Why we should relax about sugar and still eat cake
Adebate with Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh on the merits of any particular cake, biscuit or pudding, spirals into serious, labyrinthine assessments of silkiness and nuttiness, crumb size and snap. (There is, they will tell you, an art to ensuring a biscuit has as much crunch when it’s liberated from the oven as it does after three days in a tin).
You quickly realise they’d be utterly formidable on Bake Off.
Israeli-British chef Yotam, 48, coowner - with Sami Tamimi - of the Ottolenghi delis and restaurants, and pastry chef and psychologist Helen, 51, have spent the last three years concocting and wrangling over sugary treats like this to include in their new book of desserts, Sweet. It’s his sixth book and her first.
In it there are mini berry frangipanes, decadent cream-frosted puds and cookies galore - all of which have been put through the pair’s ruthless, multi-stage recipe-testing regime. “Each recipe has to have something indefinably ‘Ottolenghi’ about it,” says Yotam.
The perfect cake depends on the time of day
“Easy!” shouts Helen when asked to pick the bake she’d fancy a slice of right now. “The prune and Armagnac cake.” (It has a rubbly walnut topping, dusted with clouds of icing sugar).
“It depends on the time of day, right?” ponders Yotam. “Now, I don’t want anything creamy, I just want something that would be really nice with a cup of tea.
“But in the evening, something more dessert-y. I really love the - you know how much I like strawberries and vanilla - the rhubarb strawberry crumble cake...” We all glaze over in a sugar-spiked reverie.
“There was always going to be an Ottolenghi pastry book, the question was when,” he adds, explaining how the Ottolenghi deli windows have become synonymous with sweet things, particularly the brand’s huge and billowy meringues.
The pair collided in 2006, when Helen, who hails from Melbourne, Australia via Malaysia, moved to the UK. She began by encouraging Yotam