Cakes

Perfect Pound Cake Variations

September 10, 2018

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…

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Apple Marzipan Cake

May 17, 2018

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…

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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…

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Miniature Chocolate Cakes

February 26, 2018

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…

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Chocolate Gingerbread

December 7, 2017

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…

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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:…

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