My mother-in-law Dick was our very own “America’s Test Kitchen” well before Christopher Kimball. She was always experimenting, and couldn’t contain her enthusiasm over a new find. She called one day bubbling over with excitement. She told me about this light, fluffy Blueberry Bundt Coffee Cake. She would mail me the recipe, and she just knew I’d like it. I’d heard she’d been looking for a blueberry coffee cake. Perhaps it was because her signature coffee cake (see Dick’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake) was chock full of nuts, which many people avoid. Or maybe it was just blueberry season. I’d had a favorite blueberry cake, but this replaced it in no time. All too…
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Zell Schulman’s Chocolate Mousse Torte from Israel
Once, an “alternative chocolate cake” was something we made for Passover, usually from a Manischewitz mix. As much as my Mom and I tried, no cake recipe calling for a matzo derivative ever produced anything remotely fluffy or moist. (I swear Manischewitz cheated.) Sometime in the 1960s, French-inspired bakers adventured with eggs, nuts, butter, and intense flavorings to create decadent chocolate cakes with minimal flour. So a kind of Fifth Question inevitably swept the Passover baking community. “On all other nights we can eat flourless cake. On this night, why can’t we eat matzoless cake?” Zell Schulman helped lead the Exodus into the land of glorious desserts with this recipe for Chocolate Mousse Torte…
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Bay Area Scientists Develop Breakthrough “Alternative Chocolate Cake”
I’m thrilled and proud to post this news story I found online featuring the research of my favorite PhDs, my daughter and son-in-law. ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦ Bay Area scientists have developed a recipe for an “alternative chocolate cake” free of gluten, fat, sugar, and animal products, fulfilling a dream of those seeking a dessert they can serve to all guests. The breakthrough is reported in the April issue of the journal Nature Gastronomy. Chemists, gastronomists and celebrity chefs alike herald it as the most significant advance in food science since the fat substitute Olestra was approved by the FDA in 1996. Those who have eaten the cake, however, question its palatability. In the paper, co-authors Claire…
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Gardner Heist 25th: Isabella’s Stollen Pieces
On March 18, 1990, two guys dressed as Boston’s Finest pulled off the biggest art heist in US history. Holes in Gardner Museum’s so-called security led to holes in frames. I commiserate with those who may never tick that Vermeer off their bucket lists. But mostly I feel for Isabella. I’ve had a close, imaginary relationship with this woman since the day I arrived at college literally next door. Museum admission was free back then, so I frequently strolled through like an invited guest, taking in Sunday concerts that seemed arranged just for me. In my yearbook picture, I’m seated on a bench abutting the Venetian courtyard, my hair ironed and my glasses off,…
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Black Magic Wedding Cake, One More Time
I only have two children (as far as I know). And both asked me to make them Black Magic Wedding Cakes. I couldn’t have been happier if they had proclaimed “I love you, Mom” on the Fenway Park Jumbotron. Last year, it was my daughter Claire and Gordy’s three-tiered cake with buttercream frosting. This year, Raegandrew (Raegan and my son Andrew) opted for all chocolate. No tiers, no “3D frosting.” Just regular birthday-style cocoa frosting. Six cake recipes yielded exactly three 9” cakes for guests and one 6” three-layer cake for the bride and groom to smear all over each other’s faces. Claire truly topped it all with her poetic sculpture of intertwined trees…
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Black Magic Wedding Cake
Three years ago I kicked off this blog by posting Black Magic Cake. Now it’s back as my daughter Claire’s wedding cake. Claire didn’t exactly ask me to bake the wedding cake. She asked me to take charge of getting enough Black Magic Cake for the wedding. I think she envisioned friends and family dropping off cakes in various pan sizes at a designated table. And yet, despite my inability to do anything with buttercream frosting other than get it in my hair, I wanted to bake her a real wedding cake. This would be a challenge. I’ve never watched more than five minutes of “Ace of Cakes.” Claire is smart, and knows that…
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Lemon Buttermilk Poppy Seed Cakes, and the Poppy Seed Predicament
Poppy seeds and lemon adore each other, and prove it in these lovely mini loaves. You can feel the sparks fly in your mouth, with the teeny pop of the seeds and the puckery citrus. Tangy buttermilk, the one-two punch of lemon in the cake and the syrup, and the delicately nutty seeds create a sunny cake to boost your mood any time of day. Wrap a petite loaf in clear plastic, tie it up with some raffia, and it makes a luxuriously delicious gift. This recipephany, though, also has to do with how I solved the Poppy Seed Predicament. I’m not talking about how a slice of this will make you flunk a…
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Dick’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake
Of all my mother-in-law’s signature recipes for cakes, breads, cookies and pies, this one elicits the most nostalgia. So much so, the family handed it out on printed cards at her memorial service. Dorothy, or Dick as we all called her, passed away three years ago at the age of 91. She started out with the usual nickname, Dot, until her baby brother mangled it so adorably that the mutation stuck. I don’t know how much gender confusion it caused, but when she and my father-in-law Louis won a bridge tournament, the local newspaper reported their names as “Richard and Louise.” Dick first baked this sour cream coffee cake in the late ‘50s. No…
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Great-Grandmother’s Gingerbread (Over 100 Years Old)
I believe in probability. I don’t play Powerball because I have about as much chance of winning as drowning in a bucket. However, eerie coincidences tend to follow me around like stray puppies. I don’t notice them until I look over my shoulder, and there they are, tails wagging and tongues panting, and a little too close for comfort. When I was 24, I noticed the registration number on my birth certificate: 123456. It was creepy then, but even eerier now that it’s the most popular computer password—and a sucky one at that. This eerie coincidence involving Great Grandmother’s Gingerbread (Over 100 Years Old) began in 1976, when I bought an old textbook, Domestic…
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Julia Lipman’s Cinnamon Tea Cake
This Cinnamon Tea Cake comes from Elinor Lipman. A best-selling novelist who serves up social comedies with affection and wit, Elinor has a talent for observing and carving up our culture — which of course includes food. Most notably, she can remember every meal she ever ate. While critics have praised her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, I would also like to extol her taste buds. Everything she cooks and bakes and every restaurant dish she recommends is a winner. So I am overjoyed she has let me feature her mother’s recipe for Cinnamon Tea Cake. Like a Drake’s crumb cake, it’s delightfully light and luscious with cinnamon. And it performs the brilliant trick of…
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Orange Cake-Pan Cake — more than just a flash in the pan
The “cake-pan cake” could be the Missing Link between pudding and cake. Moist almost to a fault, it has giant, intense flavor. You mix it right in the pan – in a flash. What could be easier? With no butter, eggs, milk, or sour cream, it gained popularity during the food-rationing Depression Era. It’s perfect now for vegans, folks with egg or milk allergies, or for pareve occasions. The chocolate cake-pan (or three-hole) cake has been kicking around for years. I discovered this citrus variation in the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook. What a recipephany: freedom from the cholesterol-laden orange bundt poundcake I used to make. Here is a guest-worthy dessert you can…
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Vegan Banana Bread — can it be a guilty pleasure?
It goes beyond moist to practically gooey. Think banana intoxication with a nutmeg buzz and a chocolate rush. Does this come in IV form? Is it right to swoon like this at breakfast? Yet Vegan Banana Bread can’t be a guilty pleasure, can it? Raegan Sales, a talented vegetarian cook, may have created this cake-like bread for vegans, but it’s also for anyone with too many bananas and no eggs. It bakes beautifully with all non-creature ingredients. And I admit I was pleasantly surprised with Earth Balance, a delicious faux butter. Thank you, Raegan, for sharing this special recipephany. Be forewarned, though: waiting the eternal half-hour for this to cool is a primal test…
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The Best Cheesecake in Chicago
If our guest blogger, Jennifer Pieszak, ever wanted to chuck her career as an award-winning architectural lighting designer, she could open a beautifully lit bakery and there would be lines around the block for her superb cakes, desserts, muffins, cookies, scones and breads. I am honored she has chosen to share her “signature dessert,” The Best Cheesecake in Chicago. This black and white cheesecake is truly the best—it’s luscious, gorgeous, easy to make, and punctuated with chocolate. Here’s what Jennifer wrote: “When I was growing up in suburbia, Chicago and my grandmother came to represent the exotic and new. She lived on Chicago’s near north side in what is now the very trendy Lincoln Park…
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Black Magic Cake Works Its Wizardry
Black Magic Cake: The Platonic ideal of a chocolate cake Whatever your passion—milk, dark, or super-antioxidant dark—chocolate has a special relationship with your pleasure center. From FudgSicles to Chunky bars to Sky Bars, chocolate melts into happy memories. There are probably better chocolate delivery systems than cake. Flour and overbaking can mute the flavor. This explains the popularity of molten lava cakes and dense brownie-like cakes. Layer cakes can get dry or wimped out. For decades we had a reigning chocolate layer cake recipe in our household. We were happy. No complaints. But that was before I experienced my recipephany. I opened The Hershey’s Chocolate Treasury, copyright 1984, which I bought a few years…
