The Dumb Baker’s Perfect Cake

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I just got back from a week in anchovy country—Santoña and San Sebastián with Fishwife’s Becca Millstein and a crew of Whole Foods buyers. Special episodes of This Is TASTE will be dropping soon. Also, I’ve been having fun posting Substack Notes about my coffee rotation and my love for my new favorite New York city bookstore.

I want to write about Eric Kim for a moment. Eric is a great friend. I think I met him a decade ago at David Tamarkin’s house. David was celebrating a birthday up in Harlem with a wild buffet of homemade pastries and salads. (David is an excellent home cook.) I found Eric in the kitchen, naturally, and we had a long conversation that twisted and unwound. I have zero recollection of what we covered, but it started with my thinking “Who the fuck is this guy?” (in a good way, lol, trust me) and ended with deep satisfaction about having a new friend in the food writing hustle. Eric was working at Food52 at the time, and he had yet to explode on the scene with his debut cookbook, Korean American, and his deeply empathetic work at the New York Times.

For two examples—and there are so many—read his reporting on Korean church lunches and Chicago hot dogs. Eric is a crack reporter. He hoovers up details like a just-out-of-the-box Dyson, locking them away for future use, and he’s clearly in these stories big-time. You get that right away when speaking with him, whether catching a drink after work or chatting with microphones in our face. He’s one of my favorite and most frequent guests on the podcast, and we’ve had memorable conversations about his up-and-down time at Food52 as well as talking shop about food writing.

I also love Eric’s recipes. He’s prolific, and while his NYT Cooking archive is stacked, I return most often to a single recipe from his debut cookbook: a black sesame butter mochi cake. I first made this while cooking a few of his recipes before the book dropped. I remember trying a couple of his pizzas, and they were killer. But this chewy and umami-packed (though sweet and dessert-y) closer is now my favorite Eric Kim recipe. I like to double the sesame oil to bring this less-common dessert flavor into focus. I’ve made it at least ten times.

When cooking from my own Korean cookbooks, I often finish the meal with cake and ice cream—it’s a great closer for a meal that leans hard into spice and fermentation. Chocolate cake feels like a mismatch, though. I’ve brought Eric’s cake to barbecues and picnics to great success. And the real reason I’ve made it so much is that it’s for dumb bakers like me: One bowl. Mostly common ingredients (less so the mochiko glutinous rice flour, though I now always have a box on hand). Done in under an hour. I’m heading to a book club tonight and bringing it, cubed up like fudge as an easy finger food. I’m running the recipe below, and I hope you will give it a try.

Some call George Howell the godfather of specialty coffee. They are probably right. George and I went long on many topics in a recent episode of This Is TASTE.

✔️ Roasting popular roasting styles and other modern tropes in coffee 😭

✔️ Building Coffee Connection in Boston, negotiating with Howard Schultz, and selling to Starbucks ☕️💰

✔️ Inventing the Frappuccino (which he hates to talk about) ☕️🧊

LISTEN: George Howell Invented the Frappuccino. He’d Prefer You Forget That.

Chewy Black Sesame Rice Cake
By Eric Kim
From Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home (one of my most-cooked books)

This simple yet regal cake tastes like a mix between songpyeon, that honeyed sesame-filled tteok served during Chuseok (the fall harvest festival), and those chewy black sesame rolls you might find at a Korean bakery. The best part is you only need a whisk and a bowl to make it. I love the way the cake batter’s density forces the celestial black sesame crumble upward to form a perfect black line. This black line acts as a sweet, nutty brittle atop the squidgy vanilla base. The chewiness of this cake comes primarily from glutinous rice flour, often labeled as mochiko or sweet rice flour. You can get it online and at most grocery stores these days. But another key trick to chewiness in desserts, I find, is really whipping the eggs—a solid 1 to 2 minutes—to dissolve some of the sugar (like you would with French macarons) and to incorporate air, which causes baked goods like this one to rise and deflate as it cools, adding to that wonderful chewy texture. It helps, too, that this is the easiest, most straightforward cake recipe I’ve ever developed.

MAKES ONE 8-INCH CAKE

Cooking spray
2 large eggs
1 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling on top
¼ cup honey
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup whole milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
½ teaspoon toasted sesame oil
4 tablespoons toasted black sesame seeds
1 teaspoon baking powder
8 ounces (227 grams) glutinous rice flour (aka mochiko or sweet rice flour)
Powdered sugar, for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mist an 8-inch round cake pan with cooking spray.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, honey, and salt until fluffy and pale yellow, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the milk, vanilla, melted butter, and sesame oil until combined.

3. Using a mortar and pestle (or a coffee/spice grinder), pulverize 2 tablespoons of the black sesame seeds into a rough powder. It should smell very fragrant. Add this sesame powder, along with the remaining 2 tablespoons of whole black sesame seeds, to the bowl with the egg mixture, followed by the baking powder and rice flour. Whisk to combine, then carefully pour the batter into the greased cake pan.

4. Bake until the top is nicely browned and cracked slightly (this is a good sign), 50 to 60 minutes. You can also insert a chopstick or toothpick into the center of the cake, and if it comes out clean, then you’re done.

5. Cool completely before dusting with the powdered sugar and slicing into wedges to serve. This cake will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.