I’ve made these so many times, so you won’t have to. On the surface this seems like a dead-simple recipe, but it took quite a bit of tinkering to nail. Tahini has a complex molecular structure made up of lots of tiny carbohydrate molecules that cling to liquid for dear life, seizing up the way chocolate does if you add liquid to it at the wrong time. But if you play your carbs right and add the tahini last, after all of the other ingredients, it stirs in smoothly and bakes up into these sexy little squares that get better as they sit around. To make these non-dairy, swap in a neutral-flavored olive oil or vegetable oil instead of the butter.
For a cake that boasted deep chocolate flavor and color, we used a combination of Dutch-processed cocoa and melted bittersweet chocolate; the cocoa offered pure, assertive chocolate flavor while the chocolate contributed complexity as well as fat and sugar. Neutral-tasting oil allowed the chocolate flavor to shine. To minimize cleanup, we mixed the wet and dry ingredients directly into the saucepan where we’d melted the chocolate with cocoa and milk. A milk chocolate ganache contrasted nicely with the deeper flavor of the cake. To make the ganache thick, rich, and creamy, we added plenty of softened butter to the warm chocolate-cream mixture, refrigerated the frosting to cool it quickly so that it would spread nicely, and gave it a quick whisk to smooth it out and lighten its texture.
There should be a word to describe the way the soft texture of this cake matches the flavour of the vanilla, strawberries and almonds in it. But that word doesn’t exist, so the only way to know how incredibly good this cake tastes is to go into the kitchen and make it. If you come up with a word for it, drop us a line. For the best results, pull all the cake ingredients out of the fridge about an hour before you start. It will make your baked cakes fluffier and tastier.
Fruit soup is not really a soup, it’s more like a fruit-based tapioca pudding. When I was first served fruit soup by my mother-in-law, Ann Marie, I recognized it as chia pudding’s older Swedish cousin. My mother-in-law serves it for dessert with fresh cream and a plate of butter cookies, but I think it’s a perfect breakfast alongside some full-fat yogurt and a handful of granola. Note: This recipe requires at least 6 hours of chilling time.
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.
Our well-proportioned sandwiches feature relatively small, thin cookies and precise scoops of ice cream that give each bite the perfect combination of textures and flavors. We added water to the dough to prevent the cookies from turning rock-hard in the freezer, as well as plenty of browned butter, dark brown sugar, vanilla, and salt to compensate for the flavor-dulling effect of the freezer. Mini chocolate chips provided bursts of chocolate flavor and delicately crunchy texture.
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.
Using a vanilla bean makes this creamy pudding extra special and aromatic. But if you don’t have one on hand, just stir 1 tablespoon vanilla extract into the pudding along with the egg yolks. Although rice pudding is traditionally served cold, I also like this when it’s still warm and a little runny, poured over sliced strawberries and raspberries, which add both juiciness and acidity.
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.