Selects: Cake: So Great. So, So Great

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Hi, everybody.

Do you want to learn about cake?

It's called Cake So Great.

So, so great.

That had to be a Josh title.

Cake colon so great, period. So comma so great.
That had to be a Josh title. Cake, colon, so great, period.

So, comma, so great.

Yeah, that's Josh.

This is from November 30th, 2017.

This is supersized because somehow we did 73 minutes on cake.

Probably because we talked about cake a lot.

Beyond just the facts and figures, I know our personal opinions came around in this episode. So I hope you enjoy it as much as you enjoy pie.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.
The three of us are together, which means it's time for Stuff You Should Know About Cake. Cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake.
Cake. This made me just frankly want to put my face in a cake.
I know. Sheet caking.
Oh, man. Yeah.
I know we had a discussion about cake or pie quite a while ago. And I don't remember exactly where you landed on that.
I'm surprised you can only think of one. One time we've done that? Yeah.
Cake or pie, both. Yeah, same here.
Why choose between two wonderful things that you don't have to choose between? Agreed. As a matter of fact, every once in a while, you'll hit the birthday party jackpot, where they'll have cake and pie, and you're like, looks like I'm in heaven.
But today, Chuck, we're not talking about pie. Although we Although we can't talk about one pie in particular because we're talking about cake.

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.

Oh, yeah, probably.

Maybe.

I don't know.

So that's a cake, huh? The article on it was written in a thick Boston accent. Yeah.
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. 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.

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,

but they've got some really well-researched articles on their site about like the history of cakes and things like that.

Yeah, that's good stuff.

Kudos to you.

You remember Kudos?

The granola bar? Those are great. Oh, yeah.
Are those not around anymore? No. No? No, those are gone.
And then R.I.P. also Bonkers candy.
So Kudo went the way of the dodo. I never heard of Bonkers.
They were like a fruit chew, but really had some chew to it. Not like Starburst.
it just disintegrates. These were like, they were chewy.
They were good. They're about as good as it gets really, candy-wise.
Yeah, they need, I know you've noticed, they need to chill out here with 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.
It's just rotten right out of their heads. Well, and also...
Not you. My toothlessness is for different reasons.
Yours is from a crostini. And I've also noticed, though, there's this weird mix in our office now because they try to get super healthy.

Yeah.

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.

Seaweed strips.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I know what you mean.

Or like just figs.

Right?

Yeah.

You know?

It's like a Fig Newton without the good tasting part that surrounds it.

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.
No, today, 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 indulge.
I'm not getting into those 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 wrappers laying around your desk thinking like, what have I done? I know, man.
It's post-Halloween stuff too, so maybe it'll die down. I don't think that's going to happen.

Again, though, today, I guess if you replaced all of those candy bars with cakes that were just sitting around, you'd get zero complaints from me.

Well, and at my house at Halloween, we gave away two things.

We gave away whole slices of pound cake and just figs.

It's the worst house in the block.

Did you, uh, you a pound cake fan?

Um, 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?

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? 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. Yeah.
I am not a fan of lemon cakes. Oh, really? So like a lemon

pound cake I'm not into.

Well, okay. Let's just get it out there.

What's your favorite cake of all time?

Oh, jeez.

I'm going to

toss it up between

a carrot cake with cream cheese

frosting. That's Bill Clinton's favorite.

Well, you know.

As Bill goes, so goes Chuck. Which is not true.
That was a good COA. The carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, or I like a red velvet cake.
Really? Yeah. Well, that's the southern buttercream or cream cheese frosting.
Yeah. You can go either way.
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.
Oh, that sounds nice. It's not a cream cheese thing.
What's your favorite? Favorite of all time. 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? There's no better cake on the planet. It's like a yellow sheet cake? Mm-hmm.
It's simple, but it's tasty. It doesn't need any dressing up, but if it does, we'll just add some more frosting in the shape of balloons on top, right? It's just perfection.
It's the 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.
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.
I'm a big frosting and icing guy too. So a corner piece of sheet cake is pretty much heaven.
Yeah, that is the tops. What is Yumi's favorite cake? Yumi's is actually the same as mine.
We both are junkies for Publix cake, to tell you the truth. I have to say she introduced me to the wonder of Japanese cakes.
There's this little known fact about Japan. It loves to take...
I shouldn't say it's little known. Probably a lot of people know, but it loves to take things that other cultures came up with and then improve them 10,000%.
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 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. By far.
That's very controversial. It is, but I'm telling you, 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.
They're like, oh, this is crap compared to what the French are making, however you would say that in Japanese. But they're actually wrong.
It actually is better. But one of the things that they make that's just top-notch is what they call cheesecake.
It is not what you or I would call cheesecake at all. It's more like a yellow spongy cake.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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. But that German chocolate frosting is like, man, that's good.
I'm not into that. See, I think that's what it is that I don't like.
sort of a tradish, buttercreamy,

or just good old-fashioned birthday cake icing type thing.

Yeah.

Piped on.

Yeah.

And surely you agree, Publix is the pinnacle of that.

I don't know if I've ever had a Publix cake.

Oh.

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.

Because you're going to start adding...

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.
Like, I can't bring a whole cake in my house. That's a full party.
Be sure you look closely because they have—yeah, it would be. They sell also the same kind with, like, a cream cheese frosting.
You want yellow cake with buttercream frosting. Okay.
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? 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? I'll start you out with the word cake.
Apparently it's an old Norse word, kaka, which is kind of funny. It is.
Because I don't know where it came from, but here in America, kaka can mean doo-doo. Yeah.
But K-A-K-A is where the original word supposedly came from. Right.
And a lot of English words have like Germanic or Norse origins. Did you know that? Yeah.
So cake, the word cake is of English origin. So is bread.
And apparently the bread and the cakes from back in the day, say during the medieval era, they were very, very similar. Probably the only difference was the cake might be slightly smaller, 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.
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.
Tuk-tuk? That may be a little too far back. Yeah, I think so.
But basically, around the time I believe 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., 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. 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. And I bet you there's like one of the best things in the world.
It's probably a Chinese cake. 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. Oh, yeah? The cake that we know and love and understand is very much a 19th century American invention that came out of the Industrial Revolution.
That's right. 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. And by all accounts, that's probably the first people to start the birthday cake tradish.
And I think they even put candles on top. Well, no, the Greeks put candles on top, but it wasn't like a happy birthday cake.
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.
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.
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. And then the 1700s were full on like, it's a kid's birthday party.
It's got candles. It's a cake.
And we'll sing some depressing German song. Right.
It makes you reflect on your own existence. That's right.
And its eventual end. 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. But there was such a thing as a cheesecake already.
The Romans created that and called it placenta. Seriously.
Really? Yeah. Greeks had created something that was basically a prototype of the fruitcake, placus, I believe.
Yeah, they called it feces. Right.
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 came before the Industrial Revolution too.
Okay. So there's stuff that you would kind of recognize as cakes.
But the idea of a cake, what Americans call a cake and no one loves a cake, that came out of the Industrial Revolution. The show sponsored by Cake.
Cake. Eat some today.
All right. So let's take a break.
We definitely gave way more than three facts. 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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So we're back and we promised talk of chemistry. And I think we talked about this briefly on one show.
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.
What do you mean? Like it was lopsided or there was 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. I'll bet it was made with a lot of love, too.
Oh, of course. But my deal is I'm not a great baker because baking requires you to be very precise with your ingredients because it is chemistry.
I'm a much better cook because I'm a fly by the seat of my pants and throw a little of this in there, throw a little of that in there. You can't do that with baking.
No, there's much more forgiveness in general cooking than baking. Yeah, cooking is an art.
Baking is a science for sure. Yeah, that's what they say, right? Yeah, well, that's what I say too.
You didn't make that up, right? I think I did. Okay.
So 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 just how much of a chemical reaction baking a cake is.
Yeah, and this sounds pretty neat. The understanding of it, too, to me.
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.
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. They would make some beer.
They would make a cake, they'd make some bread. They would throw it into the eyes of their enemy.
They would, in a fight. A dirty fight.
And then eventually, yeast kind of fell to the wayside a little bit as they realized that there's other ways to make a cake rise. One of the big ways is to actually introduce air into it.
And if you, say, beat some eggs, 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. You're also introducing air into that mix, which will eventually, as we'll see, transfers into the cake to make it rise.
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. 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. Yeah, this is all very important stuff.
So you can't cheat any of these steps. No, you can't.
You really need to follow a cake recipe pretty closely. 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, 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. 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.

Which you can also use on those snowy days to clear the road, too. That's right.
So you've got yeast as a 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.
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.
Yeah, so in other words, you couldn't just put the mixer on with your eggs and leave? No. And go get on social media? No, this was with your arm.
Yeah. And, yeah, it was not, 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.

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

Yes.

And this is how modern cakes rise.

CO2 is released through this chemical reaction,

and it goes bloop and bubbles up through the cake and makes the cake rise with it.

That's what leavening agents do is they take air and they expand it and make it the cake.

Yeah, like when you slice a piece of cake, 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 pockets, those holes, those are air holes. Those were where the bubbles were.
And we'll get to that a little more, but that's very important stuff. That's a famous chef's apron, baker's apron.
Ask me about my air holes. 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.
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.
And I say that for all foods. I went on a butter, not a kick? No, no, no.
I am on a butter kick. I went on a butter...
A boycott of sorts for a while. Like real butter.
But now I'm back on butter. Oh, yeah, yeah.
I know what you mean. I tend to think butter is healthier of all of them, too.
Yeah. Although olive oil has a beat.
It's just such a radically different taste. Yeah, sure.
I love olive oil. 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. They're surprisingly good, but it is definitely its own distinct thing.
You know what I'm saying? 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.
And all these fat sources, they can be used sometimes together or swapped out for butter. But again, you've got to know what you're doing.
You can't just say, well, I'm not going to use butter. I'm going to just use the same amount of cooking oil as melted butter.
Right. And one of the reasons why he's swapping something out for butter in particular, too, I mean, butter gives it its richness.
It helps improve its moistness and texture, right? Butter's great. But butter also has a tendency to incorporate air when you cream butter, when you start to mash it around.
That's the whole reason. 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. So that butter is serving both as a fat and as a leavening agent in that recipe.
Correct. So if you come across a recipe that calls for butter that must be creamed, there's something else going on besides just getting a buttery taste out of your cake.
That's right. 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, 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. And you don't want to overdo it, though.
You want to use, again, the right amount of sugar, because not only could it affect the taste, but it could make the texture. It could be too tough.
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 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 sugar also robs that water from some of the proteins and the starches that give the cake its structure, 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. And sugar in particular, you're not going to get the same thing with stevia or honey.
It's not going to have the same effect. It's crystalline sugar, and it doesn't have to be white refined sugar.
you get the same thing with like stevia or honey. Like it's not going to have the same effect.
It's crystalline sugar and it doesn't have to be white refined sugar. You'd have the same effect, I think, with like turbinado cane sugar too.
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 in certain ways.
But it's still to me me, white sugar. Do it.
Right. And then sugar also gives it that nice golden brown color through the Mayard reaction.
Yeah, that and the eggs for sure. Yeah.
Well, we're at eggs. Sugar and eggs.
Eggs are big. Yeah.
Especially if they're ostrich eggs. Eggs, I know.
Eggs have proteins in them, right? Mm-hmm. And there's a couple of things in there.
Those proteins help give structure to the cake, I believe. Yes, absolutely.
The emulsifiers in 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. 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. Yeah, and the egg comes together and says, well, you know, can't we all just kind of stick together here? 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. 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 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.
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 millennia of little contributions here or there, it's just a blessing on humanity.
It is. It's a really neat accomplishment that everyone came together to figure this out over the span of time in wonderful kitchens on cold winter days where you've got a nice cake baking in the oven and you're contributing to humanity's knowledge of being great.
Yeah, the carcasses of a lot of bad cakes have been left in its wake to get where we are today. 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. 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.
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. 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.
and gluten. I know a lot of structure and strength.
And this is, when you mix these proteins with water, it's going to form gluten.

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.

They have.

It doesn't make you quite as sad to eat one.

No, they're pretty good now.

If you get a good gluten-free cake, it's...

Well, cheesecake is gluten-free, so that's okay with me.

I mean, you No, they're pretty good now. If you get a good gluten-free cake, it's...
Well, cheesecake is gluten-free, so that's okay with me. I mean, you know, your standard substitute flour.
They've just gotten a lot better, I think. Yeah.
So in a standard glutinous cake, that gluten from the flour mixing with the water forms a gel. And it gives it that structure.
It gives it that consistency, the texture that you're looking for. But again, the sugar is robbing the proteins and the starches from getting too much water because the more water it gets, 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 has a lot to do with how tough your cake is going to turn out. So there is such a thing as cake flour.
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.
And then there's all-purpose flour is 10.5%. Bread flour is 12%.
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 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.
The liquids are obviously going to help keep things moist. They hydrate those proteins.
They allow all those chemical changes to take place. 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, that creates a steam like that liquid cooks out and vaporizes.
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. Yeah, it blows up the CO2 bubbles in it even further, which helps make the cake rise.

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

The presence of liquids in the presence, or water specifically, I think, and heat

really make that CO2 go berserk.

All right, well, we should talk about ovens. Yeah.
I was about to say you can't bake a cake without an oven, but apparently you can. You can in Egypt.
Yeah. Ancient Egypt.
All right, so let's say we're not in ancient Egypt. Let's say we're in regular North America and Europe.
in the 18th century is basically when the semi-closed oven came around. And before this, if you were baking cakes well, you were probably a professional baker because these ovens weren't in every household.
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, not just cakes, but anything, you know? Yeah.
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 consistency.

You get a consistent, even temperature.

And of course, that just got better and better over the years with advances in oven technology.

Yeah.

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.

The sailors will stop coming by and being like, you got any more of them terrible cakes you made? Sailors? Yeah, that's who you give the terrible cakes to. Bumpkin sailors? Sure.
All right. 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.
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. and if you mess with the oven meaning like you open and close the door too often or you slam it shut too hard, 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.
And then the air pressure from slamming the door can burst those CO2 bubbles. 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.
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.
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.

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.

Yeah, they're basically like, do this right, jerk.

Or I might just take a nap here in the middle of the cake. Maybe it'll burn.
Maybe I'll stick up your whole house. But like you said about opening the door, 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.
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 and at least wait until the end. And if you have – they're not quite as in fashion now, I don't think, but ovens with a window and a light, you can obviously take a little peek that way.
Sure. Those are kind of out of fashion, right? Or are they? 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 the light.

Oh, man.

What do you have?

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.

I think everyone does.

I literally cannot picture my kitchen right now.

Jerry, he's got a window, right?

Have I been baking in the dishwasher?

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

Yeah, that might be.

I might have just said something very dumb.

So it's staying in now.

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. Yeah, but who wants a bottom of that? You can go to any big box hardware store, pop hardware store, 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. You go find yourself some Gulf Wax and you're probably near the refrigerator oven light bulbs.
All right. 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. So you might want to purchase an oven thermometer just to give it a double check because baking is science.
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.
If it springs back, then it's probably done. If you're an experienced baker, you just know by looking at it.
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.

Right.

If it's covered in goo,

that means it's not done.

That is correct, Chuck.

But then you can also lick that goo off that toothpick.

That's not bad.

No, you can, but it's just never quite as good.

I mean, I think it always tastes like disappointment. The toothpick batter? You know what I mean? Because you want it to come out clean any time you're doing that.
You're never really putting it in expecting it to come out battery. Yeah, yeah.
So even though you do get to lick it, that's like the one plus side of that experience, I think. That's true.

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 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 think I can hang with you guys.
Yeah. 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.

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 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.

Actually, now that I think about it, that's great.

Those indentations are just fine. The frosting grooves, in other words? Yep.
Should we take a break? Yes. All right.
We're going to talk, well, just about other cakey stuff right after this. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet.
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code S-Y-S-K for 20% off your first purchase. Okay, Chuck, you remember I was talking about baking soda and how that changed everything? Yep.
That was a big one. That was from the 1840s, baking soda, sodium bicarbonate.
Just good old-fashioned, regular old baking soda started to be added to it. 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? Somebody, about 20 years after baking soda was developed, said, oh, I got this.
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.
Baking powder is sodium bicarbonate and two other dry acidic minerals that when dry, they don't do anything. You can mix them together all day long and they just sit there like what? but in the presence of water and heat

then they start to react chemically with one another.

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.

That was a huge, huge advancement for cakes. But it actually came kind of toward the end of cake advancement.
Prior to that, just the mass production of the Industrial Revolution had a big impact on cakes, among many, many other things, but definitely had an impact on the spread of cake baking, especially in the United States. 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. Yeah.
It also gets stink out of like clothes, too. Oh, yeah? Mm-hmm.
You can use it to, well, that's it. No, like school science projects.
You want to make a volcano? Yeah, vinegar and baking soda. That's right.
I love that. With your parents' help.
Yeah. Pre-packaged cake mix was a very big deal when it came out in the 1930s.
But it was a company named P. Duff & Sons, and they said, we got a problem here here.
We've got too much molasses on our hands. And this is kind of how a lot of great things have been invented.
They had too much of something. They said, well, what can we use this for? So they got to work, and they said, Mr.
John Duff, the owner, said, you know what? Throw a little wheat flour in there with this molasses, a little shortening, some spices. We've got a gingerbread mix that we can sell to the public.

All you've 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 ovens now in their houses.

Yes.

And the idea that you could just get a mix from the store

and just add water was huge.

Oh, yeah.

It was a huge change.

And we'll see you next time. And they had this idea that you could just get a mix from the store and just add water was huge.
Oh, yeah. It was a huge change.
And what's interesting is this whole like P. Duff and Sons 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.
But that busts several myths, actually, Some like longstanding food myths. Yeah.
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, 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 a lot of the food companies started getting into pre-mixed foods that you could make pretty easily in your kitchen. But then the other one, I love this one.
There's this longstanding myth or this story about a guy named Ernest Dichter, who back in the 1950s, Ernest Dichter, he was a psychologist, I believe.

He came up with the term focus group. He came up with the whole idea of focus groups 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.
This guy came up with that whole idea of focus groups, right? Correct. 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 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.
They were just adding water and making a cake and then quietly sobbing while their family ate it. Talk about a patriarchal brainwashing.
Right. 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.
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. No? Yeah, that is a total urban myth.
Most of these pre-made mixes for years had said to add your own eggs because it just was better to add fresh eggs. Yeah.
It tastes better and perform better. So I don't know how that got started.
The myth? Yeah, was it? I'm not sure either. Okay.
I don't know, but it is a longstanding food myth that you can find some very credible sources who say, like, oh, this happened. 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 through a focus group.
And he did find that women were kind of not, they didn't feel guilty about it, about not contributing more to the cake mix. They think they were more bored by it.
So he advised companies to figure out a way to make cake baking about way more than just baking the cake. 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.
And it took you hours and hours to make these things. And it was like a scene of Humpty Dumpty on a brick wall, but the whole thing was made out of cake.
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? Yeah.
Champion cake decorator. Is that right? Not literal champion.
Like, she never won a contest. Yeah, because it is out there.
But, yeah, I mean, as far as the home cake baker goes, like, she couldn't go on one of these shows now where they make, like, The Great British Bake Off? Yeah, like like giant submarines and stuff out of fondant. But just for like mom making special cakes every year for the birthday, every year she would say, what kind of cake you want this year? I'd be like, I want a Star Wars cake.
I want an Atlanta Falcons cake. 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 used to be 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.

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

We were all big time into Howard Jones. So it must have been like my, yeah, it must have been like my ninth or 10th birthday.
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 black keys were Kit Kats. The knobs on the synthesizer were Rolos.
Wow. And 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. No, I shared.
Of course. I wanted everyone to partake in the bounty.
Was it

a keytar or a keyboard? It was a keyboard. Okay.
Yeah. You never know.
Strap a guitar

strap on it. You might could have held it.
I would not have put it past her to make it

a keytar. Man, that is a very sweet story.
Yeah. Literally and figuratively.
Thank you.

Hojo fans, huh?

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.

All right, well, another tip here for baking a cake. If you were looking at recipes and it says use this kind of pan,

you think, well, I don't have that kind of pan.

I've got this kind of pan.

It's aluminum and square, and they're calling for a round, dark pan. It makes a big difference.
Like, it can literally ruin your cake. 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 nonstick pan requires 25% reduction in temperature.
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. 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. Two things you don't want to take our advice blindly on.
Medical stuff and baking stuff. Yeah.
Everything else is fine. I don't know about that, but those are the two leading ways that we will mess your life up.
For sure. All right.
Well, I guess we need to talk about the different methods. 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.
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.
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 you've got a nice creamed mix of ingredients, starter mix of ingredients on your hand there.
Right. But you don't skimp on that first step.
No, and that's like that. I think the creaming method, that's the one that best gets across this point,

that this is like,

it's a chemical reaction.

I know we've kind of been beating that horse,

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. 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, 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 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. 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 couldn't read.
So it was just an easy way to remember the recipe. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. All right.
I'll buy that. They'd be like, what's a Tibbs? And also, pound cakes, too.
The reason why you're not going to find a pound cake with a big buttercream frosting is because that will send you into sugar shock in a second. Because a pound cake is already and sugary.
That's why you just have a little glaze on top. Yep.
I do like that glaze, actually. I'll eat a pound cake.
I think that glaze is, what's it called? Delicious? Something icing, imperial icing. Oh, I don't know.
I can't remember. Okay, so 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, those can be very good.
Sure.

And 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.

Yeah, I never knew that. 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. I don't think I've ever had any bad cheesecake.
It's always good. That's another thing, too.
Publix cheesecake is incredible. Man, they need to sponsor us.
And they sell it by the double slice for those. Ugh.
Like, you get two slices. And they have a key lime one, too, Chuck, that's just, oh, man.
Although, if you don't like lemon stuff, you might not like that. Oh, no, I love key lime.
Okay. Try their key lime cheesecake.
Yeah, in fact. They really should send us some stuff, frankly.
At, uh, Isle of Palms, for my vacation that I've spoken about, they had, um, 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.
And I bought and ate one of them with my friends that week. And I bought two to go home with.
Did they make it home? Huh? Did they make it all the way home? No, yeah, I stopped in, 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. And finally, with the non-aeration method, you are, you are not doing the, the beating.
You're not creaming that stuff. You're folding the batter.
And we could describe it here, but if you don't know what folding is in baking, just look it up on the YouTube for a proper folding technique. Right.
Generally done with like a rubber spatula. Yep.
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. 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 100 years now.
But doesn't New Zealand win? Supposedly. All right.
Although I saw another article from some researchers who said, no, it came even earlier, a decade earlier, out of America via Germany. Huh.
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, like, fruit in the middle of it. No.

And then a listener sent us pavlova once.

We made it.

It was pretty good.

It is pretty good, yeah.

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

Not me.

You don't like those either?

No, I'm not big into angel food cake.

Although you can use sponge cake for strawberry shortcake. That I will have.
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. And the reason they're called shortcake or shortbread is called shortbread is short is apparently a British term for crumbly.
Oh, okay. So that's where that came from.
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. So she makes a good gluten-free shortbread that we've had as shortcake with homemade whipped topping and good fresh strawberries.

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.

Right.

And then said, I'm done.

Yeah.

Good night.

It is a mess.

Yeah.

A big, big mess. And she always just says, get out of here.
I'll clean it up afterward. Don't worry about it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's funny.
The kitchen can be a place of real tension sometimes, huh? Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Especially if both of you 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. Just wait until the end.
Yeah. And you show up.
You're like, it's Marge's time to shine. Well, I'll do this.
And this is such a passive aggressive move for me, which is my style. 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 groan or something.

She'll be like, oh, God.

And she'll just say, no, out.

Right.

Again.

That's life at the Bryant house.

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. I mean, it's not like we get in serious fights over the kitchen stuff.
Right, yeah. So what's the last thing here? 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. The earliest versions of frosting was just sort of an almond and sugar paste.
Eh, not so big on that. But a French chef.
Oh, really? 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.
I suppose that's kind of what a bear claw is too, right? Yeah. All right, I'll take it back.
Yeah, but that sweet almond paste inside is, man, that's good stuff. No, it is good, but don't put that on top of a cake for me.
Sure, understood. Stuff it in a pastry.
Okay. A French chef, though, is the first person, they think, that created the first legit iced layer cake in the 15th century.
And then about the middle of the 17th century is when the first frosting recipes started spreading around on the Internet. Right.
And fondant is gross. Yeah, I'm not into it.
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 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 on the palate, on the roof of your mouth.
Yeah. But it's still good.
Well, let's talk about cakes. Like the, well, no, specific cakes, like the red velvet cake, right? Yeah, delicious.

Do you know why it's red?

Well, food coloring.

They use that to make it a little richer, but it actually naturally turns red.

It's a chemical reaction between the cocoa, the vinegar in it, and the buttermilk, I believe.

Really?

Yes.

It turns it red.

All right. I don't know about that.
No, it's true. Okay.
I read it on What's Cookin' America. I'll try it.
Because I'm making Emily, her birthday's in a couple weeks, and I'm making another, I'm taking another stab at it. Try the, go find an original recipe.
Well, I mean, what do you mean? If you see one that actually uses buttermilk, be like, okay, this one. This is one of the ones I'm going to try.
No, no, no. I have to use the recipe she tells me to use.
Oh, I gotcha. Which is the gluten-free Waldorf Astoria version.
Oh, gotcha. I see.
But you have cocoa. Does it have vinegar and buttermilk in it? I can't remember.
It's been a couple of years since I tried it. 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.
Well, 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. It tastes like chocolate cake pretty much.
Yeah. It just is red.
It doesn't taste red. No.
That'd be weird. It's not ketchup cake.
Yeah, that's Canadian, isn't it?

There's hummingbird cakes.

Well, what do you mean by the hummingbird? What is that?

Hummingbird cake has some nuts and some

fruit in it, lots of frosting.

I think it's a southern cake.

Yeah, my grandmother, Bryant,

called one of the great all-time

southern cooks and bakers

banana nut bread. She called that hummingbird, and I don't know if that was specific to her or if they are interchangeable.
I don't know. I'm not actually a southern native, so I would not say one way or the other.
All my experience with hummingbird cake is it's more like a carrot-y cake with, say, like pineapple in it and some other fruits in it and a thick layer of frosting.

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

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

So I don't know if they're interchangeable or if it's 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.

Yeah.

Toast it in the oven.

Yep.

No, I'm with you.

Our freezer is always chock full of black bananas, blackened with age.

Oh, sure.

Because Yumi makes a killer banana nut bread from scratch.

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? They just are supposed to be mushy. Okay.
Oh, okay. Gotcha.
And the best way to make bananas mushy is... To let them age? Let them age.
Freeze age them. All right.
Let's talk about Indian pound cake. Apparently, that's a thing that has cornmeal in it.
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.
And I think what the author, Leah Hoyt, is pointing out is that cakes came from all over the place through time and geography. And that the mass immigration tore into America over, say, like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries in 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 cake-ified in the American way. And that started basically right as European settlers got to North America.
Yeah, apparently the good old-fashioned chocolate layer cake came out of Boston, 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. Well, that means he's German.
German-American. Could be.
Maybe they should call it the German-American chocolate cake. Or just German chocolate cake, but it's really American, everybody, is what the real title should be.
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.

Of course not.

But I've never felt more national pride than in talking about cakes.

Yeah?

Yeah.

This is where cakes were born, really.

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 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.

Unless it's strawberry shortcake.

You definitely wouldn't like a hummingbird cake then, even.

Yeah, maybe that's the difference between hummingbird and banana bread.

Right.

Although banana's in there.

Right.

See, that's not a fruitcake to me. No.
You just don't like the juicy fruits in your cake, it sounds like. No, or coconut, which isn't the German chocolate cake, coconut in the icing.
Yeah. Yeah, see that? That's so good.
I don't want coconut anywhere near my cakes. But that pineapple upside-down cake, apparently that stuff sort of sprang out of a contest.
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.
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.
And then there's other, again, there's cakes around the world that look like cakes, kind of like tiramisu. Yum.
It's a quintessential Italian cake, but it was invented in the 1960s. 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 U.S. of A., and it spread back out to the world.
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.

What else? What about the tres leches?

That's great, too. Three kinds of milk evaporated, condensed, and whole.
It's tough to go wrong with that. Yeah, talk about moist.
And I've had good and bad tres leches, but I've never had an actual tres leches. I was like, this is so bad, I'm not going to finish it.
Right. Have you? No.
And then there's dorayaki, which is like, have you ever had this? I don't think so. One of the big things that people in Japan love is like sweetened red bean paste.
Okay. 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. 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 um you can they're best like hot off of the street from somebody who just made it 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.

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.

All right.

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. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.
All right, I'm going to call this a special one-man administrative details shout. Oh, wow.
Because we got a box today from a man named Nick Pagan from San Jose Bay Area. And he sent us just a lot of stuff, like good stuff.
It wasn't a box full of garbage. He sent...
Not that anyone ever has sent us a box full of garbage. He sent us 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.
And he is a whiskey enthusiast that lives in the Bay Area, like big time. Yeah.
And just a good dude. And beyond that, he, uh, he added this, he added, he's a, he's a list maker, an amateur list maker.
Right. And he sent us a list and Nick, if you're listening, please send us the, the word document digital version of this printout that you sent.
Cause 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 a list of films that each of us said we need to see, which is pretty good. And then finally he sent us a list and encouraged us to play a little game here, which we'll do very quickly.

See if Josh can guess how many times we've done the following things.

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 through this paper, I don't think.

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

How many COAs have we issued over a thousand shows? I'm going to say 27. 75.
Wow. Wow, we are really good at that, huh? How many times have we admitted on the air that it is a take two? You're not going to get any of these, or maybe you might.

It'll be total luck if I do.

Eight.

Seven.

Oh, so close.

Rare listener mail shout outs.

Oh, I don't know what that means.

Like where we say, hey, can you say hello to my boyfriend?

Oh, yeah.

Three.

No, 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.
Did we used to do it more than we do now? I think so. I think that's what it was.
We're a little more generous in our earlier days. Yeah.
Trips in the Wayback Machine. Oh, there's a lot of those.
I'm going to say out of 1,000 episodes, 320. He says 59, so I don't know about this, Nick.
I think he missed a few. Nick, you're just making up numbers, aren't you? Drinking scotch at home and making up numbers.
How many paper lists have you eaten? 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. 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? Those would be all you.
17. Four.
I need to step it up. How many times have I done this?

Wow.

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.

Apparently we have high five.

Does that include the two episodes on The Simpsons?

No, no, no.

I don't think so. Apparently we have high five once.
Okay Does that include the two episodes on The Simpsons? No, no, no. I don't think so.

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.

I don't know.

I think a lot just works for that.

426 times.

Almost half of our episodes. That's great.
And then bonus, name all of Josh's nicknames for Chuck. I'll just go ahead and read those.
You have called me Chuckers. You've called me beautiful.
I don't remember that one. The famous Chuck Tran.
Cheech. Rusty.
Zonkers. And The Flash.
Nick is my new favorite listener. 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. 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. Well, if you want to be like Nick, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.
And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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