Loaf Cake

Our good friends Dyan Solomon and Éric Girard own Olive + Gourmando, a perfect luncheonette on Saint Paul West in Montreal’s Old Port. Their little shop is what we expect the coffee shop in the afterlife to be like: they’re detail fanatics and it’s no contest the best place for lunch in the city. When they first opened, they were bakers, and the place was a bakery with a few seats. They still make bread, but mostly to use in delicious sandwiches. The front counter is displayed with brioches, croissants, brownies, and fruit pastries, and they’re all killer. We thought they were insane when they decided to open in Old Port a decade ago. It was a barren ghost town of bombed-out buildings, seedy bars, and grow-ops. There were no people, much less hotels and tourist shops selling maple-sugar products and “raccoon” Daniel Boone hats actually made from Chinese skunks. Like us, Éric and Dyan don’t take anything too seriously (Dyan can tell you many stories of Fred’s practical jokes when they used to work together: her showing up at 6:00 A.M. to a fake “dead man” at the bottom of the stairs; Fred putting a scraped lamb shank in his shirt, saying he may have hurt his hand. . . .) They’re Montreal classics and were kind enough to hand over one of their most beloved recipes.

For best results, bring all of the ingredients to room temperature before mixing. When zesting and juicing lemons, grate zest first, then squeeze halves to extract juice. To make one large cake, bake the batter in a twelve-cup buttered and floured Bundt pan.

Rich, dark, and sweet, honey cake was originally a kind of pound cake made by people who could not afford refined sugar or flour (many old honey cake recipes use rye flour, not exactly what we think of as dessert). This is a light, more modern (at least twentieth-century) recipe, quite succulent. Some people stir raisins (about 1/2 cup) and/or chopped almonds or walnuts (also about 1/2 cup) into the batter just before baking. Others cut the loaves in half after baking and add a layer of jam, then reassemble. Personally, I like my honey cake plain.

Thanks to a combination of aromatic spices, this is an extraordinarily good pumpkin bread, and it’s also easy to make. Be sure to use plain canned pumpkin and not the pumpkin pie version, which has spices already added to it.

This rich, dense bread is flecked with green from the zucchini and adorned with delicate zucchini blossoms on top. The flowers, which are available at gourmet specialty stores, are a beautiful addition, but the loaf is equally delicious with or without them. You can also use this batter for muffins, in which case you’ll have about twenty-four muffins and you’ll need to bake them for 20 to 25 minutes.

Banana bread was one of the great rewards for not eating all the bananas Mom bought for our lunch boxes. This hearty loaf is full of crimson berries and pecan chunks. When sliced and served in a napkin-lined basket, it rounds out any brunch. Leftovers are equally good for breakfast the next day. You can also bake the batter in muffin pans.

This recipe could almost be labeled a health bread, except that it tastes too good. It’s packed with a generous quantity of bananas, plus an assortment of mix-and-match dried fruit. Spread the bread with any of our fruit butters (pages 270–272) and serve at a fall or winter brunch.

A long hot summer with just the right amount of rain will create a situation of disastrous consequences—too much zucchini in the garden. Zucchini is prolific. You and your family can eat it every night. You can leave bags of zucchini at the front doors of all your neighbors. You can give it away to strangers. But the plants relentlessly continue to produce more and more. At a certain point in midsummer, you will notice your neighbors crossing to the other side of the street when they see you, and the postman conspicuously looking the other way as he deposits your mail. So, when you have too much zucchini in your garden, make a few loaves of this homestyle quickbread. No one can turn away from freshly baked bread.

For some reason, whenever I’m interviewed, the question always arises: “What would be your last meal?” Or, sometimes it’s: “If you were stranded on a deserted island . . .” I find both to be rather morbid questions—who wants to think about their last meal or being stranded on a deserted island?—and I never quite know how to respond. But if I had to list the things that I couldn’t live without, I’d say chocolate and fried chicken. The third food in my holy trinity is passion fruit. If you haven’t tasted passion fruit, this pound cake is the perfect introduction. If I’m ever stranded on a deserted tropical island, I might get lucky and find a few vines of passion fruit and perhaps some cocoa pods, but I won’t hold out much hope for getting any fried chicken.

To boost the reputation of the much-maligned fruitcake, I wanted to create a version quite different from those sticky, oversweet loaves riddled with iridescent fruit and soggy pecans. This recipe was my answer: an exceptionally moist loaf, chockablock with freshly toasted nuts, perky dried cherries, and a double wallop of chocolate flavor, courtesy of cocoa powder and lots of chocolate chips. I was glad that my modern-tasting fruitcake made converts out of those who tried it. But I didn’t expect that so many would want to give it a traditional soaking of spirits to preserve the cake. I set to work and experimented a few times, but I had a hunch that something was amiss when I noticed some movement underneath the gauze wrapping. I unwrapped the cake and . . . well, let’s just say I discovered I was only one of the many creatures who enjoy this fruitcake. That was the end of my experiments. Instead, I just use kirsch-flavored glaze that can be added at the last minute.

This is the best vegan banana bread ever—super moist and deliciously sweet from the dates.

My French friend Christèle was kind enough to share her recipe for gâteau au yaourt. I have adapted it here to be allergen-free, but it doesn’t suffer one bit. The beauty of this recipe is in its simplicity. It is easy, fast, and clean. You use the yogurt container (called “measure” in the recipe) as a measuring tool. Feel free to experiment with adding additional flavors to this cake, such as lemon or orange zest, or more rum, brandy, or cardamom. It’s a great basic template to play with.

This outrageous breakfast bread was introduced to Crystal when she was at her dear friend Amy’s home. It was one of those scenarios where you have room for only one piece, yet end up taking the loaf home! Amy told Crystal that her mom and her mom’s friend Janie made this recipe often when Amy was growing up. When they had passed, Amy inherited her mom’s recipe book, which included several copies of this recipe, in both her mom’s and Janie’s handwritings. Amy has taken to making it every holiday for her family and friends. Baking and sharing this delicious bread with the rest of the family is the ultimate way to honor their memories and their special friendship.

Nothing ever went to waste in my house. If bananas got too brown, we knew banana bread was on its way. In fact, I couldn’t wait for the bananas to go brown! I happily made my family’s recipe for years, until the day I tasted my friend Teri Hatcher’s banana bread on the set of Desperate Housewives. She’s our unofficial on-set baker, and her philosophy on banana bread is “the more booze, the better the bread.” This version is like using bananas Foster to make banana bread. The flavor is fantastic and it’s the moistest I’ve ever made or tasted.

Pork is a natural pairing for anything apple. More like a slightly sweet bread than a dessert, Big Mama’s Apple Nut Cake is perfect with any pork main course, although it can also be served to end the meal. It can be made either in a loaf pan or in a traditional tube pan, depending on how you plan to serve it. The spiced fruit aroma this cake emits made it one of Big Mama’s favorites. With six kids and Big Bob to look after, she was entitled to a little aromatherapy. Because it was not overly sweet, the kids were allowed to snack on it during the day. After viewing this recipe I asked Ruth, the youngest daughter of the Gibson clan, what kind of nuts should be used. She said the nut of choice was either hicka nuts or scaly barks, two varieties you are unlikely to find at your local grocer. “Hicka nuts” is turn-of-the-century Southern country slang for hickory nuts, and “scaly barks” are the nut from the shagbark hickory tree. Hickory nuts are tough to crack, and getting the meat out is very difficult, but they must be superior in flavor because Big Mama would walk past three pecan trees to get to the scaly barks. You can substitute whatever nut you prefer.

We used pears in this ice cream’wich, but many other fruits would work well, too, such as apples, figs, or peaches. Because the fruit is poached, it won’t harden in the same way that raw fruit does when it is frozen. And not to worry if you do not like rum: you can simply leave it out of the ice cream recipe, yielding a simple and tasty vanilla ice cream.

Here, the brittle adds the excitement to the ice cream sandwich by providing the crunch. But don’t add the brittle too far in advance, as it will begin to dissolve into the ice cream. If pecans are not your favorite, you can substitute a nut that’s more to your liking.

Those of you who don’t have food sensitivities and are reading this cookbook simply to improve your general health should be applauded. I know how easy it is to be tricked into thinking that the low-fat glazed gingerbread in the display is healthy when you pick up your morning coffee at the local deli. I implore you, do not let your pre-caffeine fog steer you wrong! Make a loaf of this simple gingerbread over the weekend, slice it, and store it in your freezer for the week so you can grab yourself a piece on your way out the door. The pumpkin purée makes the bread so moist and fresh you can snack on it for days. As a reward for your foresight, consider slathering a thick layer of Vanilla Frosting (page 91) on top. I would!

Lemon can be a baker’s best friend or her worst enemy. Often it tastes less like fresh-squeezed lemonade and more like a 15-cent lollipop. Achieving the perfect balance of lemon flavor in this teacake was a long and arduous journey; fresh lemon juice toys with the acidity in the batter, causing it to rise and fall unpredictably, while the rind on its own has a mousy presence at best. I tried everything from the yellow squeeze bottles of sugar-pumped citric acid to preserved lemons to lemon oil—everything short of boiled-down Lemonheads. Eventually I found that if you grate lemon rind into the batter with a generous helping of a high-quality lemon extract (I prefer Frontier’s product), you end up with a uniform, easy-to-manage batter that maximizes the lemon flavor while downplaying its domineering nature. Add the subtle nuttiness and earthy texture of poppy seeds, and you’ve stumbled onto a marriage unequaled since Luke and Laura’s.

When my aunt Cathy dropped by our house for a visit and tea, she was always packing a loaf of banana bread baked at her restaurant, Harry’s Coffee Shop, in La Jolla, California. Under her strong encouragement, I’d chow piece after piece until I’d scarfed nearly an entire loaf. “It’s good for her!” she’d say as my mother looked on in slight horror. And I believed her. I mean, banana bread? Come on! Eating that pillowy deliciousness was like getting extra-credit points for free. Of course, in adulthood I discovered that this supposed health bread, like everything else tasty, was virtually a heart attack in loaf form. Butter? Eggs? Bleached flour? Sugar?! Aunt Cathy, take note: Below is how you do it while sparing yourself—and your behind—the grief. If you’d like to take this recipe to the next level, include 1 cup of chocolate chips when you add the banana. You will not be sorry.

So this, my finale, is the ultimate in Everyday Italian cooking. Sure, there’s some cheating involved—I’m not asking you to bake a pound cake. But this distinct combination of Italian flavors will transport you to a piazza-side café, nibbling this great dessert, sipping espressos, and people-watching, instead of struggling in the kitchen for hours upon end. That’s been my goal in this book. I hope I’ve succeeded

This is an easy refrigerator dough method, which requires no kneading. Once refrigerated for 2 to 24 hours, it is easy to shape and bake a number of different ways. These breads are rich with special ingredients, which will all brown quickly while baking. So, the baking temperature must be lower than that of conventional ovens while the baking time remains about the same. You’ll be delighted with the moist crumb; because the crust is formed early in the baking, it locks in moisture.

I love how a cream cake comes together so easily, its tender crumb and its neutral pound-cake-like personality. But until I started playing around with different sugars, it always seemed too bake-shop bland. Like shortbread, the rather neutral ingredients show off whatever sugar (or flour) you use. Maple sugar is subtle and warm, while the superdark organic brown sugar or muscovado make a caramel-like cake that calls out for ginger and a bit of pepper. In the end, it's a great cake for fall and winter, when we turn to apples, pears, and dried fruits.