Cake

I know it’s tough to keep things fresh in the salt air, but my favorite cousin’s pineapple Bundt cake stays delectably moist for days—even at the beach. Sometimes I make it ahead and tote it to the beach; other times I make it there and keep it on hand. Who knows when we might be inspired to host a last-minute party? My cousin Vicki has been making this cake forever. She still bakes it in her grandmother Hille’s cast-iron Bundt pan, which she inherited along with a boxful of prized family recipes. Vicki says, “Every time I make this cake I feel like my grandmother is watching over me.”

My backyard fig tree is not always the most reliable producer, but when I have figs I make this dessert. It pairs an old-fashioned pound cake (recipe courtesy of my great-aunt Emma) with a chunky sauce made with my homegrown Brown Turkey figs. I love this dessert’s down-home elegance—a figgy topping poured over individual pound cakes baked in cupcake pans. You can use any fresh fig that’s available—light green, brown, or purple. In Texas you’ll most likely find Brown Turkeys, which I’ve been told were planted throughout the state by early homesteaders. If fresh figs are not available, use Bosc pears or tart apples. If you want a large, belt-busting dessert, use Texas-size cupcake pans. Standard-size cupcake pans will give you double the servings.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to make a good banana cake. I’m talking about a sheet cake that tastes like banana bread, but not too dry, not too tough, and not dense and fudgy, like the dead center of banana bread can be at times. For weeks, maybe even a month, we worked on a banana cake in the basement of Ko. It felt like a lifetime—and still we weren’t getting anywhere close. That is, until Emily, our extern, came in with her mother’s sacred banana cake recipe. We adapted it, but this recipe belongs to the heart of her family. Mrs. Kritemeyer, we love you!

Like the candy bar pie, this banana cake is a doozy to make, but it’s here because it’s a bestseller at Milk Bar—so much so, that in two years, it is the only cake that has never been rotated out, based on season or popularity. It is Oprah’s favorite cake, and it will be yours too.

When we opened Ko, we did so with a deep-fried apple pie. It resonated so much with people that we decided to use the apple pie as inspiration for a cake. We already had the crumb-into-ganache-into-frosting down and we loved the pie crumb we had developed for a few Noodle Bar and Ko desserts seasons before. This cake will make you seem like a genius, though all you are doing is layering apple pie fixins between layers of slightly nutty (with brown butter) cake. Leftovers make especially delicious impromptu cake truffles (see page 122).

We tried, tried, tried to make this work with our liquid cheesecake—one of our mother recipes and one of my favorite things to eat and cook with—but the finished pie just wasn’t right. So we came up with this work-around. This filling is very deep in flavor and sweetness, only meant to be layered in a gooey brownie pie. Do not attempt to snack on it or use it in another recipe.

Our most successful new offering in 2010 was our cake truffles, spawned entirely from leftovers. We had once served slices of cake to order, but after hemming and hawing with our endearing staff of counter employees over the correct way to slice and serve a multilayered cake, we decided to get smart. Helen and Leslie were the catalyst behind convincing me to make cake truffles with all of our leftover cake and cake layering scraps. Now, instead of committing to a whole slice of cake, you can get a bite or two or three. You can choose to follow the recipe, or get crazy, without our guidance, using leftovers to concoct your own. Don’t limit yourself to carrot cake; you can use any cake scrap and any leftover fillings, crumbs, or crunches. Chocolate Chip Cake (page 94) scraps with Fudge Sauce (page 136) and ground Peanut Brittle (page 169) couldn’t be anything but a success.

My mama is a busy, busy woman. If she were baking this cake, she would probably opt to buy preshredded carrots from the grocery store. She likes baking shortcuts and, in this case, it’s quite possible she doesn’t know where her box grater is (or if the handle is still attached to it). I’m not going to lie. I’ve bought preshredded carrots, and the results weren’t one bit terrible. But at the farmers’ market, they’ve got yellow carrots and purple carrots and orange carrots that actually taste like something. And they will make your cake better if you use them.

Once we got birthday cake crumbs down, we moved on to our larger quest of making a funfetti cake, canned frosting and all, from scratch. Turns out that looking on the side of the cake mix box at the monster ingredient list was really helpful in getting the “secret” stuff we couldn’t figure out by taste.

Happy birthday, Dave Chang! That’s what the kitchen screamed when we first made this cake. Marian was in charge of making boss man a birthday cake. She told me she channeled her innermost version of me, sprinkled chocolate chips into a vanilla cake batter we were going to use as a coconut cake, and layered it with liquid cheesecake and anything else she could find in the fridge; in other words, she followed to a tee our standard operating procedure for any birthday cake in our kitchen. Now even the Momofuku savory cooks know this cake by heart. It is a snack attack waiting to happen, so you may want to consider making a double batch of batter and baking the cake in a half sheet pan.

Passion fruit, chocolate, and coffee is one of my favorite flavor trios. Though the combo sounds a little out there, it’s actually beloved in lots of pastry kitchens. I wanted a way to feature it in a mainstream dessert. Turns out a deep vanilla chocolate chip layer cake is the perfect fit.

This cake was a bestseller at Milk Bar right off the bat. If you’ve had it, chances are you were hooked at first bite. Though the recipe calls for a few things that you’ll have to source aside from your normal pantry ingredients, remember that amazon.com can be the love of your life too, and that this cake is well worth the effort.

What’s better than box cake, you might ask? Nothing, actually. All I really want for breakfast, lunch, or dinner is box cake and its amazing wealth of by-products. I typically allow this 24-hour splurge only on my birthday. The one thing that always eluded me, though, was how the hell do they get box cake to taste like that?! I have made coffee cake, soup, cookies, clusters, and cereal out of it. So we undertook the recipe development task of re-creating my favorite, and the ultimate birthday box cake, Funfetti, from scratch. It took us four months to get there. And we still don’t make our own rainbow sprinkles (which Wylie Dufresne calls “cheating”). But I couldn’t be happier with the results: the crumbs, Birthday Cake (page 105), Birthday Cake Frosting (page 107), and Confetti Cookies (page 100). My dream come true.