How baker and psychologist Helen Goh aims to create recipes to make your life better
Helen Goh talks about combining the two sides of her life in her cookbook ‘Baking and the Meaning of Life’, which won a James Beard award
For the better part of two decades, Helen Goh has existed at a rare culinary and clinical intersection: the quiet intimacy of the psychotherapist’s consulting room and the exacting, warm chemistry of the pastry kitchen.
While these disciplines might seem worlds apart, they share a fundamental core. Both are obsessed with process, both search for connection and both seek to answer a deceptively simple question: what brings comfort and meaning to a human life?
Those tracks ran parallel, never to meet until Goh wrote her debut solo cookbook.
“For a long time, I felt like I was leading this duplicitous double life,” she says. “So it was really great to write this book and finally combine the two. It’s a bit like my coming out.”
That book, Baking and the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes, recently won the baking and desserts category at the 2026 James Beard Awards.
