Speaker 25 Well, and at my house at Halloween, we gave away two things: we gave away whole slices of pound cake and just figs.

Speaker 25 It was the worst house in the block. Did you, you a pound cake fan?

Speaker 25 Not typically. Like, I would never order a pound cake or say, hey, can someone bake me one for my birthday? You wouldn't say, like, clark me a pound cake?

Speaker 25 No, no, I would never ask someone to clark me a pound cake. But occasionally, like in my life, someone has had pound cake and said, Would you like some pound cake?

Speaker 25 And it's, you know, it's good. It's good, sugary, and dense stuff.
Yeah. I like it because you can just eat it with your hand.
Sure, just pick it up and eat it. Yeah, it's like cake on the go.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I am not a fan of lemon cakes. Oh, really? So, like a lemon pound cake, I'm not into.

Speaker 25 Well, okay, let's just get it out there. What's your favorite cake of all time? Oh, geez.

Speaker 25 I'm going to toss it up between

Speaker 25 a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. That's Bill Clinton's favorite.

Speaker 25 Well, you know,

Speaker 25 as Bill goes,

Speaker 25 so goes Chuck. Uh, which is not true.
Um,

Speaker 25 that was a good COA.

Speaker 25 The carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, or

Speaker 25 I like a red velvet cake. Really?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Well, that's the southern buttercream or cream cheese frosting. Yeah.
You can go either way.

Speaker 25 Yeah, Emily's favorite of all time, hands down, is the Waldorf Astoria red velvet cake, which is red velvet cake with a frosting that is basically only like shortening vanilla and sugar.

Speaker 25 Ooh, that sounds nice. It's not a cream cheese thing.
What's your favorite? Favorite of all time.

Speaker 25 Well, everybody knows that cake perfection was achieved sometime in the 20th century when Publix grocery stores started selling their yellow cake with buttercream frosting. Oh, yeah?

Speaker 25 There's no better cake on the planet. It's like a yellow sheet cake.

Speaker 25 It's simple, but it's tasty. It doesn't need any dressing up, but if it does, we'll just put like some, add some more frosting in the shape of balloons on top, right?

Speaker 25 It's just

Speaker 25 perfection. It's a perfect cake.
I love it. I can eat it morning, noon, and night.
I can eat stale stuff I found in the dumpster behind Publix.

Speaker 25 I can eat the fresh stuff right out of the oven so hot that it burns my mouth. I would eat it any way that it was given to me.

Speaker 25 I'm a big frosting and icing guy, too.

Speaker 25 So a corner piece of sheet cake is pretty much heaven. Yeah, that's that is the tops.
What is Yumi's favorite cake? Yumi's is actually the same as mine.

Speaker 25 We both are junkies for Publix cake, to tell you the truth. Although I have to say, she introduced me to the wonder of Japanese cakes.

Speaker 25 And there's this little-known fact about Japan.

Speaker 25 It loves to take, I shouldn't say it's little known, probably a lot of people know this, but it loves to take things that other cultures came up with and then improve them 10,000%.

Speaker 25 And one of the things that they've done that with is the French bakery. So if you go to Japan, you'll see all these cute little kind of

Speaker 25 Provence-style French bakeries everywhere that sell the best baked goods you've ever had in your life, right? Better than Paris? Yes. Oh, by far.

Speaker 25 By far. That's very controversial.
It is, but I'm telling you,

Speaker 25 you would just be like, Josh was right. This is better.
I'm not kidding. They've improved on it.
And they're very deferential still.

Speaker 25 They're like, oh, well, this is crap compared to what the French are making, however, you would say that in Japanese.

Speaker 25 But they're actually wrong. It actually is better.
But one of the things that they make that's just top-notch is this what they call cheesecake. It is not what you or I would call cheesecake at all.

Speaker 25 It's more like a yellow spongy cake.

Speaker 25 I don't know where the cheese thing comes in. Maybe there's a little cream cheese in there.
I'm not quite sure. But you and I would call it like kind of a dense yellow sponge cake.

Speaker 25 But it is very, very tasty. And that's a kind of a Japanese tradition that I would guess Yumi would say is one of her favorites.
Okay. And just a little shout-out: there's a place in Toronto.

Speaker 25 Next time we're there, I'm going to take you there. All right.
Actually, that's not true. I brought you a cake from there from Uncle Tetsu's Cheesecake Bakery.
Yeah, I have to do it.

Speaker 25 That's a Japanese cheesecake. Oh, that was good.
Yeah, they're the bomb. All I know is, get out of my face with any coconut or any pineapple.
I'll take that.

Speaker 25 I'll just slide that over to your desk then. Yes.
Not into it. Keep them coming.
I don't even like German chocolate cake, really. I love German chocolate.
All right.

Speaker 25 Well, have you ever heard that German chocolate cake and red velvet cake are the same? It's actually not true. I haven't heard that.
I had heard that many times. It's not true.

Speaker 25 But that German chocolate frosting is like, man, that's good. I'm not into that.
See, I think that's what it does. That's what it is that I don't like.
I like sort of a tradition,

Speaker 25 buttercreamy, or just good old-fashioned birthday cake icing type thing. Yeah.
Pipe.

Speaker 25 And surely you agree Publix is the pinnacle of that. I don't know if I've ever had a Publix cake.
Oh.

Speaker 25 I go to Publix three times a week, so next time I'm just going to Well, now that you say that, it might be best that you stay away. Well, why?

Speaker 25 Because you're going to start adding a they sell it by the slice, which is dangerous. Oh, they do? Because that's the only way I would want to do it.
They sell it by the slice, Chuck.

Speaker 25 Like, I can't bring a whole cake in my house. That's full of colours.

Speaker 25 Be sure you look closely because they have yeah, it would be.

Speaker 25 They sell also the same kind with like a cream cheese frosting. You want yellow cake with buttercream frosting.
Okay.

Speaker 25 Just give it a shot and let me know what you think. All right.
The funny thing is, we really haven't even started yet. No, do you want to take a break?

Speaker 25 No, let's at least give out like three facts first. Oh, okay.
Well, I think we just gave a lot of facts about what the greatest cakes in the world are. All right, how about this then?

Speaker 25 I'll start you out with the word cake. Apparently, it is an old Norse word, kaka, which is kind of funny.
It is.

Speaker 25 Because here, I don't know where it it came from, but here in America, kaka can mean doo-doo. Yeah.

Speaker 25 But k-a-k-a is where the original word supposedly came from.

Speaker 25 Right.

Speaker 25 And a lot of English words have like Germanic or Norse origins. Do you know that? Yeah.
So cake, the word cake is of English origin. So is bread.
And apparently the

Speaker 25 bread and the cakes from back in the day, say during the medieval era,

Speaker 25 they were very, very similar. Probably the only difference was the cake might be slightly smaller,

Speaker 25 and it was definitely sweeter. So, cake was like a sweeter version of bread back then.
Yeah, they'd add a little honey to it, but it's not like what we think of as cake today.

Speaker 25 But that's not where the first cakes originate. They actually go way, way, way further back than that, right? Is that true? Yeah, it's true.
Tuck-tuck.

Speaker 25 That may be a little too far back. Yeah, I think so.
So, but basically, around the time,

Speaker 25 I believe of Egypt, the Pharaonic Egypt, they were making cakes using hot stones and honey and some sort of grain mashed up. Right.
It seems like I bet the Chinese were doing it too.

Speaker 25 Didn't say in here. Right.
But it seems like anytime you're talking about who did stuff first, it's like Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans. Pretty much.
I mean, you know, ancient civilization.

Speaker 25 But maybe not China, because it doesn't seem like a very cakey culture. No, I'm not sure about Chinese cakes.
I don't think I've ever had one. I bet you someone knows, though.

Speaker 25 And I bet you there's like one of the best things in the world. It's probably a Chinese cake.

Speaker 25 You know, one of the other things, too, that I didn't realize that I learned from this article, Chuck, was that a lot of the cakes you see around the world that you would mistake for, you know, customary or traditional cakes for that culture, they're actually relatively new.

Speaker 25 Oh, yeah. That the cake that we know and love and understand is very much a 19th century American invention that came out of the Industrial Revolution.

Speaker 25 That's right.

Speaker 25 I mean clearly, like in Germany, like you talked about in the 15th century, they were making cakes. They were actually even serving cakes at birthdays.

Speaker 25 And by all accounts, that's probably the first people to start the birthday cake tradition.

Speaker 25 And I think they even put candles on top. Well, no, the Greeks put candles on top, but it wasn't like

Speaker 25 a happy birthday cake.

Speaker 25 It was more like, hey, this cake is round like the moon, and we're going to put candles on it to make them glow. And they're probably huge candles now that I think about it.

Speaker 25 Yeah, the Greeks gave us the round cake and putting candles on the cake to honor Artemis to make the cake look like the moon. And Artemis was the goddess of the moon, right? Right.

Speaker 25 So they were like, look, Artemis, what do you think of this cake? She'd be like, it needs some frosting. That's right.
And then the Germans in the 1400s started doing birthday cakes.

Speaker 25 And then the 1700s were full-on, like, it's a kid's kid's birthday party, it's got candles, it's a cake, and we'll sing some depressing German song. Right.

Speaker 25 It makes you reflect on your own existence. That's right.
And its eventual end.

Speaker 25 But

Speaker 25 so by the time people were making birthday cakes in Germany, there was a long, long, long tradition of cakes already. And the word cake had started to originate in medieval Britain.

Speaker 25 But there was such a thing as a cheesecake already. The Romans created that and called it placenta.

Speaker 25 Seriously. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 25 The Greeks had created something that was basically a prototype of the fruitcake,

Speaker 25 placus, I believe. Yeah, they called it feces.

Speaker 25 Right?

Speaker 25 So there were all these kind of cakes and breads and things that were starting to be developed. And I think even that pound cake that you're not so hip on

Speaker 25 came before the Industrial Revolution, too.

Speaker 25 So there's stuff that you would kind of recognize as cakes, but the idea of a cake, what Americans call a cake, and know and love is a cake,

Speaker 25 that came out of the Industrial Revolution. The show is sponsored by Cake.
Cake. Eat some today.

Speaker 25 All right, so let's take a break. We definitely gave way more than three fags.
Yeah. We have earned our keep.
And we're going to come back and talk about a little chemistry right after this.

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Speaker 25 All right, so we're back and uh we promised talk of chemistry and I think we talked about this briefly on one show.

Speaker 25 I have tried to bake, I did a birthday cake for Emily a couple of years ago, Red Velvet, Waldorf Astoria cake, And it was okay. It wasn't pretty, though.

Speaker 25 What do you mean, like it was lopsided or there's a horn growing out of it? It just, you know, it didn't look like a cake you would buy in a store, but it tasted really good.

Speaker 25 I'll bet it was made with a lot of love, too. Oh, of course.

Speaker 25 But my deal is, I'm not a great baker because baking requires you to be very precise

Speaker 25 with your ingredients because it is chemistry. I'm a much better cook

Speaker 25 because I'm going to fly by the seat of my pants and throw a little of this in there, throw a little of that in there.

Speaker 25 And there's a much can't do that with cooking. No, there's much more forgiveness in general cooking than baking.
Yeah, cooking's an art. Baking is a science, for sure.

Speaker 25 Yeah, that's what they say, right? Yeah, well, that's what I say, too.

Speaker 25 You didn't make that up right. I think I did.
Okay.

Speaker 25 So

Speaker 25 with a cake, right, what you're doing is producing a chemical reaction. And I knew that.
Yeah. But I had no idea on this granular level that this article gets into

Speaker 25 just how much of a chemical reaction baking a cake is. Yeah, this is pretty neat.
The understanding of it, too, to me.

Speaker 25 So you want to start with a leavening agent, right? That's right. That's how you get from batter, which is kind of flat and soupy and wet, to a nice tall cake.

Speaker 25 The reason it rises is because of a leavening agent. And way, way, way back in the day, they used to use yeast.
They used yeast for everything.

Speaker 25 They would make some beer, they would make a cake, they'd make some bread.

Speaker 25 They would throw it into the eyes of their enemy.

Speaker 25 They would in a fight, a dirty fight.

Speaker 25 And then eventually,

Speaker 25 yeast kind of fell to the wayside a little bit as they realized that there's other ways

Speaker 25 to

Speaker 25 make a cake rise. One of the big ways is to actually introduce air into it.

Speaker 25 And if you, say, you know, beat some eggs,

Speaker 25 what you're doing, you're not just breaking the eggs down into their kind of components or like a mishmash of all of their components.

Speaker 25 You're also introducing air into that mix, which will eventually, as we'll see, transfers into the cake to make it rise.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and like when you're following a recipe, if you've never baked a cake before, and it says cream the butter and sugar or sift the flour, you can't just say, eh, like, I don't have a sifter, so I'll just throw the flour in here.

Speaker 25 Like, your cake is screwed. Yeah, because it's not just like, oh, that makes the flour pretty.
Yeah. The sifting flour introduces air into the whole mix, too.

Speaker 25 Yeah, this is all very important stuff, so

Speaker 25 you can't cheat any of these steps. No, you can't.
You really need to follow a cake recipe pretty closely.

Speaker 25 I mean, I guess if you're a master baker and you know what you're doing, you can do something in lieu of something else. Sure.
But if you're just an ordinary

Speaker 25 non-professional baker at home, just follow the recipe and do what they say. Yeah, because you couldn't say, well, I'm going to substitute this flour for a bunch of salt.

Speaker 25 Like, not only would it taste radically different, like, you're affecting the chemical composition of the mixture. True, unless you're making a traditional South Georgia salt cake.
Right.

Speaker 25 Which you can also use on those snowy days to clear the road, too. That's right.
So, you've got yeast as a

Speaker 25 leavening agent. You've got introducing air through, like, whipping something.
And I found this mention of a recipe that called for four eggs to be beaten for two hours. Holy cow.

Speaker 25 So, you can imagine that everybody was pretty psyched when chemical leavening agents were introduced in the mid-19th century. Oh, so that was an old recipe? Yes.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and so in other words, you couldn't just put the mixer on with your eggs and leave

Speaker 25 and go get on social media. No, this was with your arm.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 And yeah, it was not.

Speaker 25 I mean, I imagine if the person you were working for asked for a cake, you're just like, this is a bad day. This is going to be a bad day.
Did you beat for three hours? Right.

Speaker 25 And the whole reason, again, you're doing this is to introduce some air, right? But if you could use something else, say like sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda,

Speaker 25 and you mixed it, which is a base, and you added another ingredient in there, which is like an acid, say like buttermilk or yogurt or vinegar, right? Yeah. like in a vinegar cake,

Speaker 25 that sodium bicarbonate, that base, and that acid are going to mix together and form a chemical reaction and release CO2.

Speaker 25 And this is how modern cakes rise. CO2 is released through this chemical reaction and it goes

Speaker 25 and bubbles up through the cake and makes the cake rise with it. That's what leavening agents do: they take air and they expand it and make it the cake.
Yeah, like when you slice a piece of cake,

Speaker 25 not so much pound cake because it's way more dense or other non-floured cakes, but your standard birthday cake, you slice it up and you see those, it's, you know, those pockets, those holes, that, you know, those are air holes.

Speaker 25 Those were where the bubbles were. And we'll get to that a little more, but it's that's very important stuff.

Speaker 25 That's a famous chef's apron, a baker's apron. Ask me about my air holes.

Speaker 25 Fat source, very important. Sure.
Fats improve the texture of a cake, allow it to be moist, flavorful, because we all know fat tastes great.

Speaker 25 And butter, you know, people can use shortening, which is good. Margarine is good.
Cooking oil, this can all be used. But for me, just get some real butter.

Speaker 25 And I say that for all foods. I went on a butter,

Speaker 25 not a kick? No, no, no. I am on a butter kick.
I went on a butter, a boycott of sorts for a while.

Speaker 25 Like real butter. But now I'm back on butter.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
I tend to think butter is healthier of all of them, too. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Although olive oil has a beet, it's just such a radically different taste. Yeah, sure, I love it.

Speaker 25 Especially when you're baking with it. Although, have you ever had an olive oil cake? I don't think so.
I don't remember where I had it, but man, they are good. Really? Yes.

Speaker 25 They're surprisingly good, but it is definitely its own distinct thing. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 25 Like, subbing olive oil out for butter is going to give you a weirdo recipe that no one's going to like, but they might pretend they do if they like you. Yes.
But they don't really like that. Right.

Speaker 25 And all these fat sources, they can be used sometimes together or swapped out for butter. But again, you got to know what you're doing.
You can't just say, well, I'm not going to use butter.

Speaker 25 I'm going to just use the same amount of cooking oil as melted butter.

Speaker 25 Right. And one of the reasons why he's swapping something out for butter in particular, too, I mean, butter gives it its richness.

Speaker 25 It helps improve its moistness and texture, right? Butter's great. But butter also has a tendency to

Speaker 25 incorporate air when you cream butter, when you start to mash it around.

Speaker 25 That's the whole reason. Like, they're not telling you to cream the butter just to make it look good before you add it to the batter.
You're actually incorporating air there.

Speaker 25 So that butter is serving both as a fat and as a leavening agent in that recipe. Correct.

Speaker 25 So if you come across a recipe that calls for butter, that it must be creamed, there's something else going on besides just getting a buttery taste out of your cake. That's right.

Speaker 25 Sweetener. I was about to say sugar instead of sweetener.
Might as well, though. But let's be honest.
You can use honey and stuff. You can use agave,

Speaker 25 artificial sweetener, but sugar is the best thing to use, in my opinion. It bonds best to water molecules.
It's really going to help, that'll help everything be nice and moist and soft.

Speaker 25 And you don't want to overdo it, though. You want to use, again, the right amount of sugar because not only

Speaker 25 could it affect the taste, but it could make the texture, it could be too tough.

Speaker 25 yeah and sugar is another one too where if you see sugar and you sub it out for something else it can have an impact on that chemical reaction for sure because it does all those things you were talking about like one of the things it does is it the crystalline structure of sugar actually cuts through the batter to help release CO2 more easily and like you said it binds to water which means it does two things it locks it in so that it keeps moisture in but it also sugar also robs that water from some of the proteins and the starches that give the cake its structure,

Speaker 25 which means that they're not going to be able to become tough and dense, like you were saying, because sugar's already grabbed onto that water molecule. Right.

Speaker 25 And sugar, in particular, you're not going to get the same thing with like stevia or honey. Like it's not going to have the same effect.
It's crystalline sugar.

Speaker 25 And it doesn't have to be white refined sugar. You'd have the same effect, I think, with like turbinado cane sugar, too.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and you can, I mean, if you don't want to use sugar and you want to use honey, look up a recipe that is specific to honey, and they will help account for that

Speaker 25 in certain ways. But it's still, to me, you know, white sugar.
Do it. Right.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 sugar also gives it that nice golden brown color through the Mayard reaction. Yeah, that and the eggs for sure.
Yep.

Speaker 25 Well, we're at eggs. Sugar.

Speaker 25 And eggs. Eggs are big.

Speaker 25 Yeah. Especially if they're ostrich eggs.
Eggs, I know. Eggs have proteins in them, right?

Speaker 25 And there's a couple of things in there.

Speaker 25 Those proteins help give structure to the cake,

Speaker 25 I believe. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 25 The emulsifiers and the yolk, they help. It also kind of serves as a binding agent.
There are a lot of things, including flour, that help bind things together.

Speaker 25 But those eggs and those yolks very much do, because there are certain things in cake sometimes that don't want to mix. Yeah, like the water.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and the egg comes together and says, well, you know, can't we all just kind of stick together here?

Speaker 25 Literally. Nice.
Yes. That wasn't meant to be a pun.
I meant that. And I think the two big emulsifiers are actually in the egg yolk.

Speaker 25 Cholesterol and lecithin are found in egg yolk. And they're like, hey, everybody, come on.
Let's hang out. That's right.
And there's also fats in egg. And

Speaker 25 we already mentioned that fats are awesome and taste delicious. Plus, also, if you're using whole eggs, most of the egg white is water.
The vast majority is water.

Speaker 25 And as we'll see, water and liquids play a big role in the cake, too. So it's all like the idea of people figuring all this out through

Speaker 25 millennia of little contributions here or there is just

Speaker 25 a blessing on humanity.

Speaker 25 It is.

Speaker 25 It's a really neat accomplishment that everyone came together to figure this out over the span of time in the wonderful kitchens on cold winter days that were like, you know, you've got like a nice cake baking in the oven, and you're contributing to humanity's knowledge of being great.

Speaker 25 Yeah, a lot of bad the carcasses of a lot of bad cakes have been left in its wake. Sure.
To get where we are today.

Speaker 25 A lot of unhappy families and a lot of unpleasant conversations about those cakes, but still. And I bet in the olden days, when times were a little tougher, they probably still ate those cakes.

Speaker 25 Oh, yeah, I would guess so. You know, you probably didn't just toss it out to the mules.
No, you gave them to sailors who were glad to have them.

Speaker 25 All right, that brings us to flour. Very, very important ingredient in most baked goods.
And flour is what is going to really be the binding agent. It's really going to hold everything together.

Speaker 25 Give it its structure. Yeah, a lot of structure and strength.
And this is when you mix these proteins with water, it's going to form gluten.

Speaker 25 And gluten, I know a lot of people hate gluten, my wife being one of them. But gluten is a pretty key ingredient here.
Although I will say they've come a long way now with gluten-free cakes.

Speaker 25 They have. It doesn't make you quite as sad to eat one.

Speaker 25 No, they're pretty good now. If you get a good gluten-free cake, it's well, a cheesecake is gluten-free, so that's okay with me.
I mean, you know, your standard substitute flour.

Speaker 25 They've just gotten a lot better, I think. Yep.
So in a standard glutinous cake,

Speaker 25 that gluten from

Speaker 25 the flour mixing with the water forms a gel, and it gives it that structure. It gives it that

Speaker 25 consistency, the texture that you're looking for. But again, the sugar is robbing the

Speaker 25 proteins and the starches from getting too much water. Because the more water it gets,

Speaker 25 the tougher the cake is going to be, the more gluten. So you actually want to make sure that your sugar is taking away some of the liquids.
But also, the type of flour you use

Speaker 25 has a lot to do with how tough your cake's going to turn out. So, like, there is such a thing as cake flour.
Yes.

Speaker 25 That's something like 7%, 7.5% protein, which is going to translate into less gluten when you mix it with water, right? Yeah. So, it's going to be a lighter, fluffier cake.

Speaker 25 And then there's all-purpose flour is 10.5%.

Speaker 25 Bread flour is 12%.

Speaker 25 And depending on what kind of consistency you want in your cake, you would use these different kinds of flour. And all of it comes down to

Speaker 25 the amount of gluten that's going to be produced when it interacts with the liquids. That's right.
And finally, that brings us to the liquids.

Speaker 25 The liquids are obviously going to help keep things moist. They hydrate those proteins.
They allow all those chemical changes to take place.

Speaker 25 But that liquid does, when you actually bake the cake, when it comes time to put it in the oven, which we're going to get to here in a sec,

Speaker 25 that creates a steam, like that liquid cooks out and vaporizes.

Speaker 25 So that steam expands the air cells and that volume, and it really lends itself to the light, airy structure and texture that you're going to get.

Speaker 25 Yeah, it blows up the CO2 bubbles in it even further, which helps make the cake rise.

Speaker 25 Plus, it also fosters that chemical reaction between the acids and the bases that act as leavening agents that release CO2 in the first place.

Speaker 25 The presence of liquids and the presence, or water specifically, I think, and heat really make that CO2 go berserk.

Speaker 25 All right, well, we should talk about ovens.

Speaker 25 Yeah. I was about to say you can't bake a cake without an oven, but apparently you can.
You can in Egypt. Yeah.

Speaker 25 Ancient Egypt. All right, so let's say we're not in ancient Egypt.

Speaker 25 Let's say we're

Speaker 25 in regular North America and Europe, and the 18th century is basically when the semi-closed oven came around.

Speaker 25 And before this, if you were baking cakes well, you were probably a professional baker because these ovens weren't in every household.

Speaker 25 Right. And even in the 18th century, they weren't in every household either, but they started to become a lot more prevalent around that time.
That was a big first step toward people baking at home,

Speaker 25 not just cakes, but anything, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 25 In cake history, that was a huge monumental moment when the enclosed oven became kind of ubiquitous among households. For sure, because what you get there is

Speaker 25 consistency. You get a consistent, even temperature, and of course, that just got better and better over the years with advances in oven technology.

Speaker 25 And more than anything, you get a reliable temperature, ideally. Right.
And if you have those things, you can make a cake after cake after cake that your family won't be mad about.

Speaker 25 The sailors will stop coming by and being like, You got any more of them terrible cakes you made?

Speaker 25 Sailors? Yeah, that's who you give the terrible cakes to.

Speaker 25 Bunkin' sailors?

Speaker 25 Sure. All right.

Speaker 25 So, with the oven in particular, I didn't realize this, but you know how the liquid and the heat and the sodium bicarbonate and the acids are mixing together to make the cake rise? Yes.

Speaker 25 That is actually a really fragile state of affairs while the cake is baking, and the structure, the proteins, and the starches and the gluten are actually solidifying and making this cake.

Speaker 25 And if you mess with the oven, meaning like you open and close the door too often, or you slam it shut too hard,

Speaker 25 the change in temperature on the one hand can cool those gases and make your cake fall. And it makes a wah wah sound as it does, as everyone knows.

Speaker 25 And then the air pressure from slamming the door can burst those CO2 bubbles.

Speaker 25 And again, the proteins haven't had a chance to solidify and make the cake structure, so the cake can fall from that as well.

Speaker 25 And if you'll notice, once a cake gets to a certain point, if it falls, it falls in the middle. The outside usually stays up because that part has solidified already.

Speaker 25 The stuff in the middle hasn't quite cooked through. So that would be the part that falls.
And that also proves my point. That's right.
You also want to put your cake in the middle.

Speaker 25 Where you place your cake in the oven can even cause problems. It's very finicky, cakes are.
Sure. Well, again, it's a science experiment.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they're basically like, do this right, jerk, or I might just take a nap here

Speaker 25 in the middle of the cake. Maybe you'll burn.
Maybe I'll stick up your whole house.

Speaker 25 But, like you said, about opening the door, like, ideally, you know the temperature of your oven, you know how long it takes, and maybe don't wait till literally you think I can pull it out.

Speaker 25 Although, if you're a good baker, you're not sweating it. You pull it out and you know it's pretty much ready.
Right. But definitely don't keep opening it.
Try at least wait till the end.

Speaker 25 And if you have

Speaker 25 they're not quite as in fashion now, I don't think, but ovens with a window and a light,

Speaker 25 you can obviously take a little peek that way. Sure.

Speaker 25 Those are kind of out of fashion, right? Or are they?

Speaker 25 Not that I know of. I feel like I don't see those a lot.
Do you have a window in your oven? Sure, of course. What am I? A communist? Do you? Yes, with a light.
Oh, man. What do you have?

Speaker 25 Just a stainless steel door. That's a dishwasher, man.
Oh, that's my problem. Yeah.
Like, my cakes always come out wet and soapy. Wait a minute.
Do I have a window? Sure, you do.

Speaker 25 I think everyone does. I literally cannot picture my kitchen right now.

Speaker 25 Jerry, he's got a window, right? I've been baking in the dishwasher.

Speaker 25 Jerry and I say, yes, you have a window in your oven.

Speaker 25 Yeah, that might be, I might have just said something very dumb.

Speaker 25 So it's staying in, though. Well, I do know.
You know what? I think I do have a window, but I don't have a working light. That's why I think I don't have a window.
You need to replace the light bulb.

Speaker 25 Yeah, but who wants to bother with that? For all that, you can go to like any

Speaker 25 big box hardware store,

Speaker 25 off the internet. Sure.
I don't replace light bulbs in my house. Matter of fact, I think they probably sell them at the grocery store even.

Speaker 25 You go find yourself some golf wax, and you're probably near the refrigerator oven light bulbs.

Speaker 25 All right.

Speaker 25 The heat of the oven is very important. So, depending on how good your oven is, it may be a little off, maybe a little hotter or cooler.

Speaker 25 So, you might want to purchase an oven thermometer just to give it a double check because baking is science.

Speaker 25 And when you think that that cake is done, take a little peek through your window that everyone has, or open it if you really think it's done. Give a little tap in the center.

Speaker 25 If it springs back, then it's probably done. If you're an experienced baker, you just know by looking at it.

Speaker 25 Or you can always do the old toothpick trick, which is sticking that toothpick, wooden toothpick, in the center of the cake and pull it out. And if there's no cake on it, then it's pretty much done.

Speaker 25 Right. If it's covered in goo, that means it's not done.

Speaker 25 That is correct, Chuck. But then you can also lick that goo off that toothpick.

Speaker 25 That's not bad. No, you can, but you're.
It's just never quite as good. I think it always tastes like disappointment.

Speaker 25 You know what I mean? Because you want it to come out clean anytime you're doing that. You're never really putting it in, expecting it to come out battery.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 25 So even though you do get to lick it, that's like the one plus side of that experience, I think. That's true.

Speaker 25 and if your cake is done you're not finished baking it yet even you need to let it cool in the pan yeah that's a big one you don't just pull the cake out and and

Speaker 25 turn it upside down in your sink and eat it with your hands while it's still hot right that's not the way to do it no no you want to let it finish in the pan cooling because it's still doing a little bit of baking and it's getting used to its new room in the kitchen and saying all right this is a different temperature in here i i think i can hang with you guys Yeah.

Speaker 25 I'm alive. 10 or 15 minutes later, get out that wire rack, flip it over, and ideally it comes out all in one nice thing.
Yep.

Speaker 25 And the other good thing about letting it cool in the pan first, too, is when you cool it on the wire rack, it won't get those wire

Speaker 25 indentations in the cake because it'll be stable enough. I never thought about that.
Nobody likes those. Sure, you can fill it in with a little extra frosting.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Actually, now I think about it, that's great. Those indentations are just fine.

Speaker 25 The frosting grooves, in other words.

Speaker 25 Yep. Should we take a break? Yes.
All right. We're going to talk,

Speaker 25 well, just about other cakey stuff right after this.

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Speaker 25 Okay, Chuck, you remember I was talking about baking soda and how that changed everything? Yep. That was a big one.

Speaker 25 That was from the 1840s, baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, just good old-fashioned, regular old baking soda, started to be added to it.

Speaker 25 But at the time, you needed to also add another ingredient that was an acid so that the two would react and form CO2 or produce CO2, right? Yeah.

Speaker 25 Somebody, about 20 years after baking soda was developed, said, oh, I got this.

Speaker 25 We're going to come up with something called baking powder. And I never knew this, but this is the difference between baking soda and baking powder.
Baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate.

Speaker 25 Baking powder is sodium bicarbonate and two other dry acidic minerals

Speaker 25 that, when dry, they don't do anything. You can mix them together all day long and they just sit there like what?

Speaker 25 But in the presence of water and heat, then they start to react chemically with one another.

Speaker 25 So you can add just a little baking powder, and you don't need an extra ingredient like yogurt or vinegar or some other acid. It's got the base and the acid that's going to produce the CO2 in there.

Speaker 25 That was a huge, huge advancement for cakes. But it actually came kind of toward the end of cake advancements.
Prior to that,

Speaker 25 just the mass production of the Industrial Revolution had a big impact on cakes among many, many other things.

Speaker 25 But definitely had an impact on the spread of cake baking, especially in the United States.

Speaker 25 Yeah, and then so just you know, leave that baking soda in your fridge to soak up the stink. Sure.
Because that's all it's good for. Well, that and no, you can use the baking soda for a lot of stuff.

Speaker 25 Yeah. It also gets stink out of like clothes, too.
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 25 You can use it to

Speaker 25 well, that's it. No, like school science projects.
You want to make a volcano? Yeah, vinegar and baking soda. That's right.
Alone. With your parents' help.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Pre-packaged cake mix was a very big deal when it came out in the 1930s. But

Speaker 25 it was a company named P. Duff and Sons.

Speaker 25 And they said, we got a problem here. We got too much molasses on our hands.

Speaker 25 So, and this is kind of how a lot of great things have been invented. They had too much of something.
They say, well, what can we use this for? So they got to work, and they said, Mr.

Speaker 25 John Duff, the owner, said, you know what? Throw a little wheat flour in there with this molasses, a little shortening, some spices. We got a gingerbread mix that we can sell to the public.

Speaker 25 All you got to do is add water, dum-dum, and you can bake yourself some gingerbread cookies. Yeah.
And the public went, hooray! Because remember, they had

Speaker 25 ovens now in their houses. Yes.

Speaker 25 And they had this

Speaker 25 idea that you could just get a mix from the store and just add water was huge. It was a huge change.
And what's interesting is this, this whole like P.

Speaker 25 Duffin son story, they're out of Pittsburgh, by the way, from them coming up, because I think they quickly went from just gingerbread mixes to cake mixes themselves as well.

Speaker 25 But that busts several myths, actually, some long-standing food myths.

Speaker 25 One of them is that cake mix came out of a surplus of flour from World War II. That's where the cake mix came from.
Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 25 pre-made cake mixes did get way more popular after World War II, but it wasn't because there was so much flour. No, it was because that a lot of the food companies started getting into pre-mixed foods

Speaker 25 that you could make pretty easily in your kitchen.

Speaker 25 But then the other one, I love this one. There's this long-standing myth or this story about a guy named Ernest Dichter, who back in the 1950s, Ernest Dichter, he was a psychologist, I believe.

Speaker 25 He came up with the term focus group. He came up with the whole idea of focus groups

Speaker 25 to help companies figure out why their new product wasn't doing so well or how to make a product that they hadn't launched yet even more appealing.

Speaker 25 This guy came up with that whole idea of focus groups, right? Correct.

Speaker 25 So he's also credited with being the man who saved cake mixes because cake mixes came out. Everybody kind of loved them.
And then supposedly sales went flat.

Speaker 25 And Ernest Dichter got a focus group together and found out that women who made cakes using these cake mixes felt guilty that they weren't contributing anything to their families.

Speaker 25 They were just adding water and making a cake and then quietly sobbing while their family ate it. Talk about a patriarchal brainwashing.
Right.

Speaker 25 So Dichter realized that the best thing that these cake mix companies could do is to remove the dried egg ingredients from the mix and tell the consumer to add her own eggs.

Speaker 25 So then that way she was contributing. Well, it was a huge success, and cake mixes took off and became part of the American pantheon from that point on, right? Not true.

Speaker 25 No?

Speaker 25 Yeah, that is a total urban myth.

Speaker 25 Most of these pre-made mixes for years had said to add your own eggs because it just was better to add fresh eggs and it tastes better and perform better. So I don't know how that got started.

Speaker 25 The myth? Yeah, was it. I'm not sure either.
Okay. I don't know, but it is a long-standing food myth that you can find some very credible sources who say, like, oh, this happened.

Speaker 25 It's just everywhere. But it turns out that's not true.
But I think the reason why it has had legs for so long is because Ernest Dichter is actually rightfully credited with saving the cake mix market

Speaker 25 through a focus group. And he did find that women were kind of not they didn't feel guilty about it about you know not contributing more to the cake mix.
They think they were more bored by it.

Speaker 25 So he advised companies to figure out a way to make cake baking about way more than just baking the cake.

Speaker 25 And so companies decided that they were going to start promoting cakes as just the beginning part, that the real point of baking cakes was to make these elaborate, amazing cakes that you decorated.

Speaker 25 Yeah. And it took you hours and hours to make these things.
And it was like a scene of like Humpty Dumpty on a brick wall, but the whole thing was made out of cake.

Speaker 25 And that was fostered by the introduction of frosting. And that came from Ernest Dichter, and that actually is what saved the cake mix industry.
That's right. You want to know something about my mom?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 Champion cake decorator. Is that right? Not literal champion, like she never won a contest.

Speaker 25 Yeah, because it is out there.

Speaker 25 But yeah, I mean, as far as

Speaker 25 the home cake baker goes, like she couldn't go on one of these

Speaker 25 shows now where they make like the great British bake-off? Yeah, like giant submarines and stuff out of fondant.

Speaker 25 But just for like mom making special cakes every year for the birthday, every year she would say, What kind of cake do you want this year? I'd be like, I want a Star Wars cake.

Speaker 25 I want an Atlanta Falcons cake.

Speaker 25 And lo and behold, I would get my Atlanta Falcons cake. That's awesome.
Very cool stuff. You know, I had an older sister who she died actually when I was 16 in a car accident.
But she

Speaker 25 used to be

Speaker 25 the equivalent of your mom at making cakes. Oh, really? But she didn't even need to ask.
She would just, she'd just make something up, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 25 And there was this one year, I'll never forget this cake.

Speaker 25 We were all big time into Howard Jones. So it must have been

Speaker 25 like my ninth or 10th birthday.

Speaker 25 My whole like both my sisters and me were totally into Howard Jones and Karen my sister my oldest sister made a Howard Jones keyboard cake Wow, and it was a couple of sheet cakes put together frosted so it looked like one big thing the like the black keys were kick cats like the the knobs on the synthesizer were rollos and I was I just looked around at all my friends like does everyone see my cake this is the greatest cake anyone's ever had and no one can have any but me

Speaker 25 no I shared of course I wanted everyone to partake in the bounty. Was it a key tar or a keyboard? It was a keyboard.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 25 You never know. Strap a

Speaker 25 guitar strap on it. You might could have held it.
I would not have put it past her to make it a key tar. Man, that is a very sweet story.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Literally and figuratively. Thank you.
Hojo fans, huh?

Speaker 25 Yes. Wasn't that his nickname? I don't think so.
Did I make that up? Yeah, I think that's the hotel chain. I think you're totally right.

Speaker 25 All right, well, another tip here for baking a cake, if you were looking at recipes and it says use this kind of pan, and you think, well, I don't have that kind of pan. I've got this kind of pan.

Speaker 25 It's aluminum and square, and they're calling for a round dark pan.

Speaker 25 It makes a big difference. Like, it can literally ruin your cake.

Speaker 25 Yeah, you supposedly want to reduce the heat. I think, not the heat or the cook time, one of the two.
Yeah, it says a dark non-stick pan requires 25% reduction in temperature.

Speaker 25 So you want to knock that heat down 25%. Yeah, but also like Google that stuff.
Don't just say, Josh and Chuck said this should work.

Speaker 25 You know, like you have to have the right pan for that recipe, and they will tell you in the recipe. And if you don't have it, just look up the cheat for it, basically.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Two things you don't want to take our advice blindly on. Medical stuff and baking stuff.
Yeah. Everything else is fine.

Speaker 25 I don't know about that, but those are the two leading leading ways that we will mess your life up. For sure.

Speaker 25 All right. Well, I guess we need to talk about the different methods.

Speaker 25 We're getting super wonky into cakes here. Well, I mean, that's what we do.
All right. Well, let's talk about creaming then, because that is one kind of method of making a cake.

Speaker 25 And creaming is what we talked about. You may not have known exactly what we meant, but when you combine the butter and sugar and it says cream it with an electric beater, that's what you're doing.

Speaker 25 And it's really tough at first to get it going, but just hang in there because that butter will start to break apart, mixing it with that sugar, and

Speaker 25 you've got

Speaker 25 a nice creamed

Speaker 25 mix of ingredients, starter mix of ingredients on your hand there. Right.
But you don't skimp on

Speaker 25 that first step.

Speaker 25 No, and that's like that. I think the creaming method,

Speaker 25 that's the one that best gets across this point, that this is like, this is a,

Speaker 25 it's a chemical reaction. I know we've kind of been beating that horse,

Speaker 25 but it's really true. Like, if you don't follow the steps correctly, the chemical reaction is not going to come out correctly.
Right. And when you step back, you're like, but I'm baking a cake.

Speaker 25 That's true, but do you want your cake to be good or do you want to just waste your time? Yeah, so in the creaming method, when it says, then mix ingredients in this order, wet, then dry,

Speaker 25 do that. Right.
Don't just say, ah, just throw it all in there, right? Yep. It makes a difference.
And it says that pound cakes are

Speaker 25 like a variation on the theme. Sure.
I looked into pound cakes, man. Do you know, so the idea that pound cakes called for a pound of each ingredient, that's actually true.
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 25 But the reason why it called for a pound of each ingredient was because a lot of the British people at the time in the early 1700s

Speaker 25 couldn't read. So it was just an easy way to remember the recipe.
Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 25 All right. I'll buy that.
They'd be like, what's a tib

Speaker 25 And also pound cakes, too. The reason why you're not going to find a pound cake with a big buttercream frosting is because

Speaker 25 that will send you into sugar shock in a second.

Speaker 25 The pound cake is already really dense and sugary. That's why you just have like a little glaze on top.
Yep. I do like that glaze, actually.
I'll eat a pound cake. I think that glaze is

Speaker 25 what's it called? Delicious.

Speaker 25 Something icing, imperial icing. Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 25 I can't remember uh okay so the next one is the not the no aeration method to where you're not really you're not whipping anything up um yeah you probably don't even have flour in this in this this probably a flourless cake right so this this is the kind of thing that you use to um make like a cheesecake or a flourless chocolate cake yeah those can be very good sure

Speaker 25 um and you you are probably going to need to add some sort of moisture because cakes like this tend to crack while they're baking which is why a lot of them, cheesecakes in particular, you cook in a water bath in the oven because that water vaporizes and steams around it and helps keep that moisture in.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I never knew that.

Speaker 25 The reason for the water bath? I didn't know that you used a water bath. That was news to me.
Yeah. I've never made a cheesecake.
Yeah, they can be quite good. Oh, I love cheesecake.

Speaker 25 I don't think I've ever had any bad cheesecake. That's always good.
That's another thing, too.

Speaker 25 Publix cheesecake is incredible. Man, they need to sponsor us.
And they sell it by the double slice for those. Oh, like you get two slices.
And they have a key lime one, too, Chuck.

Speaker 25 That's just oh, man. Although, if you don't like lemon stuff, you might not like that.
Oh, no, I love key lime anyway. Okay, try their key lime cheesecake.

Speaker 25 Yeah, they really should send us some stuff, frankly.

Speaker 25 At Isle of Palms, for my vacation that I've spoken about, they had one of the, I can't remember which one, but one of the seafood joints where I would get all the fresh seafood had a homemade key lime pie.

Speaker 25 And I

Speaker 25 bought and ate one of them with my friends that week, and I bought two to go home with.

Speaker 25 Did they make it home? Huh? Did they make it all the way home? No, yeah,

Speaker 25 I stopped at the border. Yeah.
Just put my face in it. No, they made it home.
I think there's still one in the freezer, actually. And then one of them was consumed.
Nice. Yeah, good key lime pie.

Speaker 25 And finally, with the non-aeration method,

Speaker 25 you are not doing the

Speaker 25 beating. You are not creaming that stuff.
You are folding the batter.

Speaker 25 And we could describe it here, but if you don't know what folding is and baking, just look it up on the YouTube for a proper folding technique. Right.
Generally done with a rubber spatula. Yep.

Speaker 25 There's a foaming method, too, where you are basically using just egg whites usually, and you're aerating it by whipping them up, which makes a meringue.

Speaker 25 You can just stop there and incorporate sugar, and you've got meringue, which would make a Pavlova cake, which apparently Australia and New Zealand have been fighting over the origin of for close to a hundred years now.

Speaker 25 But didn't New Zealand win? Supposedly.

Speaker 25 Although I saw another article from some researchers who said, no, it came even earlier, a decade earlier, out of America via Germany.

Speaker 25 So who knows? But yes, out of Australia and New Zealand, New Zealand's apparently won that fight. But that's meringue.
And Pavlova cake is like a meringue cake with

Speaker 25 fruit in the middle of it.

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 yeah. And then a listener sent us Pavlova once, and we made it.
It was pretty good.

Speaker 25 It is pretty good, yeah.

Speaker 25 And then

Speaker 25 you can also take that egg foam and turn it into like a sponge cake, like an angel food cake or something like that.

Speaker 25 You don't like those either? No, not big into angel food cake. Although you can use sponge cake for strawberry shortcake.
That I will have.

Speaker 25 Okay, so those spongy cakes, that uses the egg-foaming method. But if you're making a true strawberry shortcake, you're going to use an actual shortcake.
Yeah, those are really good.

Speaker 25 And the reason they're called shortcake, or shortbread's called shortbread, is short is apparently a British term for crumbly.

Speaker 25 Oh, okay. So that's where that came from.

Speaker 25 It has nothing to do with the size. Yeah, Emily makes a really good gluten-free shortbread.
She's kind of gotten into baking a bit in the last five or six years and gotten pretty good at it.

Speaker 25 So she makes a good gluten-free shortbread that we've had had as shortcake with homemade whipped topping and good fresh strawberries.

Speaker 25 Those are good, but my one complaint with her baking is it literally looks like she came in there and just started throwing ingredients everywhere with her bare hands like a three-year-old and then baked.

Speaker 25 Right. And then said, I'm done.
Yeah. Good night.

Speaker 25 It is a mess. Yeah.

Speaker 25 A big, big mess. And she always just says, get out of here.
I'll clean it up afterward. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 25 Yeah, it's funny. The kitchen can be a place of real tension sometimes, huh? Oh, for sure.
Yeah, especially if both of you

Speaker 25 do different things in the kitchen. Right.
Like one's hovering, like, are you going to clean that up? Well, I'm the kitchen cleaner, so that's why she's just like, just stay out of here, dude. Right.

Speaker 25 Just wait until the end. Yeah.
And you show up, you're like, it's Marge's time to shine.

Speaker 25 Well, I'll do this. And this is such a passive-aggressive move from me, which is my style.

Speaker 25 Not endorsing that. I'm just saying it's one of my downfalls I need to work on.
But I will just go in there and just like groan or something.

Speaker 25 She'll be like, oh, God. And she'll just say, no,

Speaker 25 out.

Speaker 25 Right.

Speaker 25 Again.

Speaker 25 That's life at the Bryant house.

Speaker 25 That's pretty nice, Chuck. It's always with love, though.
Yeah, it always comes out. There's always a cake on the other end, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 25 I mean, it's not like we get in serious fights over the kitchen stuff. Right, yeah.

Speaker 25 So what's the last thing here?

Speaker 25 Something called the all-in-one method. Yeah, that's just like a cake mix.
You put it all together at once. Yeah, well, we should talk a little bit about frosting and icing.

Speaker 25 The earliest versions of frosting was just sort of an almond and sugar paste.

Speaker 25 Eh, not so big on that. But fresh.
Oh, really? Oh, I mean, it can be okay, but. Almond croissants are like one of my great joys in life lately.
Oh, yeah. They're so good.

Speaker 25 I suppose that's kind of what a bear claw is, too, right? Yeah. All right, I'd take a look at that.
Yeah, but that almond, that sweet almond paste inside is,

Speaker 25 man, that's

Speaker 25 stuff. It is good, but I'm like, don't put that on top of a cake for me.
Sure, understood. Stuff it in a pastry.

Speaker 25 A French chef, though, is the first person, they think, that created the first legit iced layer cake in the 15th century.

Speaker 25 And then about the middle of the 17th century is when the first frosting recipes started spreading around on the internet. Right.

Speaker 25 And fondant is gross.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I'm not into it. No.
I mean, you can make a neat-looking cake, but it's gross-tasting, I think. Yeah, I'm not into it.
Buttercream or cream cheese

Speaker 25 or even Emily's Waldorf Astoria Frosting. Believe it or not, I mean, it has a bit of a mouthfeel because of the shortening, but like a residue

Speaker 25 on the palate. Yeah.
On the roof of your mouth. Yeah, but it's still good.
Well, let's talk about cakes like the

Speaker 25 well, no, specific cakes, like the red velvet cake right yeah delicious do you know why it's red

Speaker 25 well food coloring

Speaker 25 that they use that to make it a little richer but it actually naturally turns red it's a chemical reaction between the cocoa the

Speaker 25 vinegar in it and the buttermilk I believe really yes

Speaker 25 that turns it red all right I don't know about that no it's true Okay. I read it on What's Cook in America.
I'll try it.

Speaker 25 Because I'm making Emily, her birthday is in a couple of weeks, and I'm making another I'm taking another stab at it.

Speaker 25 Try the try go find like an original

Speaker 25 recipe.

Speaker 25 Well, I mean, what do you mean? Like one, if you if you see one that actually uses buttermilk, be like, okay, this one. This is one of the ones I'm going to try.

Speaker 25 No, no, no, I have to use the recipe she tells me to use. Oh, I got you.
Which is

Speaker 25 the gluten-free Waldorf Astoria version. Oh, gotcha.
I see. But you have cocoa.
Does it have like vinegar and buttermilk in it?

Speaker 25 I can't remember. It's been a couple of years since I tried it.
Okay. Well, it should turn red on its own, but I don't think there's any harm in adding some more synthetic chemical red dye.

Speaker 25 Well, and the thing is, too, a lot of people that don't try red velvet cake don't try it because they think it doesn't like it tastes like chocolate cake, pretty much. Yeah, it just is red.

Speaker 25 It doesn't taste red. No, that'd be weird.
It's not ketchup cake. There's, yeah, that's Canadian, isn't it?

Speaker 25 There's hummingbird cakes.

Speaker 25 Well, what do you mean by the hummingbird? What is that? The hummingbird cake has like some nuts and some fruit in it, lots of frosting. I think it's a southern cake.

Speaker 25 Yeah, like we called, my grandmother, Bryant, called one of the great all-time southern cooks and bakers, like, you know, banana nut bread. Yeah.
She called that hummingbird.

Speaker 25 And I don't know if that was specific to her or if they are interchangeable.

Speaker 25 I don't know. I'm not actually a southern native, so I would not say one way or the other.

Speaker 25 All my experience with hummingbird cake is it's more like a carroty cake with, say, like pineapple in it and some other fruits in it, and a thick layer of frosting.

Speaker 25 And supposedly, the reason it's called a hummingbird cake is because it's so sweet it could attract hummingbirds.

Speaker 25 See, maybe, I mean, that's sort of like banana nut bread.

Speaker 25 So I don't know if they're interchangeable or for a variation, but give me some banana nut bread, which is not a cake, but it sort of is, and slice it up and put some butter on it, toast it in the oven.

Speaker 25 Yep.

Speaker 25 No, I'm with you. Our freezer is always chock full of black bananas, blackened with age.
Oh, sure.

Speaker 25 Because Yumi makes a killer banana nut bread from scratch.

Speaker 25 I mean, you just can't look at the bananas when she's incorporating them. Yeah, what does that do? Why is that the key? Do you know?

Speaker 25 They just are supposed to be mushy. Okay.
Oh, okay. Gotcha.
And like, the best way to make bananas mushy is. To let them age? Let them age.
Freeze age them. All right.

Speaker 25 Let's talk about Indian pound cake. Apparently, that's a thing that has has cornmeal in it.

Speaker 25 And I can't imagine that taste, but I'd like to try it. Well, yeah, and that was one of the earliest cakes in the U.S.

Speaker 25 And I think what the author Aaliyah Hoyt is pointing out is that cakes came from all over the place through time and

Speaker 25 geography.

Speaker 25 And that the mass immigration

Speaker 25 into America over, say, like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries and 20th, too, all these people from all these different lands brought their ideas or ingredients of cake and they kind of went through this Americanized grinder to where eggs were added, butter was added, and like you've got these ingredients, so it bears a resemblance to its original one, but it's been like cake-ified in the American way.

Speaker 25 And that started basically right as

Speaker 25 European settlers got to North America. Yeah, apparently the good old-fashioned chocolate layer cake came out of Boston

Speaker 25 because there were chocolate companies there. Even the German chocolate cake is not German.
It's American. It's named after a man whose last name was German.
Oh, interesting.

Speaker 25 Well, that means he's German.

Speaker 25 German-American. Could be.
Maybe they should call it the German-American chocolate cake.

Speaker 25 Or just German chocolate cake, but it's really American, everybody, is what the real title should be.

Speaker 25 Strawberry shortcake that you mentioned, that does come from the old world. I'm not much of a jingoist either, I think you might say,

Speaker 25 but I've never felt more national pride than in talking about cakes. Yeah?

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 25 This is where cakes were born, really.

Speaker 25 The pineapple upside-down cake, heaven help you if you eat that stuff. I love it.
Do you really? Man, it's so good, yeah. I just don't like fruit anywhere near my cake.
Yeah.

Speaker 25 Unless a strawberry shortcake. You definitely wouldn't like a hummingbird cake, then, even.

Speaker 25 Yeah, maybe that's the difference between the

Speaker 25 hummingbird and the banana bread. Right.
Although bananas in there.

Speaker 25 Right. That's a fruit.
Well, it's not a bad thing. See, though, that's not a fruit cake to me.
No.

Speaker 25 You just don't like the juicy fruits in your cake, it sounds like. No, or coconut.

Speaker 25 Which isn't the German chocolate cake in the coconut in the icing. Yeah.
Yeah. See, that's so good.
I don't want coconut anywhere near my cakes.

Speaker 25 But that pineapple upside-down cake, apparently that stuff sort of sprang out of a contest

Speaker 25 Dole had, the Dole Company in the mid-1920s, that said, Hey, bake some cakes with fruit. And so thousands of pineapple upside-down cakes came out.

Speaker 25 So I don't think they were invented for that, but maybe that's just what made them so popular. I don't know.
Gotcha.

Speaker 25 And then there's other, again, there's cakes around the world that look like cakes, kind of like tiramisu

Speaker 25 is a quintessential Italian cake, but it was invented in the 1960s.

Speaker 25 Black Forest cake actually is from Germany. It was invented in 1915.
So what happened was, again, cake explosion happened here in the good old US of A, and it spread back out to the world.

Speaker 25 There was an influx of cake ideas into America. America perfected the cake and it went back out to the world.
That's right. That's what happened.

Speaker 25 What else?

Speaker 25 What about Tresleches? That's great, too. Three kinds of milk: evaporated, condensed, and whole.
It's tough to go wrong with that. Yeah, talk about moist.

Speaker 25 And I've had good and bad Laches, but I've never had an actual Trace Leches, so I was like, this is so bad, I'm not going to finish it.

Speaker 25 Right. Have you? No.

Speaker 25 And then there's Dorayaki,

Speaker 25 which is like, have you ever had this? I don't think so.

Speaker 25 One of the big things that people in Japan love is like sweetened red bean paste. Okay.

Speaker 25 You can find it here or there in like sweets, but this Dorayaki in particular is like between two pancakes. It's like a filling.

Speaker 25 Sometimes it's not even two pancakes, it's like a hole with like a red bean paste inside. Okay, it's like this light, kind of fluffy cake-like thing with red bean paste inside.
It's good.

Speaker 25 You can they're best like hot off of the street from somebody who just made it.

Speaker 25 That's when it's absolutely best, but it's like the kind of thing you can also find in a 7-Eleven or something, too, like in cellophane. Wow, yeah, it's good.

Speaker 25 It's no cheesecake, no Japanese cheesecake, I'll tell you that. Nope, but it's still pretty good.
Man, that was a good one, I think. Cakes.

Speaker 25 All right.

Speaker 25 Are you done? I'm done. Okay.
If you want to know more about cakes, go eat some. You're going to love them.
Yes. There's a cake out there for you.

Speaker 25 And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 25 All right, I'm going to call this

Speaker 25 a special one-man administrative details shout. Oh, wow.
Because we got a box today from a man named Nick Pagan

Speaker 25 from San Jose, Bay Area. And he sent us just a blotted stuff.
Mm-hmm. Like, good stuff.
It wasn't a box full of garbage. He sent

Speaker 25 not that anyone ever has sent us a box full of garbage. He sent us

Speaker 25 framed things, sent me a framed pavement poster, which is great. Very nice.
And sent us CDs of music. He sent bottles of liquid stuff, most notably wine for Jerry, and then bourbon and scotch for us.

Speaker 25 And he is a whiskey enthusiast that lives in the Bay Area, like big time. Yeah.
And just a good dude. And beyond that,

Speaker 25 he added this. He added,

Speaker 25 he's a list maker, an amateur list maker. Right.

Speaker 25 And he sent us a list. And Nick, if you're listening, please send us the Word document, digital version of this printout that you sent.

Speaker 25 Because he said every time you said we should do a podcast on that Yeah, he made a list alphabetically of that stuff nice work Nick and the list is so comprehensive and awesome that we need it to work from Yes, he made

Speaker 25 he made a list of films that each of us said we need to see mm-hmm Which is pretty good and then finally he sent us a list and and encouraged us to play a little game here, which we'll do very quickly of see if Chuck can see if Josh can guess how many times we've done the following things.

Speaker 25 You ready? Why me? Well, because I have the list in my hand and you're sitting across from me and you can't see it. You can't see this paper, I don't think.

Speaker 25 So how many COAs, and for people that don't know, it means cover our butts.

Speaker 25 How many COAs have we issued over a thousand shows?

Speaker 25 I'm going to say 27. 75.

Speaker 25 Wow.

Speaker 25 Wow, we are really good at that, huh? How many times have we admitted on the air that it is a take-to?

Speaker 25 Oh, man.

Speaker 25 You're not going to get anything, or maybe you might. It'll be total luck if I do.
Eight. Seven.
Oh, so close. Rare listener mail shout-outs.

Speaker 25 Oh,

Speaker 25 I don't know what that means.

Speaker 25 Like where we say, hey, can you say hello to my boyfriend? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 25 Three. Oh, 62.
What? That's pretty rare, though, out of a thousand. Yeah, but still, it seems like I thought it was even rarer than that.

Speaker 25 Did we used to do it more than we do now? I think so. I think that's what it was.
We were a little more generous in our earlier days. Yeah.
Trips in the Wayback Machine. Oh, there's a lot of those.

Speaker 25 I'm going to say out of a thousand episodes,

Speaker 25 320. He says 59, so I don't know about this, Nick.
I think you missed a few. Nick, you're just making up numbers, aren't you?

Speaker 25 Drinking scotch at home and making up numbers. How many paper lists have you eaten?

Speaker 25 Me? Yeah. One that I know of.
Yep, you nailed it. I remember the episode, too.
It was How Geniuses Work or What Makes a Genius.

Speaker 25 And I said that if this list, if the list of geniuses, if the number one genius was Einstein, I would eat the list. And it turned out it was Einstein.
How many Glenn Danzig or Misfits references?

Speaker 25 Those would be all you.

Speaker 25 17. Four.

Speaker 25 I need to step it up.

Speaker 25 How many times has Chuck was...

Speaker 25 How many times have I done this? Wow.

Speaker 25 I think it's literally countless. If he came up with a number, it's a lie.
He says 288. That's got to be more than that.
Simpsons references, I'll just go ahead and tell you. 197.

Speaker 25 Apparently, we have high five. Does that include the two episodes on The Simpsons? No, no, no, I'm thinking so.
Okay.

Speaker 25 Apparently, we have high-fived once. Okay.
I'm surprised we even did that. Sure.
The number of times Josh has done this. A lot.

Speaker 25 I don't know. I think a lot just works for that.
426 times.

Speaker 25 Almost half of our episodes. It's great.

Speaker 25 And then bonus, name all of Josh's nicknames for Chuck. I'll just go ahead and read those.

Speaker 25 You have called me Chuckers. You've called me beautiful.
Don't remember that one.

Speaker 25 The famous Chuck Tran. Cheech,

Speaker 25 Rusty,

Speaker 25 Zonkers, and The Flash.

Speaker 25 Nick is my new favorite listener.

Speaker 25 This is all gold. Plus, thanks for buttering us up with the care package, too, Nick.
That was nice of you. Yeah, so Nick Pagan, you are now on the guest list for the San Francisco Sketch Fest show.

Speaker 25 Just hit me up with an email, send that list of shows that we need to do via digital document, and you are in like Flynn. Cool.
Thanks a lot, Nick.

Speaker 25 Well, if you want to be like Nick, you can send us an email, the stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

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