Hello! Hello!
I’m back in Connecticut. Physically. Back where it’s not as hot and not as dry — rain seemed mythical during the six weeks we were in Paris. I’m back where there aren’t cafés on every corner, baguettes baked three times daily up the street and macarons two doors down. Back where there’s fresh-picked corn — corn is one of the things I long for when I’m away in the summer — good farm stands and farmers markets and, most important, family and friends I’ve missed. Also a little garden and a kitchen that’s bigger than a minute. Last week, when friends came to dinner in Paris, they graciously offered to clear the table saying they’d just bring the dishes to the kitchen doorway — they knew there wasn’t enough room for them to take a step in. I’m so lucky to be both a city and a country mouse, to have two kitchens and two cultures, two sets of friends and two different collections of cookbooks.
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As small as our Paris apartment is, we’ve managed to pack a couple of hundred books onto the shelves in our bedroom. I’d say that more than half of the books are French and that of those, most of them are cookbooks or books about food. I won’t take a guess at how many I’ve meant to read but haven’t or meant to cook from but haven’t, but I know they’ve got surprises. Remember the absolutely fabulous no-bake chocolate cake from Trish Deseine’s book I ❤️ Cake? And before that, from CT, the so very good buttermilk cornbread from Carla Mangini’s The Vegetable Eater? [Bookshop // B&N // Amazon]
Well, a riffle across the shelves produced another treasure, another chocolate cake (I hope you love chocolate as much as I do!) and more surprises. This time, I didn’t close my eyes and choose a book, I rolled over in bed one morning, looked at the shelves, as I always do and, as if for the first time, saw Roy Finamore’s James Beard Award-winning Tasty: Get Great Food on the Table Every Day. The book I had was an ARC (advance reader copy) and the pictures were fuzzy black and white, but that didn’t stop me from finding a recipe I wanted to make that day — Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake — or from thinking back to Roy, who died three years ago.
Roy Finamore was an original. While you couldn’t miss him in any room — it wasn’t just his height, his beard or his earrings, for me it was always his smile that made him stand out and his hugs that made him endearing — you might have missed that he was the behind-the-scenes genius that brought dozens of our favorite authors’ work to us. Roy was the editor who introduced us to Ina Garten — he edited Ina’s first Barefoot Contessa cookbook and with it, the duo tilted our view of what cookbooks could look like. He was Martha Stewart’s trusted editor. And Diana Kennedy’s. He edited Anne Willan, Tom Colicchio, Bobby Flay, Jean Anderson and Carole Walter (who was such a great baker and terrific teacher). He counted the remarkable Molly Stevens as his best cooking buddy. And cooked and baked all the time with a skill that rivaled that of the authors he shepherded into print.
That he finally wrote his own cookbooks (before Tasty, he wrote One Potato, Two Potato) is a gift to us and we’ve got Rux Martin to thank for that. Rux, who was my editor for 20+ years — sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been — gets a paragraph in Roy’s acknowledgements that ends by saying that she continued to “navigate the path of editing an editor with grace.” I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for one brilliant editor to edit another. The books are a testament to that grace and the fact the Roy made the groom’s cake for Rux’s marriage to Barry Estabrook is proof.
I was drawn to Roy’s Chocolate Whipped Cream Cake because chocolate, and whipped cream and cake too, but mostly because I’d never made a cake that depended on whipped heavy cream rather than butter. How did I ever miss this! Of course, no sooner did I make it and start telling the world about what I’d “discovered,” than I found, as I do with so many things, that it was “new to me” and known to many. In fact, Zoë François has a recipe for a vanilla whipped cream cake baked in a Bundt pan that comes from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible, in which she says she got the recipe from Chef Anthony Stella. So, I’m filing this one under better-late-than-never.
No matter when you come to this cake — and maybe you’ve had it or its vanilla sister — I think you’ll be as taken with it as I was. It’s fast and fun to make, always a plus, but it’s the taste and the texture that made the cake special for me. Roy compares the cake to “the best Yankee Doodle possible” and I’m happy to go with that, but I don’t remember the cream-filled cupcakes being this good. The cake is made with cocoa, so it’s very dark and has a pure chocolate flavor. There’s a tiny bit of espresso powder in the mix, but only enough to bolster, not alter the taste of the cocoa. And the texture, which is unmistakably that of soft-crumbed devil’s food, is sublime. Heavenly devilish or devilishly heavenly. The cake’s got the kind of crumb you always look for and don’t often find — and surprisingly, the crumb stays tender even after the cake’s been chilled! The recipe makes two layers that are meant to be sandwiched and topped with whipped cream, a lot more cream than a Yankee Doodle ever got! Its simplicity is both perfect and play-aroundable. Since even turning on the oven during another mini heat wave was an act of daring, I decided to serve the cake with fresh, cold cherries, but at another time in the universe’s spin, I might have poached them. Or topped the cake with fancifully arranged berries or a floppy field of fresh flowers, something I’ve always wanted to plant on a cake but never have. Scroll down for the recipe and a few ideas for add-ons.
It’s funny to think that I had to travel 3,500 miles to find a chocolate cake made by a friend in America, but that’s the surprise of bookshelf roulette.
Adapted from Tasty: Get Great Food on the Table Every Day by Roy Finamore
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