Baking & The Meaning of Life

You came for cake. You stayed for the existential spiral.

On the New Books Network, Helen Goh and I chat about Baking and the Meaning of Life – a cookbook that, improbably, name-checks Søren Kierkegaard while asking why we bother making cake at all.

Take a listen here.

Goh – pastry chef, Ottolenghi collaborator, and practicing psychologist – keeps it grounded. Baking becomes a quiet answer: ritual, care, small acts that accumulate into meaning. It’s autonomy, creativity, connection. Also: dessert. (or, heck, a midnight snack if I have a chance!)

Very VittlesVamp, in other words. Food as feeling. Cake as signal. Nobody needs it, and yet it ends up essential.

Which is how you get Kierkegaard and Pandan Chiffon in a cookbook – and somehow, it works.