Lemon Cake with Almond Flour
As I write, California is experiencing terrible fires. Here are some ways to help: The United Way is helping people affected by the Camp Fire. The American Red Cross is also accepting donations. The North Valley Community Foundation is accepting donations. To help animals impacted by the fires, the Conscious Cat…
Marble Pound Cake
The past week saw your hostess dealing with rodents in kitchen (that screaming you heard? it was me), and a near automobile accident. The other driver–who was at fault–attempted to confront me. (That screaming you heard? It was me.) This driver, who was backing out of a parking lot…
Perfect Pound Cake Variations
You are either a baker or a cook. Very few people are both. Merrill Stubbs, A New Way To Dinner I believed the above until my late forties. Then humiliation got the better of me and I taught myself to bake. Because I was in my late forties–I am fifty…
Apple Marzipan Cake
Apple marzipan cake came about because as everyone else began cooing over farmers market fraises de boise and posting nauseating recipes for rhubarb bowls (go ahead, tell me you haven’t seen some gross stuff out there), I faced a fridge brimming with apples. In the hunt for something interesting to…
The Wacky Cake: Not My Grandmother’s Bundt
Bill LeBlond, editorial director of Chronicle Books, once told a crowd at a cookbook proposal seminar that if he had to read one more book proposal from people who learned about cooking at their grandmothers’ knee, he would throw up. Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food I spent a lot…
Miniature Chocolate Cakes
Years ago, while writing an article on holiday cookies, I consulted The Martha Stewart Living Christmas Cookbook. Stewart assume a readership whose kitchens are stocked like a Sur Le Table outlet: cake pans in every possible size and shape, pizza stones, candy thermometers, pastry bags, sugar combs, a willing staff ready to…
Chocolate Gingerbread
This being the holiday season, my non-Jewish spouse asked if I might bake him some Christmas cookies. Jews don’t inherit boxes of Christmassy cookie cutters from elderly relatives. This meant I had to shop for some. (The cutters, not the elderly relatives.) My tribe, we’re good at shopping. In short…
David Lebovitz’s Cocoa-Marzipan Pound Cake
Long before David Lebovitz became David Lebovitz, he wrote a little book–literally, it’s not even 8 x11–entitled The Great Book Of Chocolate. Within The Great Book Of Chocolate resides a recipe for Cocoa Marzipan Pound Cake. Cocoa-Marzipan Pound Cake is full of ingredients that make it a resoundly unphotogenic brown:…