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, bake this month’s recipe, which you’ll find 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 bakeclub@bonappetit.com 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.
After last month’s cheesy biscuits, we’re going back to our (dessert-loving) roots and baking chocolate cake. But not just any old chocolate cake—this is a malty, brawny loaf imbued with Guinness stout. The crumb is tender beyond belief because of how you mix the batter. You’ll combine the dry ingredients, then rub in the butter by hand, until it practically disappears. This mimics a technique called reverse creaming and prevents excess gluten from forming. And there’s no special equipment, like a stand mixer, required.
A biscuit warm from the oven, split open so the steam rises to meet you, rivals the pleasure of an exalted loaf of homemade bread, all for a mere fraction of the effort (and wait time). This month’s recipe is packed with cheese and zhuzhed up with Old Bay seasoning. These biscuits are high and tall and layered like a lasagna thanks to a quick and dirty lamination technique not unlike croissants. You don’t need any special equipment for these, but I highly recommend availing yourself of a nice bench scraper. It makes shaping the dough so much easier. Chris recently handed me a set from Gestura and I’ve been loving it because it’s small but sturdy, with thoughtfully curved edges and a minimal handle.
With a few pantry staples and a little time, this recipe yields a dozen delightfully chewy bagels that rival the most beloved of NYC shops. We can say this because our Test Kitchen is based in NYC and our staff, collectively, has eaten hundreds (thousands? millions?) of bagels here.
It all comes down to a two-step process: The bagels are first boiled, then baked. This dual approach gives them their signature chew, tanned sheen, and pleasantly dense (not tough) interior. We’re also using baking soda in place of lye—a somewhat scary ingredient used by many bagel shops—and forgoing specialty sweeteners like barley syrup. These swaps make the recipe a truly home-baker-friendly project, and the result does not suffer in the least. In fact, when tasted side by side against their more traditionally prepared counterparts, our baking soda batches performed just as well, if not better. (The power of recipe testing!)