BA Bake Club: Chocolate Guinness Cake
Bon Appétit
Bon Appétit
4.2 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This month, Bon Appétit’s Bake Club is putting a spin on a classic. Listen in as Jesse Szewczyk breaks down his popular recipe for Chocolate Guinness Cake.
“The cake came to me rather easily. I had a vision. I got lucky,” Jesse explains to co-host Shilpa Uskokovic. But the challenge came when it was time to develop the frosting. “I feel like everyone in the Test Kitchen had an opinion on what it should be…I definitely tried at least 10 different frostings.”
Ultimately, Jesse landed on a brown butter frosting as the perfect topper, not just for taste but also because it matched the visual of an expertly poured Guinness, with its creamy head. “It’s reinforced with just a tad of Guinness, two tablespoons,” says Jesse. “I found it important to have Guinness in both places.”
Jesse and Shilpa also dive deep into the mailbag and answer questions about the cake and troubleshoot issues listeners encountered.
Plus, baker and psychologist Helen Goh stops by in our “Baker You Should Know” segment. Helen confesses that she has been living a double life for years and explains how she juggled working with the acclaimed Yotam Ottolenghi on developing sweet treats while seeing patients in her psychology practice. Her latest book, Baking & the Meaning of Life, bridges the gap between the two worlds.
As always, we’d love to hear from you! To send your questions to Bon Appétit Bake Club, subscribe to us on Substack, or send us a voice memo to bakeclub@bonappetit.com.
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. |
| 0:09.0 | And I'm Jesse Shepchak. |
| 0:10.0 | We're both senior Test Kitchen editors at Bon Appetit. |
| 0:13.0 | And this is BA Bake Club. |
| 0:16.0 | Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers. |
| 0:21.6 | We're creating the nerdiest and most wholesome corner of the baking internet. |
| 0:25.6 | Every month, we publish a recipe on Bonapeteet.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know. |
| 0:32.6 | And then you'll go bake, send us any questions you might have or pictures of your finished creations. |
| 0:40.7 | And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. |
| 0:46.2 | So the April Bake Club recipe, Strawberry Roll Cake, is live now on Bonapitatat.com, |
| 0:49.4 | and we'll tell you a bit more about that at the end of the episode. |
| 0:53.8 | But today, Jesse, we're here to talk about your chocolate Guinness cake. |
| 0:54.2 | Yes. Here are some of the comments about your chocolate Guinness cake. Yes. |
| 0:56.2 | Here are some of the comments we've got on this cake. |
| 1:00.8 | In quotes, indulgent, truly obsessed, magic cake. |
| 1:07.5 | Jesse, tell us everything about this magical, indulgent cake that everybody's truly obsessed about. |
| 1:11.8 | Yeah, I mean, the truth is, I think, sometimes for bake club, |
| 1:16.8 | we sit and we pull these ideas out of our head. And then sometimes we... That's on the body part. |
| 1:25.6 | I wouldn't have. The clean version. And then sometimes we identify these iconic beloved bakes that we don't have, and we kind of ask ourselves, how do we put our bake club spin on these? And, you know, with St. Patrick's Day and the season, we don't have a chocolate Guinness cake. Yeah, that's kind of crazy to think about. Yeah, and that's where it came from. It was lovely. Before we get too far into the development process, you know, why don't you tell us |
| 1:44.8 | a few of the basic steps of how you make the cake? Okay, we're going to cue the instructional |
| 1:50.0 | jaunty music. There we go. Jesse, can you walk us through the steps of your recipe? Yeah, |
| 1:56.7 | totally. It's a very simple cake. You make it by hand. |
... |
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