Break me off a piece of that Milk & Honey Pound Cake
Catching up with Flour Bakery’s Joanne Chang
Milk & Honey Pound Cake, oh myyyy
Her chocolate chip cookies are so famous that you can take her MasterClass to learn how to make them. Flour Bakery + Café’s Joanne Chang began her cookie mastery as a teen with a bag of Toll House chocolate chips, and something clicked. (Her iconic recipe is based on it, with bread flour for chew, more salt, and other small tweaks.) But she took a meandering path—a degree in applied mathematics and econ from Harvard, and a consulting gig in the power-suit corporate world—before getting into her own bakery kitchen, which she tells Jessie Sheehan about on this week’s episode of She’s My Cherry Pie.
Also discussed: a Milk & Honey Pound Cake with a velvet crumb and honey butter soak that will soon be at every Flour Bakery. They just opened their 10th location in the Boston/Cambridge area, so line up, folks.
What else is new? The beloved baker, who’s written three cookbooks, is putting the finishing salt on her latest book, The Joy of Cookies (peep these peanut butter, sesame, and miso cookies for a teaser), which will be out next year. We love her tuned-up taste buds and her obsession with precision. That math degree wasn’t for nothing! Her pastries are visionary, her iconic egg sandwich is life-changing, and her Sticky Sticky Buns are the stuff of legend. (Seriously, it’s the #1 recipe on our site!)
CATCH SHE’S MY CHERRY PIE ON APPLE, SPOTIFY, OR YOUTUBE.
Shop the show & more
Pastry Love is our favorite cookbook by Joanne Chang, strictly based on the Lemon-Polenta Cookies
Insider secret: They use Prova Madagascar vanilla bean paste at Flour bakeries
Judy Rosenberg’s All-Butter, Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book—a ‘90s classic—and her “how to open a restaurant” class put Joanne’s bakery in motion
Need a loaf cake pan? Get this beautiful Valencia orange one
Wise words
“Why reinvent the wheel?”
–Joanne Chang on the art of the Toll House cookie recipe
Tip of the week
Scrape! That! Bowl! When a recipe instructs you to scrape the batter from the bottom of the stand mixer bowl, says Joanne, do it. Otherwise, you risk pockets of unmixed flour or butter that throw off your crumb.
Fun Fact
Jessie called the bottom of the stand mixer the “nipple” and we can never un-hear it.
Question for the class
How do *you* know when a cake is done? Color? Cake tester? Finger poke?
Fresh baked news
Solidarity Bake Sale tomorrow, 6/15, in SF
All puppies deserve a birthday party
Sabina Temiralieva makes the house from Up
Learn about baker-turned-bestselling author Abby Jimenez
Nadiya Hussain’s sweet new products
Pies for Justice charity pie sale 6/19-22 in SoCal
Going bananas for Magnolia Bakery’s new pudding bar
From the archives
Joanne’s first time on SMCP, where she talks about her famous Sticky Sticky Buns
The cherry on top
Join us for our Summer Tastemaker Tour
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