A buckle was one of my signature cakes when I worked as pastry chef for the Gjelina Group. Every bite is tangy, tart, and deliciously rich. I love this cake with mixed berries, but using one single variety can also be nice. If you’re serving it after dinner, add some fresh berries and a little whipped cream on the side.
Gyulshah Mintash is our assistant manager at the Brent Cross branch of LEON, and this is their deliciously nutty tahini cake.
Blue cornmeal gives this cornbread its haunting corn flavor and lavender hue, but yellow or white cornmeal will work equally well. You can find blue corn meal in co-ops and online. Store it in the refrigerator or freeze.
Hanukkah is a fine time to serve these at brunch with a dollop of Greek yogurt or sour cream on top. I am constantly amazed at just how far Jewish food travels: when I was working on the update for this book, my daughter Daniela told me that a relative of her Chilean friend posted a recipe online for apple latkes. When I contacted her, I realized it was a Polish recipe. Shortly afterward, Daniela, on a train going through Poland, tasted a similar apple pancake. You can also substitute stone fruits, like apricots, plums, or peaches—in the late spring, at Shavuot, or anytime.
“This is not considered a special-occasion cake, but everyone loves it. It’s an everyday cake to serve with tea.”—Nawida
Flavored with freshly ground cardamom and a little rose water, this cake is made with both all-purpose flour and corn flour (which is milled more finely than cornmeal). It has an ideal ratio of cake, topping, and just a little crunch, which you get from the coarse yellow semolina flour, or sooji in Hindi, that’s dusted on the bottom of the pan before you add the batter. The result is both familiar and exciting—it’s like the best and most interesting corn muffin ever. It’s also the perfect complement to any kind of tea. Nawida usually tops one side of the cake with mild white poppy seeds and nigella seeds, which have just a touch of bitterness, and the other side with black raisins and large pieces of walnut. You can choose just one topping, but both together on one plate make this very easy dessert so much more appealing—and this approach allows everyone to try both. Ideally this should be baked in a rectangular metal pan about 9 by 13 inches (23 by 33 cm) so that you can easily cut the cake into diamond shapes. I use a square metal brownie pan, so the pieces come out a little thicker, but in a pinch you could also use two round cake pans or even muffin tins. Nawida sometimes uses muffin tins shaped like hearts and stars so that it’s easy and fun for her kids to take a piece of cake to school. Just pay attention as it bakes, as the bake time will vary slightly with a different shape of pan. As with the firni on page 299, though you can buy cardamom pre-ground, for this dish I strongly recommend you grind it yourself. It doesn’t take very long!
I’ve made versions of these crispy, delicate little fried cabbage pancakes at restaurants and in my very own home, where they are a breakfast staple. I’ve often watched my mom bulk them up with canned salmon and loads of the week’s forgotten vegetables. We’d eat them over bowls of hot grits or rice. To me, they are reminiscent of okonomiyaki (loosely translated as “grilled as you like it”), a popular savory pancake from southern Japan. I like to drizzle Spicy Sorghum-Miso Mustard (page 110) over them.
STEPHEN • These are my attempt to re-create the fantastic salt-and- pepper wings from a local NYC kitchen called La Poulette. I order them when I need something to pick up my spirits. They are very simple to make, and as my version is baked, not fried, I tell myself they are healthy.
EVIE • There are several things that Stephen turns to for comfort. Lord of the Rings is, of course, top of the list, and then old episodes of Veep, but these delicious yet easy chicken wings also are a go-to for calming the brain and restoring the spirit.
In El Salvador and much of Central America, quesadilla refers to a sweet cheese pan dulce, where the cheese is incorporated into the batter. Many folks use Parmesan cheese (for its funk) and pancake batter. I have also heard of Salvis in the southern United States using a cornbread adaptation of the recipe. I have made quesadillas countless times, and I have used only Salvadoran cheeses because they were the first items that revealed to me how obsessed Salvi folks are with food. Why? Well, my relatives always bring back pounds of cheese from El Salvador—queso duro blando, queso duro viejo, and queso morolique. These aged cheeses must be excellent if it’s worth leaving your belongings back in the homeland to make room for cheese in the suitcase.
If you cannot source Salvadoran cheese, you may use Parmesan cheese; in place of crema Salvadoreña, crème fraîche. This pan dulce is usually served with hot coffee. My relatives who recently visited from El Salvador, where they can get all kinds of quesadilla at any hour of the day, loved this recipe so much that they requested it two days in a row.
It will be completely un-shocking that my visit to Japan was more cake-centric, less fish-focused. I ate the flooffiest pumpkin doughnuts, elegant apple shortbread cookie sandwiches, silky coffee caramel flan and cheesecake. At the tiny pastry shop Equal Pastryshop, I ate a strawberry shortcake whose perfection made me want to hang up my apron, because if such baking beauty already exists in this world, then my efforts are futile.
The Japanese shortcake is their refined version of the American shortcake and is layers of dairy-rich sponge, cream and strawberries. Eating it feels like hugging a puppy, the first day of t-shirt weather in spring and knowing you are loved all at once.
The first stop on my coffee cart treat quest (second stop, Raspberry Mazurkas, page 108) is the elusive Pink Cookie. Uncle Seth’s Pink Cookies are palm- size cookies scented with cardamom and topped with a pink- tinted cream cheese and almond frosting. Here, I’ve made them into a pat- in- the pan cookie bar with a layer of perfectly pink cream cheese frosting scented with a bit of almond extract.