Pasta with Shrimp, Asparagus, and Zucchini

You’ll need to start this dish a few days early.

First, take a leisurely Saturday late-morning walk up via Carini. Stop for a coffee at Dolci Desideri with your partner, mother-in-law, and dog. Watch the neighborhood go by.

Walk up to the fish store you’ve been meaning to try and realize that it’s closed; try to go to the fresh pasta and cookie store (yes, this is one place, and it’s as great as it sounds) and realize that it’s closed, too.

Stroll to the open-air produce market that you love, the one that makes you happy whenever you go there. Linger at the fish stall and marvel at how quickly they gut and fillet your fish. Run into a colleague and her family and admire her new baby. Make your way to your favorite produce stall and debate what type of and how many tomatoes to buy. Tell the vendors that you want a few nectarines to eat today and a few for later. Grab a bundle of Lazio asparagus, even though you don’t have plans for it, just because it’s been so good and is almost the end of the season. Miscommunicate with the vendors, so that instead of the sprig or two of basil you thought you were getting (because you can’t buy tomatoes in Roma without also having basil or parsley or both thrown in), you end up with a handful of fresh herbs—basil, parsley, sage, oregano, dill, maybe some fennel fronds—two small onions, and a carrot.

Second, plan a Sunday day trip to Orvieto with your partner and in-laws, only to have it cancelled because there’s a train strike (even though Trenitalia said nothing about it and let you purchase tickets for the day of planned strike). Go sit in a café to figure out what to do instead, and hit on a plan to go to Eataly, because what is more quintessentially Italian than an almost literal pantheon to Italian food? Don’t forget to feel so exhausted from travel and work and getting up early to work out that you think you’re getting sick and decide to skip Eataly in favor of going home for a nap. Tell your partner and in-laws to grab a few things for dinner—shrimp, zucchini—so that you can throw something together quickly.

Take a nap.

Let everyone come home enthusing about Eataly and all its wonders, and so full from their lunch that you decide to just have a salad.

Third, work from home on Monday so that you can take care of the dog while everyone else goes to Orvieto. Surprising no one, their return train is delayed, so your partner doesn’t have time to grab any fresh sweet corn (what you were originally going to have with the shrimp, zucchini, and pasta), and be too lazy to run out to the market to search for some. Instead, think quickly: asparagus will work fine with the dinner you’d planned.

Fourth, put a pot of water on to boil. Finely dice a few cloves of garlic and one of the small onions from the produce market. Cube the zucchini, chop the asparagus, and devein the shrimp.

Sauté the garlic and onions in a generous glug of olive oil; add the zucchini and asparagus. Add the pasta to the boiling water. Chop up the random herbs from the market and throw them in; decide the dish looks like it needs something else and add the half jar of pesto you had in the refrigerator. When the vegetables and pasta are nearly done, lower the eat, add the shrimp, and cook them gently. Toss all to combine.

Finally, give the weary travellers a glass of wine and sit them at the table on your terrace. It’ll be hot later this week, but for now, it’s still cool in the evenings and there’s plenty of light for an early (for Rome) eight o’clock dinner. Horrify your in-laws by making everyone serve themselves from the stove, rather than dirtying another bowl to serve at the table. Drizzle your pasta with good olive oil, and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Dig in to find it far more delicious than you’d hoped. Enjoy it as you enjoy the company of loved ones, gathered around your table.

(Not recommended: taking the leftovers to work in a non-leak-proof container, which of course does leak, so that you end up with shrimp juice all over the bottom of your backpack.)

Very Lemon-y Lemon Cake

Dessert

*A triangular slice of yellow cake with a white glaze sits on top of one hand, while the other holds a lemon atop the slice of cake.*

Our first winter in Rome was something of a non-event, climatically speaking. As a born and bred Midwesterner, I am accustomed to (although not enamored with) proper winters: subzero temperatures, snow, ice, wind, the whole shebang.

Rome, in contrast, was unbelievably—and perhaps unseasonably, according to acquaintances—mild. Sure, there were some grey and rainy days, and a handful when I needed to wear a parka, but the biggest surprise of the winter was how mild it was, so much so that it was nearly indistinguishable from spring. The magnolias bloomed in February, and we wandered the gardens at Villa d’Este in light jackets. In March the tulips were out and we hiked around Frascati in shirtsleeves. By April, the wisteria was in full scent and color, and it was almost too warm for a few days in Florence.

*Lemons & wisteria in the neighborhood.*

With seasons unlike those I’m used to, the surest way I’ve found to keep track of the progress of time in Rome is to go to the market. When the flood of Sicilian citrus fruits is at its zenith, it’s winter. When you start seeing buckets of cold water full of puntarelle, spring is just around the corner. Artichokes, asparagus, and strawberries appear next. And through it all, there are lemons.

In December, we began noticing that the kinda-regular looking leafy green trees we’d walked by for months were sprouting yellow globes. It wasn’t just one or two trees, and it wasn’t just a few fruits on each tree—it was a truly extravagant amount. Around our neighborhood, along the train tracks through the city, roads in and out of town: everywhere we turned, there they were. There are orange trees, too, but that fruit came and went relatively quickly; the lemons seemed there to stay. Even now, they shine out of dark leaves, competing with the bougainvillea blossoms.

You’d think people would use all of that fruit, but you’d be wrong. The ground underneath most of the trees was littered with it, so we felt we had no choice but to “liberate” some of the lemons from neighborhood trees. We juiced a great many, squeezed it onto fish, made it into salad dressings or lemon curd. I also became fixated on the idea of the perfect lemon cake: tender, with fresh lemon flavor in every bite. After many (many) attempts, I landed on this one. There’s lemon zest in the cake batter, which I bake in an 8″ round tin, rather than a loaf pan, so that the soaking syrup gets in deeper. The confectioner’s sugar and lemon juice glaze gives it an extra sweet-sour punch. This cake might just be the taste I think of whenever I remember our first winter and spring in Italy.

Very Lemon-y Lemon Cake

Sources: Adapted from King Arthur Flour

Makes one 8″ cake

Active time: 30 minutes; total time ~65 minutes

Notes:

You can control how lemon-y you want this cake to taste. Use more lemon zest in the cake batter, or more lemon juice in the glaze, if you want a stronger flavor, and less if you want a more subtle one.
This cake is even better the day after it’s made. Giving it more time to sit before serving means the syrup has more time to soak in, permeating the cake with additional flavor.

Cake Ingredients:

200 grams granulated sugar
2–6 lemons (use the greater number if you have very small lemons or want more lemon flavor)
110 grams butter, at room temperature + more for greasing the pan
2 eggs
180 grams all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt (plus more, to taste)
1 teaspoon baking powder
115 grams milk

Soaking Syrup Ingredients:

75 grams fresh lemon juice
150 grams granulated sugar

Glaze Ingredients:

125 grams confectioners’ sugar
2–3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Directions:

Make the cake: Preheat your oven to 350°F. Butter and flour an 8″ cake pan; set aside.
Weigh the sugar into the bottom of a large mixing bowl. Zest the lemons into the sugar, then rub the zest into the sugar with your fingers until well combined and fragrant.
Add the butter to the lemon zest/sugar mixture and beat in with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, scrapping down the sides of the bowl between additions.
Add the flour in three parts (60 grams each time), alternating with the milk, beating well to combine. Your last addition of dry ingredient should be 60 grams of flour plus the salt and baking powder. Scrap down the sides of the bowl with a spatula, and give it one last stir.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan, and smooth the top. Bake the cake for ~35 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the middle of the cake comes out with just a few crumbs clinging.
Make the soaking syrup: While the cake is baking, stir together the lemon juice and sugar. Microwave it on low power for a minute or so, then stir until the sugar dissolves.
Once the cake comes out of the oven, slowly and evenly pour the soaking syrup over it. Let the syrup soak in and the cake cool.
Make the glaze: Once the cake has cooled, stir together the confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice. You can control the thickness of the glaze by adding more or less lemon juice. Pour it over the top of the cake, smoothing if needed, and let set before cutting and serving.

People Ask Me What I Think of Rome…

Essays

*View from Castel Sant’Angelo across the Tiber River on a sunny afternoon.*

It’s dirty. The city puts the trash and recycling bins on the street for communal use, and that sounds like a great idea but they’re often overflowing and sometimes very stinky. It seems as though everyone smokes and throws the butts on the ground, and no one picks up after their dogs, so there’s shit—whole and in smears, where some unfortunate person has dragged their heel through it—all over the sidewalk. I’ve seen at least two men taking a piss on the sidewalk in the five months we’ve lived here.

The smog is terrible; I’m fairly sure the car pollution will take a few years off my lung capacity (assuming I’m not actually hit by a car first).

It’s inefficient. Italian bureaucracy is legendary for a reason: it’s because it’s so confusing that even Italians don’t always know how to make their way through it. There’s often a transit strike on Friday. The rumor is that that’s because people just want a three-day weekend (and in that, who can blame them? Especially when you consider how low the average Roman salary is).

Romans takes the whole “caput mundi” thing too far. Every single person here seems to operate under the impression that they are the most important person in Rome, so you had better get out of their way.

There are parts of the city that don’t seem like a city at all. Villa Pamphili is enormous and green. Some of it is busy and full of picnickers or exercisers or teenagers faffing off, but if you go further in, it’s lush and wild. I like to go there early, to stand on a certain hill and watch the sun come across the sky, where on some mornings I can look all around and not see another single person.

It’s good to be a morning person in Rome. I get up early to run before the streets get too crowded, watch the little cafes open up, hear the espresso machines whirr into action for the first cup of the morning. On the weekends, we go to our favorite bakery before the crowds and have our pick of the pastries. Everything there is a work of art, but their croissants integrale are some of the best croissants I’ve ever had, and believe me—I have made it a point to have a lot of croissants. On early dog walks, I stop at the fruit and veg market up the street from our apartment and for fresh produce. And what produce! I’ve never had mandarins so good, never been able to buy pears that you can take home and eat for breakfast that day, rather than letting them ripen in a paper sack for a week.

One day in December, I took the dog to the park in the morning, and could not believe the color, the quality of the sunlight. It hit the yellow leaves of a ginkgo tree and they shone. It hit the yellow walls of the Escher house and they glowed.

It’s good to be a night person in Rome. Dinner doesn’t really start here until 8:30 p.m.—most of the restaurants don’t even open until 7:30 p.m. I like the slow meals, the polpettine and conversation and wine, the plate of pasta and conversation and wine, maybe a dessert and conversation and then a digestivo and then a final espresso, and then the walk home. The streets are busy enough that I feel safe, but not so crowded that I can’t open my stride, enjoy walking hand-in-hand with my partner.

It’s good to be a foodie in Rome—see aforementioned croissants, produce, and dinners—but not if you want anything besides Italian food. The spice aisle in grocery stores is depressing, a few sad jars of dried basil and oregano, some chili flakes, salt and black pepper. The “international” section is three small shelves, partially hidden behind a post, with Skippy peanut butter, ramen noodles in a package, and hideously expensive coconut milk (if you’re lucky).

We took our friends to the Colosseum and in doing so saw an extravagant sweep of human history: looking out of the amphitheater, over the Forum, to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, the streets closed off for construction of the new metro line, the streets lined with tourist shops and gelato places. It’s uncommon for an American to see so many years in one vista.

This is all Rome, and only a small part of it. It is the tourist dream (romantic cobblestone alleys and spritzes before lunch and beautiful ruins), la dolce vita. It is trash, noise, traffic, smell, and inefficiency. It is abundant contradiction. It is wholly itself, and in that, it is beautiful.

Baking from Scratch

Essays

*Three square slices of apple cake sit on the Chief Recipe Taster’s hand.*

When is the last time that you made a cake from scratch?

Until recently, if you’d asked me, I would have said that I only ever made cakes from scratch, and I would have believed that to be true. But if I were making, for example, an apple cake, I would have employed a number of little tricks to do it. I would have peeled the apples with a vegetable peeler, shredded the fruit in a food processor. I would have softened the butter just a bit in my microwave, used a hand mixer to cream the sugar into it. I might have even (gasp!) used Pam to grease the baking dish.

In Rome this fall, I found myself without recourse to any of my usual tricks. I had no food processor or hand mixer; I didn’t even have a vegetable peeler (although one did come in our shipment, which finally arrived in late November) and cooking spray is not on any of the grocery shelves I’ve visited. So when I decided to make King Arthur’s Old-Fashioned Apple Cake with Brown Sugar Icing, I had to do it much more “from scratch” than I’m accustomed to.

Let me tell you, making a cake completely from scratch took forever. Peeling the apples with a paring knife, then fine-dicing them by hand, took the better part of an hour. Creaming together the butter and sugar was a learning process that involved a spatula, a spoon, a fork, and a fair bit of mess. Beating in the eggs was easy enough, until I realized that my creaming method needed work, and had to systematically mash out every stray lump of butter. By the time I got the cake in the oven, my forearms ached, the kitchen was a mess, and I’d used almost every tool I had at the time. It took me as long to clean up as it did for the cake to bake, and then I still had the frosting to make.

It was an epic pain in nearly every way. It didn’t cut well, wasn’t even very pretty, and yet… damned if it isn’t one of the best cakes I’ve made in recent memory, or at least one of the ones I’m most proud of. I suppose it all goes to show: sometimes the things that are the hardest are also the most worthwhile.

A Kitchen in Rome, Part 3

Essays

*The view from the apartment terrace: a still verdant orchard surrounded by apartment buildings.*

My Chief Recipe Taster and I are now nearly three months into the great adventure called, “Let’s Pack Up Everything We Own and Move to a Country Where We Don’t Speak the Language,” and I am finally writing this from our own space, rather than an Airbnb. Let me tell you, no matter how nice a rental, there is no place like (your own) home, where you can accumulate condiments and spices with abandon.

I’m thrilled to be able to fill the cupboards, but my relief at being in our apartment is much greater than that. We’ve been nomadic since August, soaking up time with friends and family before heading to Italy, where we went from rental to rental. Now that we’re in our own space—where we plan to be in for the next few years—we’re both coming to grips with how stressful the last few months have been.

View of an empty kitchen built into a corner nook. The backsplash and countertop are cream tiles, with an ornate blue floral tile trim and wood cabinets. A double sink sits to the left, a small stove to the right.

You might wonder why we feel that way. Moving to Italy is a dream for many people, and it was—still is!—for me, too. But let me be real for a minute: it isn’t all Under The Tuscan Sun. When I pictured my Chief Recipe Taster and I moving to Rome, I knew it would be difficult and that the learning curve would be steep. But truth be told, I also pictured us always being in the sun, laughing and drinking wine and just being really happy all of the time. There has been a fair amount of laughing and happy and wine drinking and a LOT of sun (until the start of November), but it’s also been hard to start a new life, in a new city, with new jobs, in a country where we know almost no one and don’t really speak the language.

Food remains a way to ground ourselves and to explore our new city, whether that’s going to new restaurants or simply navigating the grocery store. We’re trying to find the middle ground between what we know and what exists, retrofitting recipes we know and love with what’s available; learning new ingredients and ways of buying and preparing food. Recent experiments have included using piadina flatbreads as tortillas and sampling every flavor of stuffed gnocchi we can find. Befitting my interest in all things culinary, my knowledge of Italian food words is far larger the rest of my vocabulary.

It will take time to bring it all together, to really make a life for ourselves that feels exciting but comfortable. We’re still assembling the ingredients, but I’m confident that this is one experiment that will turn out deliciously.

*A view of the still-empty living room. A half-open window in the sloped ceiling lets light onto the white walls, wood floors, and fireplace.*

A Kitchen in Rome, Part 2*

Essays

*The view from a top-floor apartment, through the three-seasons room, across the terrace, and out into Rome, at sunset.*

We’ve now lived in Italy for one month. It feels absurd to say that.

We’ve been in Italy for one month. We’ve been attempting to create a life in Italy for one month. We’ve been wrestling with Italian bureaucracy for one month. Each of these seems more accurate than saying we’ve lived in Italy for one month, because that denotes some form of comfort with a place, or at least (semi)permanence, and this still doesn’t feel real. There’s still an ephemeral quality to our existence here, as though a good strong wind would blow it away.

This feeling wasn’t helped by shifting from one Airbnb to another, as we wait to move into a longer-term home. Getting to explore a new neighborhood has been fun, but also a bit tiring. After two months of moving around, I want to settle in one place.

*View of another gray-and-white kitchen, with a large window that looks onto a brick apartment building, a large hob, a bowl of fruit, and assorted kitchen flostam-and-jetsom.*

In the meantime, we’re enjoying our Airbnb’s lovely terrace; we’ve managed to eat outside each night. The food we cook is still very simple, and we’ve discovered the great Italian invention of pizza al taglio, essentially pizza by the slice. The bakeries make meter-long pizzas with a broad array of different toppings. You buy as much as you want by weight and, if you’re us, take it away for dinner. It doesn’t get much more easier than that, and when you’re wrestling bureaucracy or trying to make a life in a new place, there isn’t much better than easy.

* Originally posted on social media on 13 October 2023.

A Kitchen in Rome, Part I*

Essays

*A tall, ornate, wrought-iron window* *looks out onto greenery and another building. A vase of pink flowers sits in the lower right foreground.*

In early September, my partner, our dog, and I moved to Rome.

It’s such a simple sentence to contain so much: months of waiting and of frantic action, of intense excitement and of fragility, the sense that it could all fall apart and that this thing we’d been acutely hoping for could fail to materialize. Throughout it all, there was a sense of unreality: was this really happening? Were we truly planning to pack up all our possessions, leave behind our flat and our friends and our lives, and move to Italy?

We’re here now, but in many ways the sense of unreality remains. Our first week, as we explored different neighborhoods and searched for apartments, we kept turning to each other and saying, “We live here!” It was and remains a way to ground ourselves, to claim this new space and place.

One of the other ways is through food. It exasperates me sometimes, how I need to keep caring for this body of mine, providing it sustenance three (at least) times a day, but it is also a way to anchor myself in the present. Nothing makes you feel reality like needing to go to the grocery, or cook a meal, or eat it.

*A small gray-and-white kitchen: oven and hob, sink, cupboards, and very little counter space.*

We’re staying in an Airbnb as we look for a more permanent home. While the kitchen is perfectly adequate, it’s a bit small and sometimes challenging. The stove burners are finicky. The refrigerator temperature was set too high and kept freezing our salad greens (if you’ve never had frozen arugula, there’s a reason for that: it isn’t good). There’s only one cutting board and little counter space on which to place it.

Befitting the space, the meals we’ve prepared have been simple: faro with sautéed eggplant and tomatoes, pasta with broccoli rabe and spicy sausage, fish curry with rice. Still, it’s enough to nourish us, and to allow us to act—until we truly feel—as though we’re at home.

* Originally posted on social media on 22 September 2023.

Cardamom & Candied Orange Peel Ice Cream

Dessert

The start of July signaled the tipping point into what I consider DC’s fourth season: steam room. In a matter of hours, it seems, the weather turned from “pleasant” to all-day-every-day hot & humid.

I loathe and love this season. Loathe: constant sweatiness and unruly hair. Love: abundant daylight; sunrise runs in Rock Creek Park; summer fruit. Despite the stickiness, the balance, for me, tips more towards love. It’s simple, really: I love summer because it is an unabashed call to unabashed, public pleasure. Other seasons have their joys, but they are somewhat more private ones. You’re more likely to experience them with a small group of people—a fall bonfire with friends, say, or a family holiday gathering. But summer is all out. It’s water slides on the front lawn, concerts in the park, eating watermelon slices on a picnic with friends. It’s a harkening back to the time before you worried about meeting your yearly performance assessment or cared if your bathing suit showed your stomach; a time when you had time to be bored, when you lived in the now. Summer is when you have fun for the sake of having fun. They’re meant to be a release, an escape valve from the grind of the rest of the year. They’re meant to be a corporate enjoyment.

And what food is more enjoyable than ice cream? To misquote the great Ina Garten, “You can be miserable before you have ice cream and you can be miserable after you eat ice cream but you can’t be miserable while you are eating ice cream.” Not even if you’re eating it during a yearly performance assessment, while worried about your stomach pooch, during DC’s fourth season.

Cardamom & Candied Orange Peel Ice Cream

Sources: Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours

Makes ~2 quarts of ice cream

Active time: ~30 minutes, plus bowl chilling, custard chilling, & churning time

Ingredients:

2 cups heavy cream
2 cups whole milk
6 egg yolks
2/3 cup sugar
1 heaping teaspoon ground cardamom
1 pinch of salt
1/4 cup chopped candied orange peel
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (I use Singing Dog Vanilla’s Double Fold Vanilla Extract, and it is worth every penny)

Directions:

The day before you plan to make the ice cream, put the machine bowl in the freezer.
The next day, pour the cream and milk into a heavy-bottomed pot and bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat. Meanwhile, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, cardamom, and pinch of salt in a medium bowl.
When the cream and milk are at a boil, turn off the heat and whisk one-third of the mixture into the egg yolks, whisking vigorously as you do so. Slowly add the rest of the cream and milk to the yolks, whisking all the way.
Pour the mixture back into your saucepan and heat over medium. Keep stirring, or you could end up with curds in your custard, which no one wants that.
There are two ways to test whether your custard is done. One is to dip a spoon or spatula into it and then run your finger through the custard; your finger should leave a clear trail with no custard running into the track. The other is to take your custard’s temperature: it should be between 170–180°F.
Remove the custard from the heat and pour it into a clean bowl. Let it cool for several minutes before stirring in the candied orange peel and vanilla. Press a piece of plastic wrap directly onto the surface of the custard and refrigerate until cold. The custard will be fine in the refrigerator for a day or two, if you want to spread out the work load.
Once the ice cream bowl and custard are cold, churn the custard per your machine’s directions. My custard took ~20 minutes to reach peak height and frostiness.
Transfer the ice cream to a lidded plastic container to firm up. Eat when, and with what, you desire—so long as you do it with great pleasure.

Candied Orange Peel & Fennel No-Knead Bread

Breads

There are a lot of advantages to being married to me. In addition to my obvious wit and way with words, I can be counted on to make the bed every morning, water the plants regularly, and have a firm one-book-in, one-book-out rule, which ensures that most of the books fit on the shelves, most of the time. And let’s not overlook the obvious: as a food blogging hobbyist, there’s never a shortage of good things to eat around the house.

There are disadvantages, though, primarily that—due to my hobby—a solid 65% of our refrigerator and freezer real estate is taken up with “projects”: sourdough starter, jars of carrot-ginger curd / salted caramel sauce / salted caramel cream cheese frosting, etc. While no one was complaining about the extra caramel sauce, some leftovers are a bit harder to use up, like the many containers of candied citrus peel that have been clogging our freezer since April 2020.

In a valiant attempt to be as zero-waste as possible (an understandable concern, particularly during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when you could hardly find toilet paper, let alone produce), I preserved the peel of many an orange, grapefruit, and mandarin, and have been trying to dream up ways to use it ever since. We’ve used it in cocktails and biscotti, dropped it into chocolate bark and folded it into muffin batter, and are still finding jars of it stashed away. This January, I resolved to clean out some of the projects (not to mention random ingredient odds and ends—I’m looking at you, single tablespoon of malted milk powder and dried up natural food dyes) and devised this recipe. Two months later, I’ve made a dent in my citrus peel stash and we’ve enjoyed multiple loaves of this bread. With as good as it is toasted and slathered with butter, maybe there aren’t any disadvantages to being married to me.

Candied Orange Peel & Fennel No-Knead Bread

Sources: Adapted from the inimitable Jim Lahey

Makes 1 large loaf of bread

Active time: ~30 minutes; total time ~18–24 hours

Ingredients:

600 grams all-purpose flour
260 grams whole-wheat flour
2 grams yeast
25 grams salt
75 grams chopped candied orange peel
10 grams whole fennel seeds (you can lightly toast and crush them, if you want to be fancy)
690 grams room-temperature water

Directions:

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. The dough will be “shaggy”—i.e., it will seem dry and as though you need to add more water. Resist that urge. Let that dough be shaggy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, cover it, and let rest for at least 12, and as many as 18, hours at room temperature.
Dust a clean work surface with flour and scrape the dough onto it. Fold the dough over and onto itself, shaping it into a loose ball. Flip over and give the dough a few more pats to shape it, if needed.
Transfer the ball of dough to a large sheet of parchment paper, then put the entire thing, dough and paper, into a clean large mixing bowl. Cover the dough with plastic wrap and leave it to rise at room temperature for another two hours or so. When it’s ready to bake, the dough should have increased in size and not spring back quickly if poked.
Towards the end of the second rise, place a 6- to 8-quart covered pot (I prefer a cast iron Dutch oven) in your oven and preheat it to 450°F.
Dust the top of your dough with flour and score with a knife or lame.
Once the oven is up to temperature, carefully (use potholders!) take off the top of the Dutch oven. Using the parchment paper “sling,” lift your dough and place it, paper and all, into the Dutch oven. Cover the Dutch oven and bake the bread for ~30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for another ~15–20 minutes, until the loaf is dark golden brown.
Remove the Dutch oven from the oven and use the parchment sling to transfer the bread to a cooling rack. If possible, let the bread cool before slicing in and enjoying.

Sticky Date Cake with Salted Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting

Dessert

A three-layer slab of cake sits on the Chief Recipe Taster’s palm as a drizzle of salted caramel sauce oozes its way down the cake.

On the list of adjectives that describe me, “leaves well enough alone” does not make an appearance. Quite the opposite, which might be how I found myself, last year, working multiple jobs, training for multiple stupid-length endurance events, and travelling more than is good for me, let alone the planet. Needless to say, that didn’t leave me much time for food blogging (or for sleeping). I’m trying to dial it back now, which is, interestingly, exactly what I said in my last post in May 2022, right before I managed to get even busier.

This is not a sob story, especially since not being able to leave well enough alone has its advantages. It’s why I excelled as a law student (why not write one more brief), an endurance athlete (why not go one more mile), and a recipe developer (why not do one more test). It’s why I’ve forced my friends and Chief Recipe Taster to choke down multiple iterations of this sticky date cake with salted caramel cream cheese frosting, and why I came up with the idea in the first place—a layer cake version of sticky toffee pudding, with the very American addition of cream cheese. Also: salted caramel. Because sometimes not being able to leave something alone is a very, very good thing.

Sticky Date Cake with Salted Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting

Sources: Salted caramel sauce from Sally’s Baking Addiction; date cake adapted from Smitten Kitchen; frosting from I Thought There Would Be Free Food

Makes one 6-inch, three-layer cake; one 8-inch, two-layer cake; or one 9×13, single-layer cake

Active time: 90 minutes; total time: 3 hours

Notes:

Knowing that I can’t leave well enough alone, you might guess that I made my own salted caramel, and you would be correct! In my defense, it’s easy to do and really, really good. If you, however, are the type of person who can leave well enough alone, you could buy a jar of caramel ice cream topping and add salt to taste.
Below, I describe how to make the cake in one day, but you can make it over the course of several days. For example, you might make the caramel sauce one day, frosting the next, and bake the cakes and assemble the whole thing on the third.
My frosting recipe makes enough for a “naked” cake—i.e., there is only frosting between the layers, not on the sides. If you’d like to cover the entire cake, you’ll likely need to make a stiffer frosting (use more confectioners sugar) and make more of it, about 1 1/2 batches.

Salted Caramel Ingredients:

1 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons room-temperature butter, cut into 6 pieces
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon salt

Sticky Date Cake Ingredients:

2 1/4 cups pitted chopped dates
2 1/4 cups boiling water
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter
3/4 cup light or dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

Salted Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting Ingredients:

8 ounces room-temperature cream cheese
1 stick (8 tablespoons) room-temperature butter
~1/4 cup salted caramel sauce (homemade or store-bought)
2–2 1/2 cups confectioners sugar
Salt

Directions:

Make the caramel sauce: Heat the sugar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Do not stir the sugar as it melts, but give the pan the occasional swirl so that the sugar melts relatively evenly and does not burn.
Once the sugar has melted, let it cook to a deep amber color. Take the saucepan off heat and whisk in the butter, one piece at a time. If the butter does not seem to incorporate, put the pan back on low heat and continue whisking; it should come together better. Add the cream and stand back—it will bubble and hiss and might spatter. Continue whisking vigorously. Put the pan over medium heat and let the caramel come up to, and stay at, a boil for 1 minute.
Remove the caramel from the heat and stir in the salt (you can use more or less according to taste). Let the caramel cool while you make the cake.
Note: the caramel will solidify as it cools. It will also keep well in the fridge for several weeks; just warm it on low-power in a microwave to get it pourable again.
Make the cake: Combine the dates, boiling water, and baking soda in a bowl. Stir to combine, then set them aside while you prepare the rest of the cake.
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Butter and flour your cake pans, and line the bottoms with parchment paper. Set the pans aside.
Melt the butter in a large bowl in the microwave (you can also make the entire cake in a good-sized saucepan, if you prefer). When the butter is melted, whisk in the brown sugar, followed by the eggs and salt. Whisk in the flour, ensuring there are as few lumps as possible. Pour in the dates and their soaking liquid, whisking to combine. The batter will be very thin.
Divide the batter among your cake tins. (If you’re using 3 6″ tins, you’ll have about 440 grams per tin.) Slide the tins into the oven and bake for 30–35 minutes, until the cake are golden, feel slightly spongy when pressed, and a cake tester inserted into one comes out clean.
Let the cakes rest in their tins for ~5 minutes before inverting them, peeling off the parchment, and letting them cool on a wire rack.
Note: You can make the cakes the day before assembling. Let them fully cool before storing in an air-tight container at room temperature.
Make the frosting: Are your cream cheese and butter room temperature? If not, let them get there—it’ll make incorporating them much easier. If they are, cream them with a hand mixer or standing mixer until well incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl before adding the caramel sauce and beating to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add 2 cups of confectioners sugar and salt to taste. Beat to combine. You should have a smooth frosting with enough structure to support the layers. If in doubt, add more sugar. Give the frosting a taste: if it’s gotten too sweet, add more salt to taste. Set the frosting aside.
Note: You can make the frosting a day or two before assembling the cake. Store in the refrigerator until an hour before you plan to use it. Give it a good stir to ensure consistent consistency before frosting the cake.
Assemble the cake: Carefully level the tops of your cakes with a serrated knife and set the tops aside. (Cake tops = baker’s reward!) Place one layer in the center of a plate or platter. Top with a good-sized dollop of frosting and spread to almost, but not quite, the edges of the layer. Repeat with the remaining layers. If possible, let the cake sit at room temperature for at least an hour for the layers to settle together and the frosting to seep in a bit. Cut with a serrated knife and serve with additional salted caramel sauce, if you want to gild the lily. Devour. Leftovers will keep at room temperature for 1–2 days, or in the refrigerator for several more.