Cakes Archives

The Ultimate Chocolate Banana Bread

Banana bread is a great way to pretend you’re that eating something virtuous when, really, you’re eating cake. That’s what makes this chocolate banana bread, from Jessie Sheehan’s Snackable Bakes (my new favorite baking book), such a treat. There’s no pretense here about “healthfulness” or “low-calories” or “gluten-free” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s basically chocolate cake mashed up with banana bread with all of the best qualities of each.

…

The Ultimate Chocolate Banana BreadRead More »

Citrus Upside-Down Cake

Some desserts just elicit an “ooh” or an “ahh” when you bring them to the table. This citrus upside-down cake is one of them!

I’ve made this cake (which comes to us from Melissa Clark) several times for dinner parties over the past few years. Every time I bring it out people stop their conversation to marvel at the grid of reds and oranges and yellows from the variety of citrus that I use. To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a showstopper! (Do laymen use the word “showstopper”?) And it’s actually a cinch to make.

…

Citrus Upside-Down CakeRead More »

Claire Saffitz’s Meyer Lemon Bundt Cake

Bundt cakes often look better than they taste. That’s because, at the end of the day, you’re dumping a bunch of cake batter into a big heavy mold that needs to cook for a while to have stability, but also (very often) dries the cake out in the process. So how do you make a big, impressive-looking bundt cake that actually tastes good? You soak it as soon as it comes out of the oven. I’ve seen recipes for lemon cakes where you cook sugar with lemon juice just until the sugar dissolves to make a lemon syrup and then pour that over the cake (see: The Barefoot Contessa); but I’ve never seen one where you mix raw lemon juice with sugar and olive oil and pour that over the cake. That was until I encountered Claire Saffitz’s Meyer Lemon Bundt Cake in her new cookbook What’s for Dessert?.

…

Claire Saffitz’s Meyer Lemon Bundt CakeRead More »

Marbled Matcha Pound Cake

Sometimes I make mental note of a food-related thing that leads me to buy another food-related thing and then that food-related thing sits around for a very long time until I look at it and remember the original food-related thing that led me to buy it in the first place. That’s the case with the original Tartine cookbook; Samin Nosrat mentioned in a podcast or in an interview (possibly with me?) that the recipes in it are flawless and it’s one of her favorite baking books. That book has sat around forever and I’ve never made anything from it until yesterday when I remembered that I had a glut of poppy seeds (long story) and thought that I’d make the lemon poppyseed cake from it because I’ve had it at the bakery and it’s surprisingly light and citrusy. But then another recipe caught my eye on page 191: a recipe for a marbled matcha pound cake.

…

Marbled Matcha Pound CakeRead More »

Got Persimmons? Make Persimmon Bread

And so it was that I found myself at an AirBnb in Santa Barbara with persimmon trees. The trees were so beautiful — I’m mad at myself for not taking a picture of them (sorry!) — it felt like a crime to actually pull persimmons off of them. But pull persimmons off of them, I did, and when I got home with them, they were so very squishy, they almost seemed rotten. But I knew better.

…

Got Persimmons? Make Persimmon BreadRead More »

Stressbake a Banana Cake

You could bite your nails right now, you could doomscroll through social media, or you could do what I’ve been doing: stressbake.

Stressbaking isn’t so much a strategy, as it is a state of mind. It’s where your body — your hands, your stomach, your taste buds — jump up into your brain and say: “Halt! No more perseverating. There’s work to be done.” In this case, the work involves taking very ripe bananas off of your counter and turning them into a cake.

…

Stressbake a Banana CakeRead More »

The Fluffiest Coconut Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

My friend Ryan O’Connell is a superstar in every sense. Not only does he have his own show on Netflix, he was featured this weekend in a New York Times article about artists as activists. (Coincidentally, the article was written by Mark Harris, a Lunch Therapy alumni, just like Ryan.)

Suffice it to say, I feel very lucky to call Ryan a friend. And knowing that his birthday was coming up, and that he’s part of our quarantine bubble (a very small group of friends that we still see), I asked if he had a menu in mind for his birthday dinner. He didn’t hesitate: “Oooh, can we have Martha’s Mac and Cheese?” (The best of all time, in case you didn’t know that.) “Oh, and maybe a salad with peaches? Peaches are season, right?” (They are.) “And can we do a coconut cake for dessert?” “You got it,” I replied.

…

The Fluffiest Coconut Cake with Cream Cheese FrostingRead More »

Multicolored Plum Cake with Pistachios

There’s only one plum cake worth making in this world and that’s The New York Times‘s most popular recipe of all time: Marion Burros’ Plum Torte. It’s one of those magical recipes where you think there’s so little going into it, it can’t possibly be that great — you basically make a pancake batter and drop some plums into it — but then the torte comes out of the oven and you feel like Escoffier himself.

The thing is: when I first made this plum torte, I made it with the wrong kinds of plums. The original recipe calls for prune plums, which are very narrow, and allow for maximum plum-age: the recipe calls for 10 to 12 of them halved lengthwise. When I first did it, I used normal purple plums and couldn’t fit all of the plums in. It wasn’t until my friend Cary came over last year with prune plums that I made the cake the right way.

…

Multicolored Plum Cake with PistachiosRead More »