“I was very uncomfortable with that headline. ... I thought disappointment is guaranteed. You know, like that, there's only one way to go. It's down. ... And to be honest, I don't particularly love that cake. It doesn't suit my taste because I find it altogether too rich.”
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast · Food & Beverage · October 2026
The host introduces Goh as the baker whose cafe chocolate cake a newspaper once named the world's best. Goh says it is still her most requested cake 25 years later, and that her own children eventually told her they didn't like it either.
Transcript
when I end my interviews for the podcast, I'm like, they hated me. They hate me. Anyway, can't wait to hear this.
Helen, thank you so much for joining us on Things Bakers Know. It made perfect sense to have you for a chocolate cake episode because many years ago, you owned a cafe in Melbourne, Australia, where you grew up, and you served a chocolate cake at this cafe, and it got named as the world's best chocolate cake by a newspaper reporter. So I was like, all right, obviously we're going to have the inventor of the world's best chocolate cake on the chocolate cake episode.
Well, you know, I was very uncomfortable with that headline. It was literally the front page of the Sunday paper. And I was very uncomfortable because I thought disappointment is guaranteed. You know, like that, there's only one way to go. It's down. Yeah, it's interesting because I think of chocolate cake as not one category, but a kind of major category from which there are loads of other category, you know, other types of chocolate cake. I don't see chocolate cake as one cake. And in fact, for a long time, because my, I wouldn't say it was my introduction, but because I was sort of known for this particular chocolate cake, because it was so popular. And it does, I mean, 25 years later, it's still, you know, the most commonly requested cake, you know, from my repertoire, whether from friends or people from, you know, wanting a cake for a catering or even a wedding. I've done many of them, you know, many of those cakes for wedding. And, you know, so for a long time, I just sort of associated that with chocolate cake. And to be honest, I don't particularly love that cake. It doesn't suit my taste because I find it altogether too rich, too interesting. Too heavy and too rich. But I thought, yeah, that's the quintessential chocolate cake. And recently, when my children were little and I would make them, you know, cakes for their birthdays, they then, you know, they wouldn't be discerning. They're just, you know, it's really all for me to sort of decorate. And they were only interested in the icing and the decoration. Sure. When they became older and they're now 15 and 11. So a few years ago, they started to voice that they didn't really like that chocolate cake either.
Well, that's kids for you, you know, right? You know, you had this cafe in Melbourne, Australia, where you grew up, and then you moved to London for love, I think, correct? Yes. Yes, moved to London for love. Yes. And you were baking with Oda Lengi's team, but also working as a psychologist by day, correct? That's right. You co-authored the book Sweet with Yotom. And then, of course, Baking and the Meaning of Life, your latest book, which just won a James Beard Award, which we were so thrilled to see because it is such a beautiful book. So I was looking at chocolate cake recipes that you've published over the years, you know, in Sweet and then in Baking and the Meaning of Life. And one of the things that I noticed is like, okay, world's best chocolate cake, as you say, is a creamed butter cake. It's got lots of melted chocolate in it, a little bit of cocoa. And then by contrast, in your latest book, you have the chocolate cake for everyone, which is a cocoa cake, cocoa and oil. And it's vegan. And it's vegan. And I thought that was really interesting. And so I would love to hear you talk about sort of like texture-wise and flavor-wise for people that don't know when they're sort of evaluating a chocolate cake recipe. Like if you see a recipe that has melted chocolate and butter, what can you sort of expect from it flavor-wise, texture-wise, versus, you know, an Oil and cocoa cake.
Right. So the world's best chocolate cake, as you said, has a lot of, you know, chocolate and it also has a lot of coffee and a lot of butter and sugar, all the good stuff, really. When you add oil, it gives a different texture. It's just lighter, moister. And of course, you miss the dairy flavor of the butter, but when you add the buttermilk, that then rounds it out. You know, so like kind of thinking through what it is we do and don't like, I can not reverse engineer, but I can engineer a cake using those ingredients in different proportions. So I bloom the cocoa. You know, it just hydrates the cocoa. I use Dutch process. It's rich. I feel like I get all the compounds. I can really taste cocoa. It feels more pure to me without just being rich.
Yes, I can appreciate that. And I think that note about blooming cocoa is an important one because that's a step that is not always written into recipes, but cocoa is a very drying ingredient.