As one of nine children, Ben Delwiche didn’t get the chance to eat many homemade treats.
“There weren’t many opportunities for my mom to bake,” says Delwiche, who grew up in Catonsville. “So, my siblings and I took it upon ourselves to mess around and make cakes in the waffle maker or cookies in a frying pan—things that inevitably didn’t work, but it was exciting to try baking.”
And while their experiments may have flopped, they did serve a purpose—Delwiche, who worked at the now-closed Atwater’s on Falls Road while attending Gilman—was soon hooked on baking.
These days, Delwiche is a math teacher on the West Coast, at Windward School in Los Angeles, but he also enjoys schooling others on the art—and science—of baking. He recently wrote his first cookbook, Dessert Course: Lessons in the Whys and Hows of Baking.
We caught up with him from his home in California.
What did you do at Atwater’s?
I started sweeping the floor, packaging cookies, cutting brownies—it was an exciting Saturday if I got to crack the eggs! I worked my way up and was tasked with making cookie dough, brownie batter, and bread.
What appealed to you about baking?
There are a lot of connections to math—the ratios and percentages—and then there’s all the science of the mixing method. For example, for some recipes, you want the butter cold and others you want it melted. With all those things, you can be constantly asking, “Why do we do it this way in this recipe but not the other recipe?” I love all this learning that is constantly happening in baking.
When did you decide to write a cookbook?
During the pandemic, I posted a video on how to use a piping bag. Within an hour, it had upwards of 10,000 views on TikTok [@benjaminthebaker]. By the time I went to bed and woke up, it had five million views. From that, I was like, “I think a book can come out of this where I share all these lessons and also give a new format to look at a recipe.” My book includes a flowchart, which shows how I think about recipes. You can take what you learn from one recipe and apply it to another. For most people, every time you bake something, you’re starting from scratch, but it’s all a variation on a method.
What do you want people to get out of Dessert Course?
My hope is that it demystifies baking. There’s a lot of room for creativity and people don’t realize that.
How did you want to set your cookbook apart?
My favorite cookbooks always have a teaching element. I knew I wanted my book to not just have a list of recipes and photos on the opposing page. I wanted a book where you are learning about why you might be using an ingredient. Those are the cookbooks I like—I have learned so much from J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab or Shirley O. Corriher’s BakeWise.
Has baking professionally changed your relationship with baking?
A lot of times I’m baking for a video and I love seeing people’s reactions, but I also continue to have that for joy myself, where I’m just making something I want to because my wife has a craving and it’s not something I share on social media.
How long did it take to test the recipes?
I really started writing in 2023—and now it’s finally out. The book has 105 recipes. Each recipe got tested a few times. In the book, I wanted to show what it looks like whether you underbake or overbake or how something looks if you use this ingredient over that ingredient. It’s the same teaching idea of predicting a mistake that the students might make and then showing them, “If you do this, this is the result you are going to get.”
Who ate all the spoils of your work?
I would bring stuff to school to share with the math department, or my wife, who is also a teacher, would bring it to her school to share.
So, I’m guessing it’s hard to get into your class.
I teach every grade seven through 11. In the beginning of the year, the students slowly figure it out if they have an older sibling or if an eighth-grader tells them, “Oh, you have Ben. Did you know he bakes and that he’s on TikTok and has a book?”
