Crispy Chocolate Cake with Hazelnut and Sour Cream by Alison Roman

Let’s talk about a chocolate cloud. No, I’m not referencing Willy Wonka or Candlyand, the classic board game of my childhood. I’m talking about the essence of a cloud made of rich, decadent dark chocolate with hints of hazelnut and almond. 

Just keeping it real, Alison’s crispy chocolate cake is a gluten-free chocolate cloud. A cloud that can interrupt my sunny skies any day. 

I don’t feel like walking through every step of the cake-making process today. But I do want to write a little something about the people I shared this chocolate cake with, which I’ll intersperse with pictures of the cake baking process, because I have them, so why not. 

My coworkers, the team of ten at the Center for Vocation and Career, are a delightfully diverse and committed and thoughtful group of people invested in the success of our students, now and beyond college. They care about the whole student, which includes the intersection of career goals, personal passions, faith, family, and culture. They spend their time actively listening to the needs of students and responding with compassion and gentle wisdom. They go above and beyond to champion others. They’ve made it their jobs! 

I am blessed to work with these people and blessed to share my chocolate cloud with them too. On a day when students were off campus, we had a team potluck for lunch. The theme? Charcuterie board. My contribution? This cake. And I’m thankful to say it was swiftly consumed in full that afternoon. 

As I looked around the room at these comrades eating cheese and meats, munching on olives, forking a bite of chocolate cake, I felt nothing but gratitude. Gratitude to work alongside them, to learn from them, and to contribute as well. I’ve said it before, there’s something particularly special about contributing to the nourishment, the physical sustaining, of people you care about. I’ve learned not to underestimate the power of sharing a homemade chocolate cake, especially because of this project.

163 recipes cooked, 62 to go.

Salted Butter and Chocolate Chunk Shortbread, or Why Would I Make Another Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever Again? by Alison Roman

(^That right there, folks, is the longest recipe title known to humankind.)

Everyone has an opinion on what makes for the best chocolate chip cookie. Be it chewiness, sweetness, saltiness, thickness, thinness, just out of the oven or next-day. I believe every human has the inalienable right to personal cookie preferences, so I won’t claim a universally accepted premiere chocolate chip cookie quality. However, I will tell you what I think makes the best chocolate chip cookie: a balanced ratio of sugar to salt. A cookie without salt is simply uninteresting to me. 

Because of this, I have a predisposition to not only love Alison’s shortbread chocolate chunk cookie, but to echo her question: why would I make another kind again? (My answer is: I’d make a different kind if I find myself craving a more layered, soft, but dense version of said cookie. But the shortbread will scratch the itch 9/10 times.) 

These cookies take some planning, requiring at least 2 hours of chill time in the fridge. The dough assembly, if you have a stand mixer to do the heavy-lifting, is easy. It starts with beating two and a quarter stick of butter with sugar until light and fluffy. Then slowly adding the flour and salt (if you use unsalted butter) and chocolate chunks (I chopped mine from some Whole Foods branded dark chocolate bars) until they’re all combined. I divided the dough onto two sheets of plastic wrap, and rolled them into logs that are 2.25 inches thick. Oftentimes, I wing this sort of thing. But when it comes to thinly sliced cookie dough, the last thing you want is for them to fall apart. It felt important to be exact in the circumference measurements for this reason. 

I prepared my dough on a Saturday afternoon, just before leaving for a party called The Great Midwestern Cornhole Tournament. And yes, it was exactly like it sounds. Great, full of midwestern experiences like college football, beer, and friendly people, and there was a verifiable cornhole tournament. Jordan and I placed 8th out of 16 teams, for those wondering. We’ll take it. 

On Sunday I was ready to bake. I took out one log at a time -- painting it with egg and rolling it in Turbinado sugar, then slicing it into rounds and topping the cookies with flaky sea salt. The baking time averaged to 16 minutes for me. 

I’ve had plenty of shortbread cookies in the past, but what makes these stand out is the crunchy sugar on the edges. I brought the cookies to work on Monday, and by 2pm, they were all gone. The most frequent comment I heard, besides “those cookies were amazing,” was “the sugar on the edges - oh my!”  

145 recipes cooked, 80 to go.

Chocolate-Tahini Tart with Crunchy Salt by Alison Roman

Laundry is a Monday rhythm for me. I descend 29 floors down the elevator, carrying the overflowing basket of clothes and dish towels on my hip. Our laundry room connects to our apartment lobby, and it’s usually quiet on Mondays. 

“I’m calling it ‘Trouble,’” I heard as I walked toward the laundry room door. I turned around to see Gina, the lobby receptionist peering at me with wide eyes over her mask. “Pam agreed it was Trouble. I found myself licking my hands.” After a few seconds of trying to figure out exactly what she was referring to, I remembered the Chocolate-Tahini Tart. I had given her four slices to share with the other staff on Friday, but hadn’t heard a report back. Apparently this one was her favorite Alison dessert so far. 

It’s mine and Jordan’s favorite so far, too. My mother-in-law took one bite of it and said, “I want this on my birthday.”

A brief description is in order. The tart’s crust is a chocolate shortbread. Dry ingredients such as flour and cocoa powder are mixed together with a stick of melted butter and pressed into the tart pan to bake. This was my first time using my own tart pan, which I received as a birthday present last month. I love the clean lines of the fluted crust exterior. The pan’s shape makes me feel like a more experienced baker. The crust is baked and set aside to cool for at least an hour. The filling is also simple – chocolate and tahini melted by simmering honey and heavy cream, stirred together and poured into the crust. Top the crust with a generous sprinkle of flaky sea salt (Maldon is the way to go here) and set aside to cool and set. It can be kept on the counter, wrapped tightly, for a few days. 

I used bittersweet Pound Plus chocolate from TJ’s. The bitter chocolate combined with the subtly nutty tahini kept the filling from being too sweet, which could have been the tart’s downfall. Instead it was just the right amount of rich, the right amount of sweet, the right amount of salt. A balanced, delicate yet substantial, dessert that makes it impossible to avoid seconds. I wonder if it can be beat?

61 recipes cooked, 164 to go.

Everyone's Favorite Celebration Cake by Alison Roman

My 28th birthday was magical… 

(Shameless plug: If you want to hear about ALLLL the magic, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s short and hopefully entertaining, and arrives just in time for your Saturday morning coffee. Subscribe here.)

One of the many magical events of my birthday weekend was having our two favorite couple friends over to celebrate. For this event, I felt it only fitting to make Alison’s Celebration Cake: a three-tiered yellow cake with chocolate/sour cream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. And yes, I did convert it to a Gluten-free recipe! Tips for doing so are below.

I’ll admit that I’ve never considered myself a baker. Baking is fussy and requires precision. People say baking is pure science, and since I am historically terrible at that subject, I assumed I’d fail at baking, too. I used to tell people that I was capable of messing up a box of brownie mix. (Which is true, I’ve done so more than once.)  I’m working on my baking confidence though. I received a Kitchen Aid mixer as a wedding gift, and you can’t have one of those giant, heavy machines and not attempt to use it. This project alone requires me to bake at least 30 times. But a three-tiered cake -- now, that made me nervous. I went down a dark mental road and imagined it toppling over several times. Which turned this into a moment when I had to test my theory that good things happen when passion and risk join forces. So without further ado… cake.

First step was to make all three tiers of the yellow cake and let them cool completely. I won’t bore you with the steps of making the cake batter, but I will tell you how I made it GF. Using the steps below, I truly could not tell what the difference would be between my GF version and the real deal. Similar to the method I used for the Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake, I: 

• Swapped regular All-Purpose flour with Gluten-free All-Purpose flour, using a 1:1 ratio 

• Added 1.5 tsp. of Xanthum gum (½ tsp. per cup of flour)

• Used 2 additional eggs: 7 whole eggs instead of just 5 eggs, in addition to 3 egg yolks

I used my scale to distribute the batter evenly between the cake pans as best I could. The cakes bake for about 40 minutes, swapping two of the pans halfway through so that each one has some time on the top rack. Once they are golden brown and pulling away from the sides, they can rest on a rack to cool completely. 

The frosting is made of only 5 ingredients: 12 oz. melted bittersweet chocolate, 2 sticks of butter, powdered sugar, sour cream, and a dash of salt. Whip them together until they’re impossibly fluffy, and you’ll have frosting that looks and feels like it came straight from a canister. I’ll admit that this frosting is VERY rich. Delicious, but perhaps slightly too much for me. And for some reason, it tasted more mellow on the second and third days. 

Assembling and frosting the cake was the part I was most nervous about. However, Alison provides a guide on “How to Casually Frost a Cake,” which basically encourages playing fun music, sipping rosé and acting like the whole affair is purely a fun activity. Which in hindsight seems like a no brainer. But I do struggle with taking myself too seriously, so this was a welcomed reminder. 

I learned about a crumb layer through this recipe. It’s essentially the first layer of frosting applied to a cake. You know the time you frosted a cake as a kid and it felt like you were just smearing loose crumbs all over the surface with the frosting? A crumb layer allows for that to happen, because you can refrigerate the cake after the crumb layer, allowing the cake to settle and firm up before applying the second, and more decadent layer of frosting -- the layer that won’t have any crumbs. (However, I didn’t have any problems with crumbs in either layer, which I think is due to how thoroughly my cakes had cooled by this point.)

The last step was to apply copious amounts of rainbow sprinkles. For the sides, I basically had to toss sprinkles at them like confetti and pray that they stuck. Which means that these sprinkles went E-VER-Y-WHERE. At one point, Jordan had the brilliant idea of moving the whole operation to our balcony. We stood in the cold wind and chucked double-fisted handfuls of sprinkles at the cake like all-star pitchers. 

I may still be vacuuming up sprinkles from my carpet one week later, but this cake was totally worth it. The awe-factor of cutting into it and seeing those three straight layers of cake emerge was super satisfying. Like I said, the cake and frosting were rich, but boy were they delicious.

49 recipes cooked, 176 to go.

Tiny, Salty, Chocolatey Cookies by Alison Roman

It is on a rare day that I crave chocolate. Generally speaking, I’m a savory gal. If I must have something sweet, I dream of strawberry pie or tangy lemon bars. It sounds like Alison and I are in agreement on this. But every once in a while, we have a hankering for a small morsel, literally just a taste of chocolate, preferably dark chocolate. And it is for this instance that these cookies were created. 

Seldom though they are, my chocolate cravings tend to come on strongly and usually at night. One minute I’m relaxing on the couch, and the next I’m on my feet urgently searching the refrigerator’s bottom shelf for the Trader Joe's Pound Plus bar I keep in the back. These cravings don’t mess around. Which is why these cookies may be my solution. They take less than an hour to assemble and bake. 

Plus, they’re tiny, (which makes them dangerously snackable), and unintentionally gluten free. Ingredients only include cocoa powder, sugar, eggs, brown butter, and chocolate. Alison gives an option for chopped nuts, but I say no nuts, keep it simple.

One confounding aspect of this recipe is the quantity it yields. Alison tells you to “drop quarter-sized blobs of dough” onto the baking sheet. To make sure I achieved the right size, I dug out a quarter from my wallet and laid it on the counter to reference. I’ve never been great at size approximations. She says this should make 24 cookies. But using a quarter as my guide, my dough produced not 24, but 44 cookies! It took four rounds of baking to get them all in and out of the oven. I’m not complaining, more cookies is always better than less. I just kept wondering when this fishes and loaves situation would run out. 

These tiny cookies are a real treat, no matter how often you crave chocolate.

26 recipes cooked, 199 to go.