Stuff You Should KnowCake has been around for a long time, but mostly less than great forms. It took the Industrial Revolution, the advent of plentiful sugar, and some good old American know-how to come together to make the cake we know and love today. Find out all about it in this classic episode.
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.
Yeah, that's Josh.
This is from November thirtieth, twenty seventeen. This is supersize because somehow we did seventy three 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 enjoyed as much as you enjoyed 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, there's Jerry. Three of us are together, which means it's time. There's stuff you should know.
About cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake, cake.
Cakeke cake, cake cake cake.
Cake. Uh.
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.
You 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 like the birthday party jackpot where they'll have like cake and pie and you're like, looks like I'm in heaven. But today, today, Chuck, we're not talking about pie now. 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 it'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 house 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 niches 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 rip also bonkers candy, So.
Kudo went the way of the Dodo. I never heard of bonkers.
They were like a fruit chew, but like really had some chew to it, not like starburst, you know, just to cintegrate. So 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, I don't need that in here.
There's like three or four people who are like walking around toothless. Now, well I'm just rotten right out of their heads.
Well and also not you. My toothlessness is for different reasons.
Yours is from a Christine.
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?
To know, I have chips sound kind of good?
Seaweed seaweed strips?
Oh yeah, yeah, no, I know what you mean. Or like just figs.
Yeah, you know, it's like a fig Newton without the good tasting part.
We take figs and we mash them up, then we wrap them in cell a phane and you eat them for five dollars.
Apiece, 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, 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 get like ten rappers laying around your desk thinking like what have I done.
I know it's post Halloween stuff too, so maybe it'll die down.
I don't. I don't think that's gonna happen. But yeah, but again though, today, I guess if if you replaced all of those candies bars with cakes that were just sitting around, you get zero complaints.
For me.
Well, and at my house at Halloween, we gave away two things. We gave away whole slices of pound cake and just pigs.
It's the worst house in the block.
Did you you a pound cake fan?
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, And 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 geez, I'm gonna toss it up between a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.
That's Bill Clinton's favorite.
Well, you know, as Bill goes so ghost chuck, which is not true, the.
Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, or I like a red velvet cake.
Yeah, well that's the or cream cheese frosting 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.
It's not a cream cheese things.
What's your favorite favorite of all time? Well, everybody knows that cake perfection was achieved sometime in the twentieth century when Public's grocery stores started selling their yellow cake with buttercream frosting. Oh yeah, there's no better cake on the plane.
It's like a yellow sheet cake.
It's simple, but it's tasty. It doesn't need any dressing up. But if it does, we'll just put like some add some more frosting in the shape of balloons on top.
Right.
It's just it's just perfection. It's a perfect cake. I love it. I can eat it morning, noon and night. I can eat stale stuff I found in the dumpster behind Publics. I can eat the fresh stuff right out of the oven, so hot that it burns my mouth. I would eat it anyway that it was given to me.
Uh.
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?
Yuma's is actually the same as mine. We both are junkie for Public's cake, to tell you the truth, Although I have to say she is introduced me to the wonder of Japanese cakes. And there's this little known fact about Japan. It loves to take I shouldn't say it's a little known. Probably a lot of people know this, but it loves to take things that other cultures came up with and then improve them ten thousand percent. 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's still the best bake good you've ever had in your life, right, and Chris, yes, oh, by far, by far. That's very controversial, it is, But I'm telling you you would just be like, Josh's right.
This is better.
I'm not kidding. They've improved on it, and they're all they're very deferential still, they're like, oh, well, 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 this what they call cheesecake. It is not what you or I will 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 Umi 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 gonna take you there, all right. Actually that's not true. I brought you a cake from there, from Uncle Tetsu's Oh 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 you.
I'll just slide that over to your desk.
Then, yes, not into them coming.
I don't even like German chocolate cake. Really, I love.
German chocolate all right. Well, have you ever heard the 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 does. That's what it is that I don't like. I like sort of a tradish butter creamy or just good old fashioned birthday cake icing type thing.
Yeah, pie mean yeah, and surely you agree. Publics is the pinnacle of that.
I don't know if I've ever had a public's cake. Oh. I go to publics three times a week, so next time I'm just gonna.
Well, now that you say that, it might be best that you stay away, well, because you're gonna start adding. Is 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.
Fun 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 butter cream 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 though.
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 is an old Norse word kaka, which is kind of funny because here I don't know where it came from, but you're in America.
Coca can mean do doo.
Yeah, but kaka is where the original word supposedly came from.
Right, And a lot of English words have like Germanic or Norse origins. Did you do you know that?
Yeah?
So cake, the word cake is of English origins. So there's 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, Yeah, and it was definitely sweeter. So cake was like a sweeter version of bread back then.
Yeah, they'd had a little 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. Toktok uh. That may be a little too far back, Yeah, I think so so. But basically around the time I believe Egypt, the Puronic 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 if someone knows, though, and I bet you there's like one of the best things.
In the world. It is 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 nineteenth 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 fifteenth 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. But and I think they even put candles on top. Well, none of the Greeks put candles on top. But it wasn't like a happy birthday cake. No, 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 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, 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 and the fourteen hundred started doing birthday cakes, and then the seventeen hundreds 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 that makes you reflect on your own existence, that's right, and it's eventual. But so by the time the 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, the Greeks had created something that was basically a prototype of the fruitcake plocouse.
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 it cake and no one love is 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. All right, 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 Story of.
Cake, and it was okay.
It wasn't pretty, though, what do you mean, like it like it was lopsided or there's a horn growing out of it.
It just you know, it didn't look like a cake you would buy in a store, but it tasted really good.
I'll bet it was made with a lot of love too.
Oh of course.
But my deal is 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, and throw a little of that in there.
And there's a much you can't do that with.
No, there's much more forgiveness in general cooking than baking.
Yeah, cooking's in 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 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. This hes pretty neat the understanding of it too to me.
So you want to start with a leavening agent, 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 use 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, the dirty fight. And then eventually yeast kind of fell to the wayside a little bit. Is they realized that there's other ways to you make cake rise. One of the big ways is to actually introduce air into it. And if you say, you know, 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 a flour pretty yeah, the sifting flour introduces air into the whole mix too.
Yeah, this is all very important stuff. So you can't. 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 something else. Sure, But if you're just an ordinary non professional baker at home.
Right, 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 nineteenth century.
Oh so that was an old recipe, yes, yeah, And so in other words, you couldn't just put the mixer on with your eggs and.
Leave, no and go get on ti.
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 gonna be a bad day.
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 the acid are going to mix together and form a chemical reaction and release CO two. Yes, And this is how modern cakes rise. CO two is released through this chemical reaction and it goes 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 not so much pound cake because it's way more dense or other non flowered cakes, but your standard birthday cake. You slice it up and you see those it's you know those pockets, those holes that you know.
Those are air holes. Those were where the bubbles were.
And we'll get to that a little more, but it's that's very important stuff.
That's a 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 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, ye, 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 it's own distinct thing, you know what I'm saying. Like, subbing olive oil out for butters can give you a weird oh 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 gotta know what you're doing.
You can't just say, well, I'm not gonna use butter, I'm gonna 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. Like, they're not telling you to cream the butter just to make it look good before you add it to the batter. You're actually incorporating air there, so that butter is serving both as a fat and as a leavening agent in that recipe. Correct, if you come across the recipe that calls for butter that it must be creamed, there's something else going on besides just getting a buttery taste out of your cake.
That's right. 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 a gave artificial sweetener, but sugar is the best thing to use. In my opinion. It bonds best to water molocles. It's really gonna 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 sell it out for something else, it can have an impact on that chemical reaction for sure, because it does all those things you're talking about. Like one of the things it does is the crystalline structure of sugar actually cuts through the batter to help release CO two more easily. And like you said, it binds to water, which means it does two things. That locks it in so that it keeps moisture in, but it also sugar also robs that water from some of the proteins and the starches that give the cake its structure, 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 particularly, you're not going to get same thing with like stevia or honey, Like it's not gonna have the same effect. It's it's crystalline sugar, and it doesn't have to be white refined sugar. You have the same effect I think with like turbinato 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. You know, white sugar do it right.
And then they sugar also gives it that nice golden brown color through the Mayerd reaction.
Yeah, that in 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, and there's a couple of things in there. Those proteins help give structure to the cake, I believe.
Yes, absolutely, the almost fires in the yolk. They help.
It's 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's certain things in cake sometimes that.
Don't want to mix.
Yeah, the water.
Yeah, and the egg comes together and says, what you know, can 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 less than 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 an egg, and we also 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 it's just a blessing on humanity ca cakes.
It is.
It's a really neat accomplishment that everyone had came together to figure this out over the span of time and wonderful kitchens on cold winter days where that were like, you know, you've got like a nice cake baking in the oven. You're contributing to humanity's knowledge of being great.
Yeah, a lot of bad the carcasses of a lot of bad cakes have been left in its wake, sure to get where we are today.
A lot of unhappy families and a lot of unpleasant conversations about those cakes.
But still in a bet in the olden days, when times are a little tougher, they probably still.
Late those cakes oh yeah, I would guess.
So you know you probablydn'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 good, going to hold everything together.
Give it its structure, Yeah, a lot.
Of structure and strength. And this is when 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.
An they're pretty good now. If you get a good gluten free cake.
It's well, the 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 glutenous cake, that gluten from the from the flour mixing with the water forms of gel and it gives it that structure, it gives it that consistency, the texture that you're looking for. But again, the sugar's robbing the proteins and the starches from getting too much water, because the more water it gets, the more the tougher the cake is going to be, the more gluten. So you actually want to make sure that your sugar's taking away some of the liquids. But also the type of flour you use has a lot to do with how tough your cake's going to turn out. So, like, there is such a thing as cake flour. Yes, that's something like seven percent seven and a half percent protein, which is going to translate into less gluten when you mix it with water, right, Yeah, so it's gonna be a lighter, fluffier cake. And then there's all purpose flours ten and a half percent, bread flours twelve percent, 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 gonna 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 gonna get.
Yeah, it blows up the CO two 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 CO two in the first place. The presence of liquids in the presence or water specifically, I think in heat, really make that CO two 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 an ancient Egypt. Let's say we're in regular North America and Europe. In the eighteenth 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 eighteenth century they weren't in every household either, but they tried 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 oven technology, 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 too. 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. 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, you're gonna The change in temperature, on the one hand, can cool those gases and make your cake fall, and it makes a sound as it does, as everyone knows. And then the air pressure from slamming the door can burst those co two bubbles, and again you're 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 in the middle of the in the middle of the cake.
Maybe I'll burn, maybe I'll stick up your whole house.
But like you said about opening the door, like, ideally you know the temperature 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. But definitely don't keep opening it. Try and lease wait till 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 m hm. You can obviously take a little peak that way. Sure those are kind about a fashion, right or are they?
I don't not that I know.
I feel like I don't see those a lot. Do you have a window in your rubin? Sure? Of course?
What am I a communist?
Do you?
Yes? With the light?
Oh man? What do you have just to stay in the 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'm literally cannot picture my kitchen right now.
Jerry, he's got a window, right.
If I've been baking in the dishwasher.
Jerry, and I say, yes, you have a window, and you're.
Yeah, that might be. I might have just said something very dumb.
So so it's stand in.
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 wyone's a bottle of that for all it.
You can go to like any any big box hardware store and killipop hardware store off the internet.
Sure, I don't replace light bulbs at 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 if it's covered in goo, that means it's not done.
Uh, that is correct, chuck.
But then you can also lick that goo off that toothpick. That's not bad.
No, you can, but you're it's just never quite as good. And I think it's it always tastes like disappointment, you know what I mean, because you want it to come out clean. Anytime you're doing that, you're never really putting it in ex 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 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 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.
Kept, I think I can hang with you guys.
Yeah, I'm alive.
Ten or fifteen 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 is stable enough.
I never thought about that.
Nobody likes us. Sure you can fill it in with a little extra frosting. Yeah, Actually, now I think about it. That's great. Those indentations are just fun.
The frosting grooves.
In other words, yep, should we.
Take a break, Yes, all right, we're gonna talk, well, just about other kkey stuff right after this.
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 eighteen forties. Baking soda sodium bicarbonate just good old fashioned, regular old baking soda. SORR 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 CO two or produce CO two. Right, somebody about twenty years after baking soda was developed said, oh, I got this. We're gonna 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 CO two in there. That was a huge, huge advancement for cakes, but it actually came kind of toward the end of cake advancements. 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, that's all it's good for. Well that No, you can use the baking soda for a lot of stuff.
Yeah, it also gets stink out of like clothes too. Oh yeah, 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'll love with your parents help. Yeah.
Pre packaged cake mix was a very big deal when it came out in the nineteen thirties, but it was a company named p. Duff and Sons. And they said, we got a problem here. We got too much molasses on our hands. So, and this is kind of how a lot of great things have been invented. They had too much of something. They say, well, what can we use this for? So they got to work and they said, mister John Duff, the owner, said, you know what, the little wheat flour in there, with this molasses, a little shortening, some spices, we got a gingerbread mix that we can sell to the public. All you got to do is add water, dumb, dumb, 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 they had this. The idea that you could just get a mix from the store and just add water was huge. It was a huge change. And what's interesting is this whole like p duffin Son's 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 long standing food myths. Yeah, one of them is that cake mix came out of a surplus of flour from World War Two. That's where the cake mix came from.
Yeah, I mean cake pre made cake mixes did get way more popular after World War Two.
But it wasn't because there was so much flour.
No, it was because that a lot of the food companies started getting into pre mixed foods. Yeah, that you could make pretty easily in your kitchen. But then the other one. I'd love this one. There's this long standing myth or this story about a guy named Ernest Dickter who back in the nineteen fifties, Ernest Dicktor, 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 Dictor got a focus group together and found out that women who made cakes using these cake mixes felt guilty. 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.
Right about the patriarchal brainwashing.
Right, So Dictor 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 long standing food myth that you can find, like some very credible sources who say, like, oh this is 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 Dictor is actually rightfully credited with saving the cake mix market through a focus group, and he did find that women were kind of they didn't feel guilty about it about, you know, not contributing more to the cake mix. They think they were more bored by it. 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 like 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 Dictor, And that actually is save 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. The home cake baker goes like she couldn't go on one of these shows now where they make like the Giant British Bake Off. Yeah, like giant submarines and stuff out of Fondon. 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 to 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 sixteen 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, 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 saying but yeah, it must have been like my ninth or tenth 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 that like the black keys were kit kats, like the the knobs on the synthesizer were rollos, and I was I just looked around at all my friends, like, does everyone see my cake? This is the greatest cake anyone's ever had?
And no one couldn't have any but me.
No, I shared, of course I wanted to everyone did partake in the bounty?
Was it a key tar or a keyboard? It was a keyboard, okay, yeah, you never know.
Strap a yeah, strap a guitar strap on it. You might could have held it.
I would not have put it past her to make it a key tar.
Man.
That is very sweet story. Yeah, it literally and figured thank you Hojo fans.
Huh, yes, when that is 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 are 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's 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 twenty five percent reduction in temperature.
So you want to knock that heat down twenty five percent.
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 this 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 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 like the butter and sugar and it says cream it with an electric beater, that's what you're doing. And it's 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 you've got a nice, a nice creamed mix of ingredients starter mix of ingredients on your hand there, right, But you don't skimp on that.
That that first step.
And that's like that I think the creaming method that's that's that's the one that best gets across this point that this is like, this is a it's a chemical reaction. I know we've kind of been beating that horse, but it's really true. Like you, 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 making 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 makes ingredients in this order, wet then dry, right, do that right? Don't just say I'll 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 at the pound cakes. Man, do you know so that the idea that poundcakes 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 seventeen hundreds 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 TIBs?
And also pound cakes too.
The reason why you're not going to find a pound cake with a big butter cream frosting is because that will that will send you into sugar shock.
In a second.
Is why a pound cake is already really dense and sugary. Like, that's why you just have it like a little glaze on top.
Yep.
I do like that glaze. Actually, I eat a pound cake.
I think that glaze is oh what's it called? Deli something? Icing? Imperializing. Oh I don't know, I can't remember. Uh, okay, So the next one is the not the no aeration method to where you're not really you're not whipping anything up.
Yeah, you probably don't even have flour in this in this this probably a flowerless.
Cake, right, So this, this is the kind of thing that you use to make like a cheesecake or a flower or less chocolate cake.
Yeah, this 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 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. Public's cheesecake is incredible.
Man.
They need to sponsor us and they sell it by the double slice for those Oh, like, you get two slices and they have a key lime one too. Chuck. That's just man. Although if you don't like lemon stuff, you might not like that.
Oh No, I love key lime in Okay, try their key lime cheesecake.
Yeah, they should send us some stuff.
Frankly, at Isle of Palms that for my vacation that I've spoken about, they had one of the I can't remember which one, but one of the seafood joints where I would get all the fresh seafood had a homemade key lime pie 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 and stopped at the border. Yeah, just put my base 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 is.
And finally, with a non narration method, you are you're not doing the the beating, you're not creaming that stuff. You were folding the batter. And we could describe it here, but if you don't know what folding is and baking. Just just look it up on the YouTube for proper folding technique right, generally done with a like a rubber spatula.
Yep, there's a foaming method too, where you you are basically using just egg whites usually and you're errating it by whipping them up, which makes a merangue. You can just stop there and incorporate sugar and you've got marangue, which would make a Pavlova cake, which apparently Australia and New Zealand have been fighting over the origin of for close to one hundred years now.
But doesn't New Zealand win.
Supposedly, although I saw another article from some researchers who said no, it came even earlier, a decade earlier out of America via Germany, so who knows, But yes, out of Australia New Zealand. New Zealand's apparently won that fight. But that's marangu and Pavlova cake is like a merangue cake with like fruit in the middle of it. And then 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 it like a sponge cake, like an angel food cake or something like that. You don't like those.
Either, No, not big into angel food cake.
Although you can use sponge cake for strawberry short.
Cake 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 short cake.
Yeah. Those are really good.
And the reason they're called short cake or short bread is called short bread is short is apparently a British term for crumbly. Oh okay, so that's where that came from. Has nothing to do with the size.
Yeah, Emily makes a really good gluten free short bread. 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 short bread that we've had at short cake with homemade whip 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 and then said I'm done.
Yeah, good night.
It is a it is a mess, yeah, a big, big mess. And she always just says, get out of here. I'll clean it up afterwards, 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 once 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 like groan or something.
She's like, oh god, and she'll just say no out right.
Again.
That's life at the Brian House.
That's a pretty nice chuck.
It's always with love though.
Yeah, it always comes out. There's always a cake out the on the other end, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's not gonna get in serious fights with 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 makes you put it all 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 really, I mean it can be.
Okay, but almond croissants are like one of my great joys in life.
Like, oh, yeah, they're so good.
I suppose that's kind of what a bear claw is too, right, Yeah, all right, I take it.
Yeah, but that almond that's sweet almond paste inside is man, No, it.
Is good, but I'm like, don't put that on top of.
A cake, for sure, understood.
Stuff it in a pastry.
A friend chef that was the first person they think that created like the first legit iced layer cake in the fifteenth century, and then about the middle of the seventeenth century is when the first frosting recipes started spreading around on the internet.
Right, and fondant is gross.
Yeah, I'm not into it.
No, I mean, you can make a neat looking cake, but it's gross. Tasting, I think, Yeah.
I'm then into it butter cream 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.
Pallet, Yeah, 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, yes, it turns it red.
All right, I don't know about that.
No, it's true. Okay, I read it on What's cook in America.
I'll try it because i'm making Emily. Her birthday is in a couple of weeks, and I'm making another. I'm taking another stab at it.
Try the try go find like an original like like recipe.
Well, I mean, what do you mean.
Like one if if you see one that actually uses buttermilk, bea 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 isn't the.
Waldor the gluten free Waldorf for story version?
Oh gotcha? I see, But you have cocoa? Does it have like vinegar and buttermilk in it? M?
I can't remember. It's been a couple of years since I tried it.
Okay, well, it should turn red on its own, but I don't think there's any harm in adding some more synthetic chemical red dye.
Well, and the thing is, to a lot of people that don't try red velvet cake don't try it because they think it doesn't like it tastes.
Like chocolate cake pretty much. Yeah, it just is red.
It tastes red.
No, weird, It's not ketchup cake.
There's Yeah, that's Canadian, isn't it. There's hummingbird cakes.
Uh, well, what do you mean by the hummingbird?
Hummingbird cake has like some nuts and some fruit in it, lots of frosting. I think it's a Southern cake.
Yeah, like we called my grandmother Bryant called one of the great all time Southern cooks and bakers like you know, banana nut bread. Yeah, she called that hummingbird 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 carrity 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 the 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 for 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, toasted it in the oven. YEP, No, I'm with you.
Our freezer is always chuck full of black bananas blackened with age. Oh sure, because you makes a killer banana nut bread from scratch.
Using.
I mean, you just can't look at the bananas when she's incorporating.
What does that do? Why is that the key? Do you know?
They just are supposed to be mushy.
Okay, oh, okay, gotcha.
And like the best way to make bananas mushy is to let them age, let them age freeze agent.
All right, let's talk about Indian pound cake. Apparently that's a thing that has corn meal 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 US. And I think what the author Leah Hoy is pointing out is that like cakes came from all over the place through time and geography, and that the mass immigration tore into America over say like the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, in twentieth too. All these people from all these different lands brought their ideas are ingredients of cake, and they kind of went through this americanized grinder to where eggs were added, butter was added, and like you've got these ingredients. So it bears a resemblance to its original one, but it's been like cakeified 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 led 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 jingo list either, I think you might say. Of course, 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 just don't like fruit anywhere near my cake. Yeah, it's a strawberry shortcake.
You definitely win like a hummingbird cake then even.
Yeah, maybe that's the difference between it hummingbird and the banana bread. Right, although banana's in there, right, that's a well see though, 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 in that coconut in the icing.
Yeah, yeah, I 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 Doll Company in the mid nineteen twenties. They 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 looked like cakes, kind of like tear Me Sue Yum is a quintessential Italian cake, but it was invented in the nineteen sixties. Black forest cake actually is from Germany. It was invented in nineteen fifteen. So what happened was again, cake explosion happened here in the good old US of A, and it spread back out to the world. There was it 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 sled chase?
It's great too. Three kinds of milk, evaporated, condensed, and a whole. It's tough to go wrong with that.
Yeah, talk about moist.
And I've like, I've had good and bad trace lay chase, but I've never had an actual trace lay chase. I was like, this is so bad, I'm not gonna finish.
It, right, have you no?
And then there's doda yaki, 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 there in like sweets, but this dori yaky 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. It's like this light, kind of fluffy cake like thing with red bean paste inside. It's good. You can their best like hot off of the street from somebody who just made it. That's when it's absolutely best. But it's like kind of thing you can also find in a seven to 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 gonna love them. Yeah, there's a cake out there for you. And since I said that, it's time for listener mate.
All right, I'm gonna call this a special one man administrative details shout.
Oh wow, because we got.
A box today from a man named Nick Pegan from.
San Jose Bay area, and he sent us just a blotted stuff, like good stuff. It wasn't a box full of garbage he sent.
He said 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, 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, and just a good dude. And beyond that, he added this, he added he's a list maker, an amateur list maker, and he sent us a list, and Nick, if you're listening, please send us the word document digital version of this print out that you sent. Because he said every time he said we should do a podcast on that, 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 encourage us to play a little game here, which we'll do very quickly. See if Chuck can see, if Josh can guess how many times we've done the following things?
Are 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 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 one thousand shows?
I'm going to say twenty.
Seven seventy five?
Wow, Wow, we are really good at that. Huh.
How many times have we admitted on the air that it is a take two.
Yeah, you're not gonna get anything, or maybe you might.
It will 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, sixty two? What that's pretty rare tho out of a thousand?
Yeah, but still it seems like I thought it was even rareer than that did. We used to do it more than we do now, I think so.
I think that's what it was.
Was a little more generous in Earth Takes. Yeah, trips in the Wayback Machine.
Oh, there's a lot of those. I'm gonna say. Out of a thousand episodes.
Three hundred and twenty, he says, fifty nine. So I don't know about this, Nick.
I think you missed a few. Nick. You're just making up numbers, aren't you. How many can 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?
Huh?
And I said that if this list, if the list of geniuses. If the number one genius was Einstein, I would eat the list it turned out it was Einstein.
How many Glenn Danzig or Misfits references?
Those would be all you seventeen four? You need to step it up.
How many times has Chuck was? 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, two hundred and eighty eight.
That's gotta be more than.
That Simpsons references. I'll just go ahead and tell you one hundred and ninety seven. Apparently we have High Does.
That include the two episodes on The Simpsons?
No? No, no, thinks okay, apparently we have High five once. Okay, I'm surprised we even did that.
Sure a number of times Josh has done this a lot?
I don't know. I think a lot just works for that.
Four hundred and twenty six times almost half our episodes.
It's great. Yeah, 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, 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. The Stuff podcast at Houstuffworks dot com and as always, joined us at our home on the web, stuff Youshould Know dot com.
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