Baking the Perfect Pi

Benjamin Delwiche spends most of his time in two places: the classroom and the kitchen.

It’s been that way since his days at Boston College, where Delwiche crunched numbers as a math major when he wasn’t cracking eggs for his part-time job at a nearby bakery. Nowadays, Delwiche lives in Los Angeles and works full-time as a middle school and high school math teacher. At home in his kitchen, though, you’ll find him on social media, shooting and sharing videos of his science-minded methods for making cookies, breads, pies, and pastries. Over the past few years, his educational and instructional video clips have earned him more than two million fans and followers on TikTok and Instagram, where his handle is @benjaminthebaker.

Delwiche’s new cookbook, Dessert Course: Lessons in the Whys and Hows of Baking, is the sum total of his lifelong twin passions for math and baking. In its pages, Delwiche breaks down precise recipes for brownies, custards, and other treats to explain how even slight alterations of ingredient measurements, ratios, bake times, and other variables can yield very different tastes and textures. It’s this professorial approach to guiding amateur bakers that sets him apart from others online and on bookshelves.

“A lot of cookbooks have amazing recipes, but are missing the element of explanation,” Delwiche said. He believes that teaching the math and science behind baking gives readers a stronger foundation for perfecting the classics, from carrot cakes to banana breads, plus the know-how to personalize basic recipes. Dessert Course describes how the addition of baking powder makes for puffier snickerdoodles, for instance, and explains why subtracting egg yolks results in denser cakes. The book even has flow charts for helping bakers find their way to, say, their preferred oatmeal cookie, be it thin and crispy or thick and chewy.

Delwiche, meanwhile, likes to bring his baking background into the classroom, where his students sometimes get to taste-test their teacher’s experiments. “When math feels challenging, students often say, ‘I’m never going to use this,’” said Delwiche, whose dream is to one day have a Mr. Wizard’s World-style television show that demystifies math through cooking. “When I teach things like ratios and percentages, I center the unit all around baking. It helps them recognize that math is something people use on a daily basis.” ◽