This Book Will Make a Baker Out of You
When I first thumbed through our soon-to-be-released cookbook, “Milk Street Shorts: Recipes That Pack a Punch,” I had no doubt that many of the recipes would make their way into my dinner rotation. What I didn’t expect was how many recipes would make it into my dessert rotation.
I didn’t expect to find my ideal birthday cake, but that’s exactly what our Yellow Blender Cake is. The batter for this basic golden-hued layer cake takes only a few minutes to throw together, and whirring the wet ingredients in a blender makes the recipe virtually failsafe. No stand mixer and careful creaming needed. It’s nostalgic birthday perfection, especially when served with our Food-Processor Vanilla Ice Cream.
It’s also where you can find the recipe for my favorite lemon cake, which we learned from Giovanna Aceto, whose family owns a generations-old lemon farm on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. I didn’t appreciate just how much lemon went into the cake until I found myself zesting and juicing 4 lemons at 8 p.m. on a Thursday evening. The zest perfumes the sugar that goes into the batter; the juice is used to make a syrup that is poured on the still-hot bundt shortly after it comes out of the oven. It is tender. It is bright. It is beyond fragrant. It is so moist it borders on juicy, yet never reads as sodden.
Craving chocolate? “Shorts” has a cake for that too. This tender, almost bouncy cake is “baked” on the stove, in a gentle, steamy sauna. It’s rich but not dense, with a velvety simplicity pairs well with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or dusting of powdered sugar.
There are cookies, too. Really good cookies, like the Rye Chocolate Chip Cookies, which swap out some of the usual all-purpose flour for slightly bitter, slightly savory rye flour—the perfect counterpoint for the sugary high notes of a chocolate chip cookie.
You’ll also find the first Milk Street recipe I ever made: our Brown Butter-Cardamom Banana Bread. Banana bread is a perfect vehicle for browned butter—not only does it beg for nutty depth of flavor, but it’s a looser batter that can tolerate the slight moisture loss that occurs during browning. (Make sure to use salted butter. It just makes everything better.) Cardamom makes the everyday loaf a little more special, and now I don’t make it any other way.
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Claire Lower
Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.
