One tin. One sauce. No life story.

What every recipe here has

Consistency is the whole idea. If you have baked one cake on this site you already know how the next one works.

• Grams, not cups. A cup of flour can vary by 30% depending on how you scoop it. That is the difference between a tender crumb and a brick.
• One 20 cm springform tin. Everything is written for the same tin, so you only need one. Converting to another size is a table away.
• Three oven temperatures. Conventional, fan and Fahrenheit, on every recipe, because guessing at fan conversions ruins cakes.
• A sauce to pour. Caramel, curd, fruit or honey, made while the cake cools and poured over the slice at the table.
• A film. Forty-five seconds, five steps, hands only: out of the oven, out of the tin, topped, sliced, sauced.

How the recipes are developed

Each recipe starts from a standard ratio of butter, sugar, egg and flour, proportions that are two centuries old and still right, and is then adjusted for whatever the flavour needs. Wet fruit means a thicker batter. Ground nuts mean a lower oven. Cocoa means more liquid, because cocoa is thirsty.

The notes and FAQs on each page are the failures: the sunken middles, the sunk fruit, the seized caramel. Those are more useful than the method, because the method is the easy part.

Nothing here is written from memory. Every quantity is read off at least two independently published recipes for the same cake in the same tin, and every recipe is run through a program that refuses batter the tin cannot hold, a bake time the batter cannot survive, and a weight in the method that no ingredient has. The whole list is on the house rules page.

About the films

The short films on each recipe are made in the same kitchen with the same plate, the same spoon and the same charcoal counter, which is why they look like a set rather than a collection. They show hands and cake and nothing else: no faces, no talking, no music telling you how to feel about a sponge.

They are produced with AI video tools from a shot list written for each cake. The recipes themselves are written, weighed and reasoned out by a person, and the notes come from cakes that went wrong.

Get in touch

Something not working, or a cake you want to see? Say so. Corrections to recipes are published on the page they affect.