Melissa Clark transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of three baking books, including my latest, Snackable Bakes. Each Saturday, I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
Today's guest is Melissa Clark, a staff reporter for the New York Times food section, author of the weekly column A Good Appetite, and a prolific author of cookbooks, including her latest Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals. I know many of you are curious about developing your own recipes and recipe testing. So I asked Melissa to join me to explain how that works for her when it comes to baked goods. We'll talk all about where Melissa gets her inspiration, the role seasonality plays, and how she does her research. Then we go through her tender coconut chocolate cake recipe from Dinner In One as a template for understanding how her recipes get written. Why does she include certain ingredients? Why are some things whisked rather than folded in? How about substitutions? She answers it all. So stay tuned. I hope our conversation inspires you all to develop your own recipes.
Thank you to Plugra Premium European style butter for supporting today's show. If you are a professional baker or just particular about your baked goods, you know the right butter makes all the difference. Plugra Premium European style butter has 82% butter fat, which is the perfect amount for your layer cakes, shortbread cookies, laminated pastries, all butter pie crust, and other delicious creations. A higher butterfat content means less moisture and more fat, which is precisely what you're looking for. Cakes rise higher, cookies crisp more evenly, and pastry layers are flakier. Speaking of flaky layers, Plugra is also slow churned, which results in softer, more pliable butter. For those of you obsessed with making laminated pastries, that's exactly what you want. I know there are a lot of you out there trying your hand a croissant, pain au chocolat, Kouign-Amann and your own puff pastry. Plugra European style butter is available in different forms for all your baking and cooking needs, including salted and unsalted sticks and solids. From professional kitchens to your home kitchen, Plugra Premium, European style butter is the perfect choice. Ask for Plugra at your favorite supermarket or specialty grocery store.
Now let's check in with today's guest. Melissa, so excited to have you on She's My Cherry Pie, and to talk about developing and testing, baking recipes with you and so much more.
Melissa Clark:
Oh, I'm so happy to be here. This is my favorite topic because of all the recipes that I develop, baking is my favorite. Oh, my gosh. Absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
That is so incredibly thrilling to hear. So you've been described by Eater as the gold standard for internet recipe writing, AKA, recipe development, and you've said that you likely develop at least a hundred recipes a year between your New York Times column and your cookbook writing. Do you have any idea how many of those 100 might be baking?
Melissa Clark:
Oh, that's such a good question. I've never broken it down like that. My guess would be about a quarter of them.
Jessie Sheehan:
A quarter?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
You've already said this, but I came up with this cute pun. So of course I have to now ask you this question. Is it fair to say you have a soft or sweet spot for baking recipes?
Melissa Clark:
Oh my gosh, I have a sweet tooth the size of my body. There's two reasons I love to do dessert recipes. Best number one is I like to eat them the best, and if I don't make them, then there's no dessert in the house and I'm sad and I really have trouble buying dessert. I want to make everything. I want to make your recipes. I want to make other people's recipes. I want to develop my own. They're harder. There is more of a challenge. As you know, baking recipes are harder to nail. I like that challenge. That to me is so fun, is just breaking down a recipe and building it up again exactly the way I want to eat it.
Jessie Sheehan:
So recipe development differs when you were co-authoring a book versus writing your own cookbook or writing for your column in the Times. Can you describe what a recipe developer does in those two contexts, and if you feel like that job is different in the realm of baking versus cooking?
Melissa Clark:
Well, a recipe developer is starting from scratch. You are starting from the recipe that you wish existed in the world. You're not always starting from zero. You are standing on the shoulders of baking giants, but you're taking a recipe, a sweet, and you're saying, "Okay, how can I make this exactly the way I want to eat it?" Say it's a pound cake. You have to decide, "Well, what do I love about poundcake?" Because there's so many different ways to go. A classic pound cake is just butter, flour, sugar, and eggs. There's no seasoning in it even. But then there's pound cake that has added liquid, like a buttermilk pound cake or a cream cheese or a sour cream. So then you take all those elements and you make those and you decide, "Well, what do I like best?" So now step one in developing is deciding what recipe needs to be out in the world and what you like best.
Then of course, steps two to a hundred until it's right is testing, testing, testing, subbing out one ingredient at a time and changing things and taking careful notes and really thinking about each step of the way. And then at the end you have a recipe, but recipe testing or co-authoring with chefs is different because it's not what you want. It's what they want. You are working on their vision and they've already come up with it. They know what they want. Usually when you're working on someone else's cookbook, it's a restaurant chef or a bakery chef. So someone who's working in volume and they're not working on kitchen equipment that the home cook has. So you need to take their vision and take their recipe and you need to translate it into the kitchens of the home cook. It needs to taste exactly like what they do, but you need to be able to make it in your home kitchen. So they're really quite different. The overlap is I'm baking and I have delicious things at my house. So that's the good part. But they're two different skill sets.
Jessie Sheehan:
Is there a difference, would you say, in being a recipe developer of a savory recipe versus a baking recipe?
Melissa Clark:
Yes, only in that the process is different. With a baking recipe, they tend to take a lot more time. They're harder, as I was saying, they're harder because they're harder to nail. They're generally, not always, but usually they're more involved. So there are more steps to get to the finished recipe. With something that you're cooking ... Also, baking is chemistry. Oh, sorry, this is a really important thing. Let's talk about how baking is chemistry. So it's easier to mess up. You need to make sure that all of the elements are incorrect proportion or you're not going to get the result you want.
You need to make sure that the leavening the baking soda or the baking powder is either reacting or not reacting with an acid in the batter. I mean, there's all these variables which you have less of. You still have them in savory cooking, but there are fewer of them. You can wing it more like you really can wing it. When you are cooking dinner, you know you're like, "Oh, okay, I got my peas and my chicken and here's some olive oil, and I'm going to make a sheet pan chicken and it's going to be delicious. But with baking, you really need to be exact. So exact that I only use a scale. I have bowed down to the weighing gods. I will weigh everything.
Here's something about me. I'm not detail oriented. I'm just not. I see the forest, I don't see the tree. I really just like the big picture. So for me to break down a baking recipe, which is really scientific and exact, and you really do have to weigh takes a lot more concentration on my part. I need to be more careful. Cooking is just like, "La, la, la, la. Here I am making dinner." It's a lot easier. It's a lot more off the cuff. My personality is more suited to savory cooking because I am not great at measuring every gram of salt. It's so hard for me to measure when I'm cooking savory things. But when I'm baking, if I know that I don't measure everything except for the vanilla, which I give myself a pass on, I measure everything really carefully because my instinct is not to measure, so I need to compensate.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you are a famously prolific cookbook author with your latest Dinner In One bringing the number to the mid-forties. Yes? In terms of cookbooks?
Melissa Clark:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Although you've never written an exclusively dessert baking book say, for your 1999 Ice Cream Machine cookbook which is a sweets book. You not only include baking recipes and sweets recipes in almost every one of your books, as well as in your weekly New York Times column on occasion, but you have co-authored such books, including Claudia Fleming's iconic dessert book The Last Course. Fun fact, Claudia was a guest on Season 1 of She's My Cherry Pie. Yay, Claudia. Now I assume you were working with Claudia and scaling down her restaurant recipes for the home baker. Some recipe development was required of you as well as copious amounts of recipe testing. Can you tell us about your experience writing Claudia's book with her and what was required of you in terms of doing so, and maybe explain the difference between recipe development versus testing?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, so with Claudia, she had her recipes. I would eat the recipe as made in ... She was at Gramercy Tavern at that point. I would go to Gramercy Tavern in her kitchen. I would taste the recipe and we would make it together in her restaurant kitchen. I would take all my notes and she would print out the recipes. So I would take her recipes and I would bring them home and I would play with them, and I would try to get them to taste as close to my taste memory of what she had given me at Gramercy. Then I would take whatever I cooked at home, and I would get on the subway and I would take the two to the four to the six, and I would bring my little bag of things and she would taste everything. This is unusual. Most chefs I've worked with just trust me and they don't need to taste everything. Claudia needed to taste everything because she is a control freak, and I love her for it. It was great because there were things that weren't quite right.
They were good, but Claudia was always like, "Well, how do I make it, not to say better, but more what people would get here?" Just little things. The oven temperature was a big part of it because she's using convection oven and home cooks for the most part, don't use convection. So you'd think the 25 degrees non convection, like that difference wouldn't make a big difference, but it does. So really we were working with timing. We were working with temperature, we were working with color, how to get the correct degree of brownness on something because you want it to be that right shade of golden. We tested things a lot. It was a great education for me. Every time I co-author a cookbook with a chef, I learn so much. So obviously for baking, I learned what I know practically everything from Claudia and also from Bill Yosses who was a former White House chef. He and I wrote a dessert book as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
The other thing I wanted to say that I just am so interested by is I think I would've thought that you would've taken Claudia's recipe, and let's say it serves 50, and you would've divided everything by 50 and then be done. Do you know what I mean?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Take 15 tablespoons of baking powder and just divide it. But it sounds like it's much more of you in the kitchen having to taste and test a million different versions. It's not as easy as just scaling it down as it were.
Melissa Clark:
Well, that was step one is scaling it down, but that's step one because it's never exact. When you're working with something like you're scaling 15 tablespoons of baking powder down to two tablespoons for biscuits or something. It's not exact. On the one hand, it is exact, but on the other hand it isn't because it doesn't scale down perfectly. Nothing scales down perfectly. There's always adjustments that you need to make along the way.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'd like to hear about your personal baking sweets recipe development process for your own books and for your column. Could you describe your dessert baking style in terms of the kind of recipes you like to develop or put differently, just the types of desserts and baked goods that you like to share with your readers?
Melissa Clark:
I'm pretty traditional. I really like classic Americana. I like French desserts as well, but I also love flavors from all different cultures, and I really like to incorporate the flavors into what is basically a pretty classic French or American dessert structure. I like easy things. I'm not a fusser. I don't want to fuss. Maybe that's because I cook so intuitively, and it's one thing to really be careful when you're baking, but then an added layer of being careful when you're baking is the fussiness. If you're making a parfait and you have to chill this, and then you chill it, and then you add another layer after you've strained it and Oh, my God, I hate straining. I really hate straining. If I could avoid straining, I do that. Do you really have to strain that lemon curd? Do you really?
Jessie Sheehan:
I feel the same way about pudding. Everytime I'm like, "There are no chunk, there are no lump. I'm not straining this."
Melissa Clark:
So what I do now, and all the recipes I do for things like that, I make it optional. I'm like, "Look at it and see, does it really need straining?" It is up to you. When I write recipes, this is for savory and sweet, but it's especially important for dessert is I like to give people options and tell them checkpoints along the way so they know what they're looking for. It empowers them. It helps them get a better result. But also, if they mess up, it's their fault, not yours.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. It's so true. Say it all, if needed. If you want, you don't have to.
Melissa Clark:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
I agree.
Melissa Clark:
Actually, can I tell you something funny that I did?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Melissa Clark:
Because you will totally understand this. Do you get people commenting on your recipes and they're like, "It's too sweet. It's too sweet?" It's like constantly, "It's too sweet. It's too sweet." So I wrote this lemon curd recipe where I particularly, I purposely under sugared it. It was so damn sour. But I put a range. I was like, "You can use between ..." I forget. "Three quarters of a cup and a cup of sugar. Up to you, depending on how much you like it." Now, I forgot that I had done that, and I made it the other day, and I just looked at it quickly and I used the lesser amount of sugar and it was inedible, but at least I was cutting off those people who say, "It's too sweet, it's too sweet, it's too sweet."
Jessie Sheehan:
I often will, in a head note, have to say something like, "FYI, I have a voracious sweet tooth. If your sweet tooth is a little more mild, you can cut back a little bit."
Melissa Clark:
But you also can't because there's certain recipes with a lemon curd, you can use a little less sugar. It's not going to matter. But with a cake, if you cut the sugar, it might come out okay, but you're not going to get the color. You're not going to get the crunch, the texture. Sugar is not just sweetness, it is structure. That is something that people don't know or forget. It's not always okay to cut the sugar.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%. We'll be right back.
If you love She's My Cherry Pie, I have something else I think you'll love. It's Cherry Bombe Magazine, and it's the most beautiful food magazine out there. Cherry Bombe features women and culinary creatives in and around the worlds of food, drink, hospitality, and baking of course, each issue is thick and gorgeous and printed on lush paper. There are features, profiles, full page photos and recipes you'll want to make. Cherry Bombe Magazine is printed in Rhode Island at an independent family owned printing press, and they do work for the top artists and art galleries around the world. So every issue of Cherry Bombe is top-notch. Subscribe now and receive four issues of Cherry Bombe. One each season. Delivered direct to your door. To learn more, visit cherrybombe.com/subscribe. Now, back to our guest.
I wanted to talk about recipe inspiration. I assume when you develop a dessert or a baked good for the column versus one for a book, the process is probably different in terms of inspiration. Maybe you have places where you seek inspiration from different places or with a different goal, because I imagine with the column, sometimes you're restricted more. I think I read sometimes you have to think about what does the section need or what does the database need or et cetera, et cetera. So could you unpack how you get inspired just when you get to write for yourself in a book, which obviously has its own structure, if you're writing a one pan, one dish book, your dessert has to be that. But I wondered if there's a different way that you get inspired when you're book writing versus column writing.
Melissa Clark:
Well, the inspiration is usually from the same places, but it's where the need is. Really it's need based. You're right, there's a lot of times when I want to do a recipe, but we have something similar already at NYT cooking. So my editor was like, "Yeah, maybe not," because we actually already have 12 brownies. I'm like, "Yes, but you don't have these brownies. These brownies are really special." So that's when I'm like, "Okay. Well, fine. I'm going to save my brownies for my cookbook and you're not going to get my special brownies." But the inspiration for both of them, it starts with the thing I want to eat. What am I hungry for? What do I feel like cooking? Generally, it's seasonal. So when I'm working on a cookbook, I like to be able to have a full year so I can be inspired throughout the seasons. The newspaper in the column, it's obvious because you need to have your asparagus recipes in spring and your strawberry recipes at the beginning of summer and your citrus in the winter. So that makes sense.
But it is also the way that I cook. Then I think about cooking is seasonally, and then I love to try other people's recipes. I get really inspired. I love learning new things. I love learning new techniques from people. I love trying new flavors or figuring out how to apply new flavors. I'm still trying to figure out my relationship with matcha powder. I'm like, "Really? I love it so much, but how do I make it mine something that is a recipe and that we can really call a Melissa Clark recipe that's not someone else's recipe?" I haven't quite got there with matcha, although I use it. I make other people's matcha recipes and I'm so happy. So it's all of those things. Then at some point I'm going to say, "Okay. Well, this is how matcha makes sense to me." Now I'm thinking, I'm like, "Ooh, maybe I'll put a little in lemon curd. How would that be good? Would that be bad? "
Jessie Sheehan:
Having written so many baking recipes per year over so many years, how do you keep it fresh in terms of coming up with ideas and how do you not repeat yourself?
Melissa Clark:
What I do when that happens, especially if I've forgotten a recipe that I've done, then I make it again and I see, "Well, can I make it better?" Because often, I can improve it either by a new technique that I've learned or my tastes have changed, our tastes really do change, or maybe it's perfect, and then I just say, "Okay, I'm going to move on and I'm going to try something else." Or maybe there's a way to use that recipe as an element in another recipe.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that, and I find the same. For me, it's about streamlining, and I'm sure it is for you as well in the sense that maybe both of us as we've gotten older in the industry, made more things. We want things to be simpler. We both love one bowl or a one pan. There's this sense when I look back at stuff, I've written like, "Why did you have 50 steps? Why did you get a stand mixer out? Who are you?"
Melissa Clark:
Oh, my God, a hundred percent. What did I just make the other day that I made in a stand mixer? I'm like, "Why? What was I thinking? You don't need a stand mixer, a bowl and a whisk, and that is it." Same thing or food processor. I'm like, "This really did not need a food processor. There's just no reason to." I would never wash it out now. I would never want to wash it out.
Jessie Sheehan:
100%.
Melissa Clark:
I guess we're getting lazier.
Jessie Sheehan:
I think so. I think so.
Melissa Clark:
Or no, no. Let's just say we're older and wiser and our wisdom makes us more confident in skipping steps that we wouldn't necessarily have thought to skip.
Jessie Sheehan:
I actually think that's true because developing recipes earlier in my career, I was probably afraid if I was researching a recipe and saw that everybody used a stand mixer, I probably thought, "Oh, then, if I'm going to do a recipe like this, I better pull out a stand mixer."
Melissa Clark:
That's one of the best things about, let's just say, wisdom is knowing that just because everyone else does it does not mean you have to do it. That's really about confidence, and that is so I love that life lesson for everything, for everything. Right?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. Terms of research. So you will look back what you have kind of your recipe idea. Now it's time to research that you'll sometimes look back at your own work. Do you pull out your cookbooks? Do you ask your colleagues a mixture in terms of researching the recipe?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, so I will pull out my own work, of course, if it's apropos, but I start by baking other people's things or cooking other people's things to see what other people are doing, because you need to have context. So you have to understand what the recipe is, what other people have done with the recipe. That's when you as a developer say, "Okay. Well, now how do I make it mine? What is the Melissa Clark stamp on this?" Usually it's taking out 10 steps.
Jessie Sheehan:
Putting in more vanilla.
Melissa Clark:
Putting in more lemon, more lemon zest. Half the time I'll make a lemon recipe. I'm like, "Why didn't they use a zest?" Sometimes I'll make a recipe and it'll just be like, "Whoa, this is so delicious. The only thing I want to do here is change one little thing." Then that's not developing because it's like you're changing one or two little things. It's still someone else's recipe, and that's fine. Just give credit. I love to do that because I love to showcase other people's work as well. So whenever I can do that, I can say, "You know what? This is so-and-so's lemon squares, and it's so good. The only thing I did is that I added almonds to the crust," or something or whatever it was that I did. You show your work. You are transparent about your process, and you are also able to celebrate other people's work, which I love.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that too. That's really nice to hear. Now, the baking or sweets recipe testing part. So I know you've said that for savory recipes, you might test twice if you're really lucky or six or seven times, but desserts can take 10 times to get right.
Melissa Clark:
Oh, more than that, you know it. Right?
Jessie Sheehan:
Because desserts are really hard. I do know it makes me so sad and more involved. As you have said, you can only change one thing at a time when you test a baking recipe. Can you explain that for people?
Melissa Clark:
Really, you should only change one thing at a time for other recipes as well, but especially baking, because baking is a science, and you want to know how the thing that you're changing affects the entire result. So if you change two things and you're like, "Oh, this is better." Well, which was it? Was it the fact that I switched buttermilk for sour cream, or was it the fact that I use cake flour instead of AP flour? So you really need to just one thing. It just saves you work in the end to be more careful about it, and it teaches you as well.
By doing that, you're constantly learning. Even though I think I know the answer. So every once in a while I'll say, "Okay. Well, I know that if I'm going to substitute heavy cream instead of sour cream, the acidity is going to be different. So do I need to change the leavener?" I know that. So sometimes I will make two adjustments at the same time if I know that I am going to need to. You want to be smart about it, you want to be thinking about it. But generally speaking, one change at a time.
Jessie Sheehan:
When you're ready to test a baking recipe, do you enter the kitchen with a drafted recipe? I keep my laptop in the kitchen with me, but I've already written a Google doc of what I hope is the recipe.
Melissa Clark:
Absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
So that I can change it the whole time.
Melissa Clark:
Yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
So you have your drafted recipe. Would you do the same for savory?
Melissa Clark:
Never.
Jessie Sheehan:
Never. So interesting.
Melissa Clark:
Sometimes I will, sometimes, but rarely.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Then you've also written about your ... Or maybe it was in a podcast, I'm not sure, but your notebook in the kitchen, which you always have to have. Tell us about the notebook in the kitchen, and then I wondered, is it only a savory notebook? Because you've actually got the recipe for your baking recipes, do you not need your notebook? Talk to me about the kitchen notebook for both savory and sweet.
Melissa Clark:
The kitchen notebook is just for savory. It's rare that I will have a sweet recipe in there, except for some things like rhubarb strawberry compote, something that where it's practically a savory, it's not a baking recipe. You don't have to weigh things. Once I get out the scale, I need a draft. In a perfect world, I print it out and then I make hand notations on it, because that way I don't get flour in my computer. But half the time I bring my laptop into the kitchen and I'm embarrassed to say, "Don't do that. It's bad."
Jessie Sheehan:
Tell people I love why you need your notebook in the kitchen. It involves wine and doing dishes.
Melissa Clark:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. Okay. So when I'm cooking savory food, most of the time I'm just cooking ... The notebooks in the drawer. I'm making dinner, right? The other ... Oh, I did such a good dinner the other night. Can I tell you about it?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, yes, yes.
Melissa Clark:
I made duck breasts. I seared off some duck breasts, and I had let them sit with Za'atar and salt a couple of hours ahead, and they dried out and I seared them. I had a beautiful asparagus, and I made a hollandaise, and I added a little bit of the Za'atar to the hollandaise, and I just was cooking, and it was so good on days like that, I'm not taking any notes, but my husband said at the end of the mail, he's like, "You got to write it down. You got to write it down before you forget it," because it was so good.
That's when the kitchen notebook comes out, because I have had wine with dinner, and if I'm not writing it down immediately, I will forget it tomorrow. So that is step one of developing a savory recipe is making something delicious, having the foresight to have written it down in the moment, or at least right after dinner. Then those notes become the Google doc that I'll type them up and then I'll test them, and then I'll change it. I'll say, "Okay. Well, actually, instead of using ..." This is actually what I'm thinking for when I do this recipe instead of the Za'atar in the hollandaise, it would've actually been better to have the fresh herbs that go into Za'atar, like oregano and maybe a touch of sesame oil, because there is a slight grittiness that I didn't love. So how do I get rid of that? I use fresh. Then that becomes the recipe eventually.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I know you work with a recipe tester at home. Definitely with all of your savory recipes. I assumed you do the same with her fur baking as well?
Melissa Clark:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. I have a recipe tester. I have several recipe testers who work with me, and I just actually started working with someone who's a ... Oh, I think she worked with other trained pastry chefs, and I've worked with a couple of trained pastry chefs who have a lot more knowledge than I do, which is great. I make them do it my way. I'm like, "Just do it the sloppy way, please just try it." They really want to do it the fancy way. They want to with a rough puff pastry. They want to chill it every single step, and they want to make a nice square. I'm like, "Please, just try to reign in your instinct for perfection and try to do it the imperfect way." But at the flip side, I'm also learning from them. So it's very collaborative, which is the best.
Jessie Sheehan:
Finally, I just wanted to ask a little bit about your recipe writing. The actual drafting process, I guess, is it different for sweets and savory? I think I know the answer because it's going to be much more precise in terms of all of those weights. But I know you've said when you're writing a savory recipe, you like to walk the line of being a little bit handholdy and making sure people understand, but you don't want the recipe, and I love this word that you used, "You don't want the recipe to seem cluttered." Do you find that you're doing the same thing when you're baking handholding, but also giving people a little freedom? Or is it harder to give freedom because it's a baking recipe?
Melissa Clark:
I want to give freedom every time I can, every place I can. In baking also, there's plenty of ways people can make a recipe their own. I think that the traditional wisdom is always cook the recipe exactly as it's written first, and then you can put your spin on it. But I like to write recipes that are flexible enough for people to be able to put their spin on it from the get-go, because maybe you're not going to make this recipe again. I want people to be able to know where they can, which rules in the recipe are non-negotiable, and then where they can go off on their own. That works with baking. There really, there's lots of places where you can do that.
Jessie Sheehan:
So your latest cookbook Dinner In One is my kind of book as I'm a bumble baker from way back and Dinner In One is all about making dinner in a single vessel and avoiding dirty dishes, which is basically my love language. When you spoke to Vogue about the book, you said that not only were you a dessert person, but that you considered dessert to be an essential part of dinner. Thank goodness. I was so happy when I read that. But you also said that the tender coconut chocolate cake from Dinner In One is your favorite dessert recipe from the book, which is thrilling to hear because I would love to unpack how you developed it.
Melissa Clark:
Absolutely.
Jessie Sheehan:
What do you love about this cake?
Melissa Clark:
As the name says, "It's a tender cake." It's not brownie like. It's not like a chewy dense, which I also love, but this cake is one of those light, almost like devil's foodish cakes. It's got a light crumb, it's got a deep chocolate flavor and coconut and chocolate is just like, is there a better match? That to me, coconut and chocolate, the mounds bar, it is what I want to eat. So it has all of that in it. Of course, it's so easy because it's a one bowl recipe, and I love a one bowl cake. Who doesn't love a one bowl cake?
Jessie Sheehan:
I do not know that person who does not love a one bowl cake. I also love this cake has a glaze that's poured over it almost in a Texas sheet cake way because it's poured over when the cake is warm, which I thought was fantastic. Soaking into the crumb, making it very moist. I wonder if there's anything particular that inspired this cake, this recipe, when you're writing the book, obviously you knew it had to be one bowl, but those qualities of the cake that you included in the head note in which you just described, "Soft, velvety crumb," is that the kind of thing where in your head you're like, "I really want a soft velvety crumb. I really want it tender." You know what I mean? Those inspire you? Or is it more like, "I want a chocolate cake, I'm going to play. Oh, this is tender and light. I love it?"
Melissa Clark:
No, I was looking very specifically. So because I have two chocolate cakes in this book, and they're both one bowl chocolate cakes, they need to be distinct because otherwise, why would you have two when you could have one? Dense chocolate cake is more like a brownie. It isn't a flowerless cake, but it could be a flowerless cake. It's very almost chewy, dense fudgy. It's just fudgy. So I wanted to have the opposite as well. I wanted to have an example of a light velvety cake that maybe that it was more birthday cake-ish in a way. So I was going for a particular texture and then a particular flavor. I'm like, "Okay, I want coconut. I want a coconut chocolate cake. This is the place to do that because coconut milk works so well." What I did here really is if you think about a devil's food cake, right? You'd normally have buttermilk. That's a common ingredient and a lighter devil's food cake.
So what I did was I used coconut milk and a little acid instead of the buttermilk. So I've got the coconut flavor in there, and then I used some vinegar to give the acidity. I can keep the texture, the light crumb, but I can amp up that coconut flavor. That was my thought process for that recipe. Then so you open a can of coconut milk, and there's one and three quarters cups in that can of coconut milk. I used one cup for the cake. What do you do with the other three quarters of a cup? Unfortunately, I didn't nail it. I didn't use the whole thing, but it's a can. It's sitting there, it's open. So let's make a glaze. So then I used another quarter cup in the glaze.
That just also to have the fresh coconut flavor, right at your initial bite and then you get it again through the chocolate, through the crumb, you're getting the double coconut flavor. It's reinforcing the flavor. So that works really well. So I use the coconut milk for the glaze and then texture, you want to have some texture. So I use coconut on top to give it a candy like texture. I think I say you can use unsweetened or sweetened. Guess which one I like better? I like sweetened. I do. Because it's like that's what makes it a mounds bar. The unsweetened is a little more refined, it's more elegant. It's delicious also. So if you want a slightly less sweet flavor, that one works too. But I want the Mounds bar.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. So do I. I just wondered, when researching, did you turn to your own recipes or have you made enough chocolate cakes at this point that you can pull from your head as to, "This is what I'm going to do to make this recipe the way it is, or the way I wanted to do?"
Melissa Clark:
I don't remember. I think I probably baked a couple of chocolate cakes. Did I? Or did I start? For this one? I don't remember. The process though, it's either I'm baking a bunch to see which is where my starting point is going to be, or I'm using one of my old ones. I think that this one was a little bit ... I think I crossed several recipes because I'm like, "I know that I want this texture, but I want the one bowl." I think this one was really like a hodgepodge. It was like a Franken recipe. Do you ever do that before? You just take a bunch of recipes and you take, "I'm going to take a little of this, I'm going to take a little of that," and then you squish it together in your Google Doc, and then you make it and you're like, "Okay. Hey, let's hope for the best."
Jessie Sheehan:
A hundred percent. First of all, you say, "Heat oven to 350." Just as a personal little recipe writing thing that I love, I do not say, "Preheat." I just say, "Heat."
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, just heat.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that you do that too.
Melissa Clark:
Yes. The preheat, it actually makes no sense conceptually.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right, exactly.
Melissa Clark:
If you really think about it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. So we're going to heat the oven to 350, which is a standard baked temp. Grease a nine-inch round or a nine by nine inch square, parchment on the bottom. In a situation like this, are you testing both the square and the round?
Melissa Clark:
I have to test both. Yeah, because they bake differently.
Jessie Sheehan:
You give peeps the choice just to be a nice person or just because you want to make sure maybe they don't have a round?
Melissa Clark:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
Also, aesthetically, when it's a round cake, it's somehow, to me, more formal. A square cake is more casual. It's like this is a snacking cake. You can eat it directly from the pan with a glass of milk. The round cake is more like, "Look at my cake. I'm putting it on a cake stand."
Jessie Sheehan:
"We're going to whisl together in a large bowl, some melted unsalted butter." But you say, "You can sub oil," which I love. And you name a few. There's sunflower, safflower, grape seed. Just out of curiosity, why butter if oil works? Just for the flavor?
Melissa Clark:
For the flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
Oil is slightly richer. Butter has moisture in it has milk solids, it has other things other than fat. Oil is just fat. It is a slightly different texture as well as flavor. So I really prefer for this cake. It works as a vegan cake. You can use the oil, but I really do prefer the slightly lighter, more buttery flavor.
Jessie Sheehan:
The one large egg. Just out of curiosity, why not two or why not one plus a yolk? Did you test it both ways, or you just knew this is a tiny enough cake, you're not a big sheet cake, it's not a layer cake? I think you can come buy with one egg.
Melissa Clark:
Actually, it's really funny because no, I did it with two eggs as well, and I liked one egg better. I wanted it light, but not that light. I wanted for it to have a little bit of a slightly more compact texture than I would've gotten with two eggs. I could have used one yolk as well, which would've been delicious, I think. I'm never going to ask you to separate an egg unless I absolutely can justify it, and it wasn't a big enough difference for me to ask you to do that.
Jessie Sheehan:
The full fat coconut milk unsweetened, obviously to amp up your coconut flavor, did you experiment with whole milk just to see, or you knew from the beginning, I want to use that coconut because I want that flavor in the cake?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, no, I knew that because I've made similar cakes with whole milk or with buttermilk.
Jessie Sheehan:
This is technical. Did you always know it would be one cup or did you think to yourself, "I could maybe make this a three quarters cup or I could try a cup and a quarter?" Or is it almost, "I know for my own baking brain to some degree, I know how much leavening I need for a cup of flour. I know how much liquid I ..." Liquid can be funny though. You can switch them. They can go up and down, "But how much liquid I'm going to need for the cake?" What was your thinking on the one cup?
Melissa Clark:
I knew that if I was using one egg, then it was going to be the one cup. I forget exactly how much flour. What's the flour?
Jessie Sheehan:
I think it's one in a quarter.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah. So I knew that, because you're going to use approximately one cup of liquid for the one cup of flour, maybe a little more, and then the one egg is going to get you where you want to go.
Jessie Sheehan:
Then there's vanilla extract. Do you ever use something like coconut extract or does it feel fake to you?
Melissa Clark:
Feels fake to me.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Then I think I know, but can you tell people why we might add vanilla to a chocolate cake? Some people think that's counterintuitive.
Melissa Clark:
Oh, yeah. No, it really rounds out the flavor. It's funny. Do a test. When I was baking a million pound cakes, I was really playing with the vanilla because you have so few things to play with and using it or not using it made such a huge difference. You think, "Oh, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, what is that going to do?" You'd be surprised.
Jessie Sheehan:
Then the apple cider vinegar, you explained why it's there, but can you remind us why are we putting a little vinegar in this cake?
Melissa Clark:
It's for the acidity because you need to balance out. It helps leaven the cake. It helps work with the baking soda, baking powder. I forget which I use. I think it soda.
Jessie Sheehan:
Baking soda.
Melissa Clark:
Soda, right. Which makes sense. So sometimes I use both, but if you're going to use baking soda, it needs to react with an acid. Cocoa is one acid because it's acidic. But to really give it more of a rise, you need to add something like vinegar or buttermilk.
Jessie Sheehan:
Also by adding that vinegar, you're almost making a homemade buttermilk because a cup of milk can be butter milk iced with what is it? A tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar.
Melissa Clark:
Exactly. But I'm not quite going that far. I'm just using a teaspoon. So it's just a little bit, because you have the cocoa powder, so you have the additional acidity of the cocoa powder.
Jessie Sheehan:
You don't need that whole tablespoon?
Melissa Clark:
You don't need whole table...Right.
Jessie Sheehan:
Makes sense. We've got our melted butter, we've got our egg, we've got our coconut milk, we've got our vanilla, and we've got our cider. Now we're going to add our coconut milk right in there. You know how sometimes a cake recipe will have you do a little bit of dry, a little bit of wet, a little bit of dry? Are we just one bowling this, so it's just easy and works to just put our liquid right here with the rest of our wet ingredients?
Melissa Clark:
Exactly. Also, because it's a melted fat, so you would add those ingredients alternating with a whipped fat, because what you're doing is you are really trying to emulsify this. You don't want it to break. If it does, it's very forgiving. It doesn't matter that much. But in a perfect world, you've got your solid fat, it's whipped, and you're adding a little bit of liquid. You don't want it to break. You want it to be absorbed nicely, and then you need to add a little bit of flour to keep that emulsion. So basically, you're just working to keep this nice emulsion, this well-mixed batter. But when you're doing a liquid fat and you're using a whisk, you don't need that. It's null and void. It doesn't matter. What is important though, is that you want to dissolve the seasonings, the salt, and also the baking soda and the cocoa needs to get dissolved in the liquid before you add your flour, because once you add your flour, it might be harder to incorporate those, and then you're going to over whisk it. So the order is important,
Jessie Sheehan:
But it's also a way to one bowl a recipe. Because if you add your leavening, your salt, your cocoa powder in this instant to your wet ingredients, you don't have to do that thing that many baking recipes call for first step, get a bowl, whisk all of your dry ingredients, set it aside, and then move on to wet. You don't need to do that.
Melissa Clark:
I never did that. Even when I was a kid, even when I was a teenager and I was baking cakes for my family, I was always like, "Ah, that's dumb." I never did that step. I don't think it's dumb now. I totally understand why it's important, but I also know that you don't have to do it all the time.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. I also thought this was interesting. I often will think of sugar when I'm doing a womble cake, for instance, as one of my wet ingredients. So I probably would've done the butter and the vanilla and then I would've added the sugar, and that would've been part of my wet ingredients. I thought it was interesting that in this recipe, the sugar is going to get whisked in now along with the cocoa powder and baking soda, and I didn't know if you had thought about that, if that was a specific choice. I might have added it before that coconut milk, for instance. I don't know. It's just the way my mind works when I think about a recipe, and I wondered if you had a thought about that.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, I wanted it to come after the cider vinegar. I did want it to come after. I just think it mixes in better. It probably doesn't matter.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
What would be interesting to do is to bake it ... See, now I'm going to go home and do this, bake it both ways and see, does is matter when you have the sugar? So that's another element. That's like another thing to play with.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. First of all, I love, I just wanted a flag for people. Everything in this recipe is done with a whisk. We're adding our dry ingredients with a whisk. I just adore that rather than grabbing a spatula. So I'm just-
Melissa Clark:
One bowl, one implement.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, exactly. So we have our granulated sugar, and I just wondered, did you think about brown? I often put brown in a chocolate cake just for the moisture and the caramel vibes, et cetera.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, totally. I did think about it, but here it's coconut that it needs to highlight, so you don't want to add the molasses.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. Unsweetened cocoa powder. I always use Dutch just because I love the way it looks, and I love the flavor.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, exactly. But I didn't say which one to use and I tested it both ways and both ways work, and I didn't want to burden people with that. Dutched is generally my go-to. Looking back, I probably should have said which one I use so that people would have that information. So regret not saying, "I use Dutch. You can use either one." "Dutch gives you a ..." I do I say it somewhere on the fudge tort maybe? But it works either way. It really will work either way.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. That's again, back to this thing about wanting to give people agency, wanting to give your readers agency to use what ingredients they have at home. Because the worst thing in the world, obviously, in my opinion, is forcing people to go to the grocery store to buy something that they don't need when they have something at home that would work.
Melissa Clark:
Exactly. I'm wondering if it got cut out, because I'm looking at this recipe and I'm looking at the ingredient list, and it goes all the way down to the bottom, and I wonder if it got edited out for space.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
Sorry. That happens. That's the reality of writing a cookbook is the recipe needs to fit on the page.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. No shade editors have a hard job to do, but sometimes things get missed.
Melissa Clark:
But for this, I think it's fine. It's not it's going to make or break it.
Jessie Sheehan:
No. Now we have some baking soda, which is useful because of the cocoa powder and the vinegar. I was just wondering, how did you know three quarters of a teaspoon of baking soda, and how did you know that versus trying to make a mixture of soda and powder? One thing I thought of is sometimes if you can avoid having to ... Again, if you're thinking about being a one bowl baker and you do want to keep ingredient lists short, if it doesn't need two leavenings, don't use them.
Melissa Clark:
Exactly. What I would've done is this was the recipe where it's either add the baking powder and skip the vinegar, and then you get the rise, or you add the vinegar and you can skip the baking powder. You don't need both. So again, I'm not going to add an extraneous ingredient, and I like the flavor. I think I did try it with the other way, and it's missing something. It was missing something. There is a slight tang that you get that's nice,
Jessie Sheehan:
Lovely. Fine sea salt, and I just wondered why not kosher? Is it anxiety about people grabbing Mortons versus-
Melissa Clark:
Kosher salt.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's so controversial.
Melissa Clark:
No, kosher salt is just a can of worms that I want to avoid, because the brands of kosher salt differ so drastically that one brand weighs twice as much and is twice as salty as the other. Morton's is twice as salty as diamond crystal. In order to skirt that whole issue I just said ... This says fine sea salt. The way I write my recipes now is I say, "Fine sea or table salt," because table salt's fine too. It doesn't matter. Fine. Meaning okay, not.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Yeah. It's only fine.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now we're going to add our all-purpose flour, which goes in last, which makes sense. Now we move to a spatula, going to fold in some chips, which you say are optional. What do they add and why optional?
Melissa Clark:
They make it a little bit richer. They also do give a slight chew just a little bit. If you want it to be even lighter, you keep the chips out. If you don't have chips, you keep the chips out. They're not an integral part of the recipe, but they up the chocolate presence in the cake.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great. Then sweetened or unsweetened, shredded coconut, which is going to be added for texture. You're scraping the batter into your pan. You're baking 30 to 45 minutes, and you have two signals for the reader that the cake is done. One is that the edges of the cake spring back, one lightly pressed, and then the second is that the toothpick inserted into the centra, comes out clean. This is an important thing as a recipe writer to make sure we have those signals for peeps. Do you always try to include two?
Melissa Clark:
Not necessarily.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Melissa Clark:
Not necessarily. The toothpick one is hard because sometimes when it comes out dry, it's over baked.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
So I don't do that unless it's very specific. This one, it's fine. But yeah, that one is hard. So really the best test for me is the finger test. It's just this experience. It's hard to get people to ... But I would rather have someone pull it too early than too late.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me too.
Melissa Clark:
So if it's a little gummy right in the center, if you're putting a glaze on it, you're not going to notice. But if it's dry, it's dry.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. I couldn't agree anymore. I always say, moist crumb.
Melissa Clark:
Moist crumb. Yes. Moist crumb.
Jessie Sheehan:
Just because then if I see a clean toothpick on a cake cup mine, I think I've over baked it, even if I'm pulling it at the time I thought it was supposed to be pulled.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah. I also try to give a big range. I give a 10-minute range. Sometimes I give a 15-minute range on cakes, one baked cakes, because everyone's oven is so different, and I want people to not over or under bake their cakes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Yeah. 100%. You ask that the cake be rotated halfway through, and I always write cake recipes like that, and a lot of people ... I do it with cookies. Now, that's for hotspots in my oven. Do you include that for that reason?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah.
Melissa Clark:
Yeah. Because otherwise everybody's oven has hotspots.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right. "Right before the cake comes out, we're going to make our glaze." You say, I think in the little head note, maybe, you say it'll be, "Gloppy," if you don't make it too early and let it sit. Is that something that happened while during the testing process and you realize, "Oh, shoot. I made this too early in the process. I have to wait?"
Melissa Clark:
Well, no, I didn't do it because I knew it would. Because when you're doing a confectionary sugar glaze, do you know the crunchy glaze is? Confectionary sugar glaze starts out very soft, and then it gets crunchy as it dries. That's what it's supposed to do. But if you try to pour it after it starts to get crunchy, then it's going to get those little crunchy crunch bits, which is not what you want. For some cakes, maybe you want that. For this cake, what I wanted was, I wanted it to be a ... It also thickens as it sits. I wanted it to be on the runny side, and then you put it on the warm cake, it absorbs in, and then on the top you're left with just a little bit of the crunchy crunch as it dries, and then the coconut. So it's almost like this candy, like little slight texture that compliments the texture of the coconut.
Jessie Sheehan:
I just want to say I'm team crunchy crunch. I love an American buttercream with confection sugar that gets a little crunchy. I just love a crunch.
Melissa Clark:
It's like extra candy.
Jessie Sheehan:
It is. When the cake is still warm and it's out of the oven, you're going to poke it so that you can pour your glaze over it. I wondered when you were testing, you try not poking and seeing if the glaze would absorb, or you just knew this-
Melissa Clark:
Oh, no. I tested a lot of different glazes and icings on this cake, because I wanted to see, I played with a buttercream, but a buttercream where I just used, this one is just the only fat in it is the fat from the coconut milk, but I also played with a melted butter glaze. So like a buttercreamy sort of glazy kind of thing. What else did I play with? There are a few iterations of this glaze and it needed to be in one bowl for sure. Oh, I also did a choc ... That's what I did. I did a melted chocolate chocolatey glaze, like chocolate coconut milk. But I just like this one the best. If you're going to pour a liquidy glaze onto a warm cake, it just makes sense to poke it because why wouldn't you?
Jessie Sheehan:
The shredded coconut that goes on top, sprinkling it over right after you pour the glaze over. I love that we get our mounds bar vibes from the sweetened. Or you can use unsweetened. Just out of curiosity, and maybe it was because it was too fussy. How come you didn't toast? I like toast all my nuts. I toast all my coconut. Was it maybe a color thing? You wanted the white?
Melissa Clark:
Yeah, I wanted the mound ... Mounds bars aren't toasted. No, toasting would be great too. I love toasted coconut, but not here.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Melissa, and I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Melissa Clark:
This was so fun. I can talk about this stuff forever.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Plugra Premium European style butter for their support. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on your favorite podcast platform and tell your baking buddies about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CitiVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie and happy baking.