Good morning fellow cooks and friends,
It’s snowing in Chicago. I’ve yet to pull on my warm socks and boots to take a walk in it, but from my perch at the bright table in my kitchen, facing the window, it looks like a lovely animated snow globe. I’m sitting with my cup of matcha listening to afternoon bike ride (thank you TikTok algorithm for the recommendation) thinking about cake. Or half of a cake. Actually, a halved cake recipe to be exact. It was two weeks into the cookbook challenge, eating big bowls of curdled stracciatella, that Todd recommended we halve the recipes since there are only two of us noshing. Readers: the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind and a lightbulb moment ensued. I wouldn’t have to eat leftover curdled egg soup or over-toasted bread salad if there wasn’t any left to eat!
Which leads me to cake. I had lofty goals of making a cake, a frittata, and a butternut squash and brussels sprouts dish amidst a busy holiday weekend where I was also getting my footing with the new semester. I had a moment where I said to myself, “Sandy, you do not have to do it all right now.” I made this cookbook mission for myself because I needed a hobby that brought me solace, not stress and anxiety. Good news, the sprouts and squash keep for a while (hoorah for hardy vegetables!) and cake and frittata are relatively easy to make. In giving myself permission to do a little bit less, I found that I enjoyed the process of cooking and baking much more and the food turned out quite well! Also also, Todd caramelized onions for the Roasted Potato, Caramelized Onion, and Parmesan Frittata using a sweet trick from J. Kenji López-Alt’s book The Food Lab that plays on the Maillard reaction, a chemical reaction that shifts the pH of the onions resulting in sugary caramelized onions in much less time. The key is adding ¼ teaspoon of baking soda for every pound of chopped onions. He saved us time and effort, caramelizing onions while I fried a batch of potatoes in butter and olive oil!
But back to the cake.
Do you ever recall defining moments in your life that you credit with having a causal effect on who you are today? Here’s one: I was lucky enough to go to museums from an early age, ergo, I wound up studying art history and working in art museums for over a decade of my life. Here’s another: I always wanted an Easy Bake Oven growing up but was never given one (sob!). But… did you know that most kitchens have actual ovens? And that if you are lucky enough to have been raised in the company of those who cook and bake regularly, you can hang out in the kitchen—the one with the egg yolk colored yellow walls and the Mexican ceramic tiles—and watch them bake and cook, eventually learning how to use the oven to bake cookies and cakes yourself? Mind-blowing! I attribute some of my love of baking to the fact that I didn’t have an Easy Bake Oven, which pushed me into the kitchen at a younger age. I recall coming home in middle school and high school, with a sincere need for chocolate chip cookies, and figuring out how to make them myself from the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag—a gold standard recipe imho.
Fast forward two decades later to today. I have an adult version of an Easy Bake Oven, a toaster oven that can also airfry and go into convection mode, it’s truly a transformer! And now I have a cake recipe that I must tell you about. In Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat writes about one of her favorite cakes, the Fresh Ginger and Molasses Cake that was on the menu at Chez Panisse while she worked there. She begins the recipe with an anecdote. When she arrived at work in the mornings, she would grab a slice of this deliciously moist day-old cake, make a cup of milky tea, and bring the tea and cake into the walk-in refrigeration, eating while she reorganized the space around what meat and produce they’d be cooking with that day. I love this anecdote so much because it shows that small moments, even work, can be made memorable and delicious with the perfect slice of cake. The recipe is close to the original one they served at Chez Panisse, with a few slight modifications that make it easier for home cooks (thanks, Chef!).
What I found so good about this cake is that it uses fresh ginger, which is blended into a spicy sugary syrup that is mixed with oil and molasses, creating a dark moist cake that is utterly delightful. In the chapter “Fat”, Nosrat expounds the reason why oil-based cakes are so moist yet light. The fat in the oil coats the flour proteins which prevent gluten networks from forming, which causes an oil-barrier that prevents water from participating in the gluten formation process, resulting in a moister cake. Causality, science, baking perfection!
In my wildest Easy Bake dreams and with my new focus on halving recipes, I halved the proportions and baked two layers in teensy six-inch pans, making the cutest little cake you ever did see. I topped the cake with cream cheese frosting I’d made in May and frozen for occasions like this. Defrosted in the fridge, this frosting held up! The sweet, creamy, slightly dense frosting was the perfect foil for the light moist spicy cake. ::Chef’s kiss emjoi:: It was good enough for Wayne Thiebaud to paint.
I will be making this again, maybe next time with the Scented Vanilla Cream Nosrat recommends. And who knows, perhaps when it is safe for us to gather again, I’ll make the whole recipe for us to enjoy over milky tea while we take stock of what’s in our kitchens and all the meals we could make with everything we already have.
two plates each topped with a slice of potato, caramelized onion, and Parmesan cheese frittata, flanked by a green salad with cucumbers and feta
a partially eaten ginger molasses cake with cream cheese frosting and a single slice cake next to a mug of matcha with pillowy almond milk foam