Honey-Yogurt Pound Cake with Raspberries by Alison Roman

I find Alison’s recipe introductions delightful. When I read them, I feel as though she’s having a friendly conversation with me. Sometimes she lets me in on a secret; sometimes she divulges her opinions on food prep or ingredient preferences. I appreciate hearing about her failures and victories in the kitchen. 

The intro to this particular recipe is about desserts that travel well, and one’s that don’t. Clearly she’s tried bringing many carefully crafted desserts to a variety of shindigs, and those desserts haven’t always made it to their final destination. At least not in their desired form. But this pound cake? It travels well! 

My own experience can back this up. Apart from the two slices I took down to the lovely receptionist in our apartment lobby, I took the whole cake to a friend’s house wrapped in cling wrap. The cake jostled around in a big bag full of other stuff over a bumpy car ride, and yet it arrived looking just as shapely as it did coming out of the pan. I left most of the cake at said friend’s house, but returned home with a small chunk leftover. This bit also didn’t crumble. Thus I can vouch for Alison’s travel-well assertion. I bet I could take this cake in my backpack on a plane and have relative success! 

Though the title sounds fancy, this cake recipe is extremely simple. It’s a mix dry ingredients, then mix wet ingredients, then combine them and stir in the fruit sort of recipe. The key is to not overmix the dry and wet ingredients. Apparently that’s how a dome forms at the top, and that’s not what you want. 

Once again, I converted this to be gluten free. I was told by several taste testers that this was my most successful GF dessert conversion yet. The cake maintained the appropriate moisture and crumb levels for a pound cake. This brought me great joy. 

The cake is also not super sweet. The raspberries and yogurt add a nice tangy, sour balance to the honey and sugar. I can see this going well with whipped creme fraiche or regular whipped cream. Perhaps next time I’ll really go wild and top it with turbinado sugar before baking. I’ve got a few trips on the books (thank you, vaccine!) that may well include this cake in my backpack.

58 recipes cooked, 167 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.

Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake by Alison Roman

Small Victories is the name of a cookbook I own and love. It’s written by Julia Turshen who is a boss lady (check her out!). Every recipe in her book provides the reader with several “small victories” or opportunities to master a cooking technique or hack. This can look like how to make your own lasagna noodles, how to turn leftovers into a different meal, or letting your chicken come to room temp before roasting. Her book has encouraged me to pay more attention to small victories in my day to day. As someone who tends to put unnecessary pressure on herself to be impressive, I benefit from feeling accomplished in smaller tasks and letting that delight fuel me. For me, that can look like pushing myself 0.10 miles further on a run or remembering to take out the trash before it gets smelly. Little wins, folks. 

The lemony turmeric tea cake afforded me two small victories.  

Small Victory #1: I’ve said before that I don’t like turmeric. After trying this cake, I’d like to make an amendment to that claim: I don’t like turmeric when its taste overpowers my food. I can get behind turmeric if it helps complexify (is that a word) a dish without wrestling the other spices to the ground and claiming victory. A dessert is an odd way to learn this about my own pallet, but I was pleasantly surprised. 

Small Victory #2: I turned this glutenous recipe into a Gluten Free one! With the help of my pal Margaret pointing me to this King Arthur article, I made several small adjustments that really paid off. When I tried converting Alison’s Cocoa Banana Bread to gluten free, I simply swapped the AP flour for GF flour, 1:1. The result was a drier, thicker cake. But this lemon cake turned out light n’ fluffy as heck! 

Here are the alterations I made: 

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

• Added a little less than 1 tsp. of Xanthum gum

• Used an additional egg: 3 eggs instead of just 2 eggs

Beyond flour, sugar, turmeric, and the typical baking dried ingredients, this recipe utilizes 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of zest. The first step is incorporating the sugar and the zest by rubbing it together with your fingers, thereby turning the sugar a light yellow and releasing the lemony aroma. The sugar is then whisked into the eggs, lemon juice and greek yogurt/sour cream. A stick of melted butter and other dry ingredients get folded into the batter just before pouring it into the cake pan. Thinly sliced lemons and sugar top the cake. The lemons looked really nice, but I had to be careful not to let them burn. 

Alison mentions in the recipe description that she often makes this cake to bring to an occasion or gathering, and then ends up eating all of it herself. I can relate. It’s only because Jordan begged me to bring half of it to a bonfire that I gave some away. 

43 recipes cooked, 182 to go.

Crushed Blackberry and Cornmeal Cake by Alison Roman

Berries in the winter are an act of resilience. They’re a burst of hope for warmer days. I wanted to make this seemingly summer cake on a zero degree day because my heart needed a reminder that seasons don’t last forever. Seasons are just that -- seasons. Something good is always around the corner. I love the way cooking can be an act of resilience. Resistance against melancholy, despair, and even the cold. 

Choosing what to cook directs our mindsets and spirits. To make a decadent meal in the middle of grief says, “Against all odds, I can still find pleasure.” Even better, cooking for someone else in the middle of grief says, “I will find it within myself to be a blessing.” In the past year, I have known much grief. Cooking has helped me climb my way through it. 

Food is a physical, incarnational way to express love and concern for other people. It’s the realest way I know how. Real in the sense that the people you love can see, smell, taste, and be nourished by your food. Cooking is embodied love.  

This blackberry cake was shared with people I love: Madeline, Sam, Kailey, J, my in-law parents, and Gina who sits at our apartment lobby’s front desk four days a week. (All at different times of course, because you know, pandemic). Sharing this cake was the best part of this cake. 

As far as baking went, the assembly was rather quick and could all be done by hand. My favorite part was manually crushing 2 pints of blackberries, releasing the juices from their little pods and smelling their sweet fragrance. The blackberries are incorporated at two different steps. Half of them get folded into the batter, and the other half are poured on top of the batter once it’s in the cake pan. This ensures a rather even distribution of berries in this otherwise subtly sweet cake. 

I think my cake turned out drier than it’s supposed to be, primarily because I called another audible and swapped regular all-purpose flour for GF all-purpose flour in a 1:1 ratio. I was a little disappointed. I’ve swapped in GF flour in two different recipes now, and both have wound up drier than expected. Upon hearing about this difficulty, my baking-expert pal, Margaret, did some quick research and sent me this illuminating article from King Arthur about how to sub in GF ingredients without losing moisture and volume. The article suggests that beyond a flour substitute, a GF recipe will need Xanthum gum and additional eggs for wetness. I’m looking forward to giving this method a try in my next Alison dessert. 

Lastly, I was very pleased by my choice of cake condiment. Yes, cakes can have condiments, too! Alison suggests butter and honey, which I’m sure tastes nice. But what I wanted more was lemon curd! I had leftover egg yolks from another recipe I was working on and didn’t want them to go to waste. So I whipped up a half recipe of lemon curd, and boy oh boy, did it elevate the cake experience. Not only in terms of flavor, but also moisture - the curd made up for the cake’s dryness. 

22 recipes cooked, 203 to go.

Dropping off cake to Kailey. A highlight of my week!

Cake is an excellent accompaniment to folding laundry.