valentine's day — Journal

OLIVE OIL AND MANDARIN CAKE

The holidays will look different this year, but I can’t help but want to keep it magical —inspiring me to put on the ritz a little more, even if it’s just for my own family, at home — like serving one or two beautiful home-baked cakes, with a pot of cinnamon tea or wine for the grown-ups, and a simple spread of cheese and nuts and winter fruits.

For the sweets, I want something that doesn’t feel every day--something that screams holiday, without a lot of fuss. There is an elegance to an olive oil cake, especially one layered in shingles of shiny rounds of citrus that makes it an instant holiday centerpiece. But good looks are only part of the story. I only want a pretty cake that has the texture and flavor to back it up.

This cake wins in all categories.

CHOCOLATE BANOFFEE PIE

Years ago my friend Robert gave me a stack of two slim French baking books that are just divine—one called Caramel and the other, Chocolate. They are the kind of books with simple recipes and even simpler list of instructions, the kind where the photographs look mouthwateringly dreamy, but the recipes more of sketch, than a list of actual instructions for how to achieve such results.

It’s been nearly ten years since I had looked at them, but one day recently, I flipped through the book and landed on the same page I’d marked all those years ago—BANOFFEE PIE.

CHOCOLATE CHIP BUCKWHEAT BANANA PANCAKES (GLUTEN-FREE)

If you saw my dissertation on bananas as rations, you know that I likely still have several bananas hanging around, brown and fragrant and ready for —you guessed it—more panckes!

MAKE-AHEAD LASAGNA FOR A CROWD

2020 was supposed to be the year of the Lasagna. Currently, it’s looking more like the year of the bean (or rice, or insert-any-other-pantry ingredient needed to get through a three week quarantine at home). Beans are great, but how many of you can get your kids to eat beans two nights in a row? Not me.

With very few exceptions, we’re all home with our kids for, like, weeeeeeeks—and it seems to me like they are ALWAYS hungry. Lasagna is the kind of food that can keep a family fed for many nights in a row, happily. But it has other perks, too: namely, that you can prepare the whole thing a day before, and store it in the fridge overnight to have ready to pop in the oven an hour before dinner (just before the kids start to whine)…

GLUTEN-FREE CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA BREAD

Did anyone else grab bananas by the armful on their last half-calm, half-frantic cruise through the grocery, that last time you went solo, the kids still in school. Maybe you kept your gloves on the whole time—the Coronavirus was already getting real, but not quite in your own backyard yet. Maybe you still bought strawberries and kale, but just in case everyone was right, you still stocked up on rice and beans and pasta and all the 28-oz cans of San Marzano tomatoes your shelves could fit. And bananas, obscene amounts of bananas.

A TIRAMISU FOR THE AGES

Tiramisu is my dad and my husband’s favorite dessert--two of the people I love feeding most. But I didn’t make it for years, somehow recalling it from culinary school as a laborious task. How wrong I was. One night, I decided not to bring home the tempting piece hanging around in the Italian bakery window I passed on my way home from work, and instead make it myself. It was a slam dunk.

News flash: tiramisu is not only easy (provided you’re not making ladyfingers yourself), it is a built-in make-ahead. You can make this a day ahead, or even two, and still come out looking like an absolute star the day you serve it. Try it for yourself.

CHOCOLATELY CHOCOLATE CAKE | FROM SIMPLE CAKES

There is so much I love about chocolate cake, starting with the fact that I’m sure it’s the first cake I ever ate, the kind of cake my mom always, always baked on our birthdays as children, and later, carted to us across the country (literally) in her double decker Tupperware cake carrier when we moved far from home.

Too often, I find the kinds of chocolate cakes at birthday parties or events spongy and bland, not chocolaty enough to satisfy, not toothsome in the way I believe a cake absolutely should be. Not so this cake, which comes to us from Odette Williams, from her new book, Simple Cake. Skip on down for the recipe, below.

FLØDEBOLLER | DREAMY DANISH SWEETS

Imagine your dreamiest chocolate sweet—the thing you’d eat with abandon if you could do so without consequence—if toothaches and stomach aches and snug waistbands were just the made up things of terrible fairy tales. Mine would be a Flødeboller, these chocolate dreams pictured above—though, I only recently learned that is what they’re called. I knew it in childhood simply as a chocolate-coated marshmallow treat—but not just any marshmallow—it would have to be an pillowy, airy, freshly made marshmallow without even the faintest resemblance to the kind you find in a bag (I’ll skip those all together, thank you). And not just any chocolate coating—the chocolate coating would be thin and snappy, and give to the slightest pressure from the tooth—made with the highest quality dark chocolate you can find (I link to one of my favorites for baking, below).

BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE TART WITH SEA SALT

There is only one thing, in my opinion, that needs to be made on the week of Valentine’s day, and that is anything containing chocolate (and lots of it). It could be big or small, fancy or simple, but for my taste, it should come as close to an elevated form of a pure chocolate truffle as humanly possible. This tart is one I developed ages ago for my very first book, but it has stood the test of time, and lives up brilliantly to the call. Thanks to its press-in crust (no rolling or pastry mastery required), it couldn’t be simpler. The inside, little more than a glorified ganache, set and baked with an egg, is pure chocolate bliss. You’ll need a tart pan with a removable bottom, and the best chocolate bricks or bars you can find, and the rest is as simple as is gets.

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