Baking for Your Valentine? This Psychologist Would Like a Word.

For 20 years, Helen Goh has been living a double life.

In one reality, she is baker-in-chief of the chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s food empire, architect of bright sweets like rose powder puffs, rolled Pavlovas and striped cakes.

In the other, she is a psychologist in private practice in London, an acolyte of the school of interpersonal existential therapy, dedicated to navigating the darkest realities of human existence.

These tracks ran parallel, never converging, until she began work on her recent cookbook, “Baking & the Meaning of Life: How to Find Joy in 100 Recipes.” Those recipes are divided not into chapters on cakes, tarts and cookies, but by topics like Celebrating, Nurturing and Remembering.

Who better than a professional student of pastry and people to give advice on baking for Valentine’s Day?

“It can be treacherous,” Dr. Goh said. “A cake is very rarely just a cake.”

Our conversation began with this story: As a doctoral student, she happened to be in a new relationship when Valentine’s Day came around. She was already a skilled pastry chef, but decided that a classic chocolate cake would be the right gesture. “And then the madness of early love took over,” she said.

Her new beau had just received his doctorate, emerged from a divorce and purchased a house for himself and his young son. Slowly, her longing to be part of his future took over the cake. She circled it with Cadbury’s white chocolate fingers to match the picket fence around the house. She hid a Lego piece inside to represent his son, and piped his new name and address on the top.

He was delighted by it at first, she said, but broke up with her soon after. The work she had put into it was too much, too soon.

“I think the cake really betrayed me,” she said. “It showed that I thought too much about him, and he thought too little about me.”

Dr. Goh, 59, said it’s never too soon or too late in a relationship to bake something special for a loved one. Because sweets are inessential, not utilitarian like a roast chicken or a steak, they are inherently symbolic and romantic.

But she has thoughts on how to calibrate the gift to the relationship. “Early love is all about effortlessness,” she said. “It’s magic and spontaneous.” But baking requires care and thought, which can result in a loaded offering.

At this stage, she recommends something sweet and simple: a heart-shaped cookie, something chocolate-dipped, or a simplified version of a dessert you enjoyed together on a date.

But for longtime couples, effort is exactly what’s called for.

“Now is the time when you want to be seen, when you can capture something specific, and when you know you can survive a disaster in the kitchen,” she said, citing the psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s definition of maturity: surviving disillusionment.

Over decades, Dr. Goh and her husband have navigated a culinary disconnect. Her family is Chinese, she spent her childhood in Malaysia, and now works in a European kitchen founded on the flavors of the Middle East. To her, talking about food is the very definition of intimacy.

Her husband knew how to make exactly four meals when they met, and his highest praise for a dish is “quite good.” But after many years together, she knows the one dish that breaks down his reserve about food: pasta puttanesca.

Since that doesn’t feel special enough for a Valentine’s Day dinner, she turned the dish into a galette, with a peppery crust, filled with garlic, anchovies and red pepper flakes, and topped with olives and capers.

“For a birthday, the gift is all about celebrating the loved one,” she said, “But because Valentine’s Day is so coupled with love and intimacy, you want the gift to reflect both of you.”

The strongest long-term relationships she sees in her patients, she said, are marked by connection, negotiation, attunement: what the philosopher Alain de Botton describes as “what’s left after the flames of early love die down.”

Existential philosophy holds that there are four grim “givens” of human life: isolation, responsibility, meaninglessness and mortality. Its corresponding school of psychology says they can’t be ignored, but can be surmounted through three key objectives: connectedness, purpose and significance.

Dr. Goh’s work, as both a therapist and a baker, is to help people build toward those goals.

From a professional perspective, she said, the kind of wine-and-roses romantic love celebrated on Valentine’s Day is inherently short-lived, not part of a lifelong quest for meaning. “It’s all-consuming,” she said, in a way that is unsustainable over the long term.

In between new and mature relationships, she said, is a good time to try making something unexpected, like her buttery crackers laced with cheese, scallions and chile crisp.

At that point you can take a risk and go beyond the predictable, she said.

“The message from that is: We might be covered with crumbs and taste like spring onions, and we can still be enjoying each other.”