Cooked strawberries are a controversial subject in some circles. I love them, but I agree that there is a right way to cook them. My method is simple enough: Cook them hard and dark. They are at their best when you choose a high-flavor variety with good color, and you cook them until nearly all the water has escaped and they are concentrated and toothsome. Anything less than that and you have the soft, pallid, slippery fruit situation that gives cooked strawberries a bad name.
This pie came to be after a longtime customer showed up at our kitchen door with two stalks of fresh, local bananas that he had grown in his yard in the Malibu hills. I placed the entire stalks, flowers and all, on a top shelf in the kitchen and waited patiently for the bananas to ripen. Those bananas deserved an over-the-top preparation to honor the weeks of ripening it took for them all to be ready to use. Weighing in at a staggering four pounds, this is not your average late-night-diner banana cream pie. A rich layer of almond cream and baked bananas line the crust, followed by vanilla custard piled high and fresh bananas, and then a topping of whipped cream.
If you have never made a cake before and love chocolate, this is the cake that you should bake. Because it is an easy cake for a beginning baker, I sometimes refer to it as the world’s easiest chocolate cake—but don’t think that it doesn’t deliver in the flavor department! The results are spectacular. Plus, this is the cake that I always make for a crowd, as you can cut it into as many as 48 pieces. In this variation on a Texas sheet cake, I’ve loaded both the cake and the icing with ground cinnamon, giving it a distinctive Tex-Mex flair.
Buttery, light, and not overly sweet, madeleines are dead-easy to make. The only thing that stopped me from making them for years was not owning a madeleine pan. I don’t know why I waited so long. Do yourself a favor, splurge and get two pans so you can crank out more than one batch at a time. We recently shared a special birthday dinner with good friends at Daniel Boulud’s eponymous restaurant in New York City, and at the end of the meal, the waiter brought freshly baked mini madeleines all bundled up for dessert. They were still warm and lightly dusted with confectioners’ sugar, and we gobbled them up in minutes. Madeleines can be made without beaters and are best eaten on the same day as close to the bake as possible.
There are those among you who swear the best damn lemon cake is The Best Damn Lemon Cake. I thought so too…until this recipe was sent to me by my daughter, Toni, who lived on East 62nd Street when she began to make it. When I sent this recipe to my friend Craig Claiborne, he printed it in the New York Times. It became amazingly popular. Devin, the young man who took care of our swimming pool, once even baked this cake on his charcoal grill (he didn’t have an oven). It came out perfectly!
Pomegranates never fail to delight me; their crimson juices and sweet and tart arils provided such joy for me throughout my childhood that they are forever etched in my memory and on my heart. Palestinians also hold this mighty fruit in high esteem, and here I’ve paired it with a dense and sticky almond cake, topped with a light and creamy mascarpone topping, which I love, and which I hope will enliven your passion for this magical fruit, too. You will need an 8 in./20 cm cake pan.
Soft Wheat And Rye Cakes / Hönö Cakes
Hönökaka (Sweden)
I first tasted m’smen traveling in Morocco. I bought a piece of the tender, buttery, flaky bread drizzled with honey from a street vendor. It was an exquisite culinary experience. So years later, in 2009, when the Arab American Family Support Center referred three strong candidates from Morocco to our training program, my first question was, “Do you know how to make m’smen?” One of the three, Bouchra, taught us how to make the bread and, much to her surprise, it quickly became one of our best sellers. M’smen, also called rghaif or melloui, is often served with fresh mint tea, but we hear from our customers that they use it for all sorts of things, including making tuna sandwiches. You can mix and divide the dough up to 8 hours before shaping, allowing ample time for the gluten to relax.
This is one of my personal favorites, and it’s also the most popular rye bread in our bakeries. It’s a light and tender loaf that stays fresh for a long time. Here, the fabulous, intense taste of dark malt and rye is supplemented by the lovely crunchiness of pumpkin seeds. If you can’t get your hands on cut rye berries, which give the bread a chewy bite, you can just as easily use cracked rye berries.