Is baking your entire personality? Is The Great British Baking Show your comfort watch? Or maybe you just love eating cookies? Either way, you’re one of us. Come join our Bon Appétit Bake Club.
We’re Jesse and Shilpa, senior editors and the resident bakers of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. We love to bake—some might even call us obsessive—and we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what-didn’t-works that come with it.
Think of the Bon Appétit Bake Club as a book club, but for baking. Each month we share a brand-new meticulously tested recipe. Bake along with us, share your wins (or your fails—we’ve all been there), post pictures, ask us your pressing questions. We’re creating a community of confident, curious bakers who find just as much joy in the process of baking as the final results.
Want to join the club? Here’s how:
First, and most important, save each month’s recipe and bake it! You’ll find all of them below.
Join the Bon Appétit Bake Club chat on Substack and we’ll take you behind the scenes of our recipe development process.
Post and share photos of your beautiful bakes on Instagram using the hashtag #BABakeClub.
Share feedback and ask us questions in the Recipe Notes section of the recipe page in the Epicurious app. We read every comment and look forward to talking with you about butter, sugar, and more.
Send your baking questions to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on our podcast. Each recipe’s episode goes live at the start of the following month on the Bon Appétit podcast feed.
For those unfamiliar with karpatka, a.k.a. Carpathian Mountain Cake, let us enlighten you. Traditionally, two discs of tender, airy pâte à choux house a layer of pastry cream lightened with whipped cream or crème mousseline. This version ditches the classic filling for a no-bake cheesecake (!) ribboned with homemade plum jam. It’s make-ahead-friendly and endlessly fun; just the thing to keep the summer vibes going a little longer.
This sunflower yellow cake with an alluring bounce is Bake Club’s midsummer stunner. Fresh (or frozen! I don’t mind) corn blended with a can of sweetened condensed milk and our defining ingredient, sweet rice flour, makes up the bulk of the batter. The end result is a textural masterpiece with gentle resistance and slight elasticity that tastes like buttered corn, toasty coconut, and nutty caramel all at once.
If a tomato sandwich, pizza, and flaky pastry started a band, these tomato galettes would be their first hit single. Start by making a black-pepper-spiked pie dough, which needs no specialty equipment to bake up crisp and layered. Each little round is filled with a dollop of garlicky Parmesan and herb mayo, which acts as a barrier between each little galette’s juicy tomato slice and delicate pleated crust. —Rebecca Firkser, Test Kitchen editor
Lemons are a powerful ingredient. So why miss out on their full potential by only using their juice and zest? That was the thesis behind these bars. By blitzing up two whole lemons into the curd, then straining out the pulpy bits, we keep lemon’s most exciting qualities: the bitterness of the pith, the essential oils of the skin, and of course, the acidity of the juice. Think Lemonhead candy. It’s everything I love about classic lemon bars with the volume turned up to a reckless decibel level.
Last year, for deputy food editor Hana Asbrink’s birthday, I made a strawberry roll cake filled with whipped cream and tiny jewel-red strawberries. It was an immediate hit and we decided right then that it belonged in Bon Appétit Bake Club. With fluffy cake, vanilla-bean-flecked cream, and juicy berries, it’s a dream dessert, tailored for this joyful season filled with new blooms and tender asparagus. Roll cakes traditionally require a complex series of steps when it comes to shaping, but this version utilizes an oil-based chiffon sponge, making it particularly easy to roll with no cracks and no heartbreak.