All about cake

A FEW WEEKS ago, I received a crowd-source-designed cutting board with a phone dock carved into one corner. The message: The internet's place is in the kitchen. True/ not true. While it's miraculous to have instant access to all chocolate chip cookie recipes at once, people still want to own a bound collection of recipes from someone they trust to give them the chocolate chip recipe. More than just an imprimatur of taste and talent, cookbooks offer us narrative and vision. A good cookbook is a trusted friend. Try sticking that in your cutting board, interwebs. This season brings us new books from some of the food world's best-selling BFFs. ft also offers a welcome range of accents and insights that will expand your pantry - and your mind. The London chef (and New York Times contributor) Yotam Ottolenghi is celebrated for his modern spin on eastern Mediterranean cuisine. So celebrated that grocery chains in the United Kingdom now stock za'atar and sumac. But his recipes have rarely been of the breezy, Ttiesday-night variety. Along with his co-authors, Tara Wigley and Esme Howarth, he remedies that with ottolenghi simple (Clarkson Potter, $35), in which almost all the recipes have fewer than 10 ingredients, and many can be made in under 30 minutes. (Other dish categories include "LazyDay" and "Easier Than You Think.") While some of those ingredients are head-slappers for those of us without, say, nigella seeds and rose harissa (!) in our cupboards, recipes like watermelon, green apple and lime salad; lamb and pistachio patties with sumac yogurt sauce; and Nutella, sesame and hazelnut rolls are worth the trip to Amazon or the local spice shop. Every recipe has a brightness, a twist and a unique layer of flavor that you rarely get at home on a weeknight. My friend the food writer Charlotte Druckman - the kind of person who ordered Ottolenghi's first book on Amazon.co.uk long before it was published here - tipped me Off to CASABLANCA: My Moroccan Food (Firefly, $35), insisting that it had the potential to Ottolenghi-fy North African fare. Written by the British-based food blogger Nargisse Benkabbou, who was comforted by her mother's tagines while growing up in Belgium, this book has the friendly, approachable mien - not to mention the familiarity with the limitations of British grocery stores - of her fellow London blogger Meera Sodha's "Made in India." While Paula Wolfert acolytes might scoff at some of Benkabbou's modern interpretations, the rest of us will gladly use spaghetti in place of vermicelli in a cinnamon-laced chicken and chickpea soup that's transformed with a last-minute whisking of lemon juice, egg yolk and parsley. And we'll find authentic happiness in the results of marinating short ribs in ras el hanout, peaches, ketchup (!) and a few other things before roasting them into something intoxicatingly new. Benkabbou has you making your own ras el hanout spice blend and harissa, and you'll be the better for what's in those jars. Because after cooking from "Casablanca," you'll want to eat everything over couscous. Cal Peternell's pantry (and sly humor) is right there in his title: ALMONDS, ANCHOVIES, AND PANCETTA: A Vegetarian Cookbook, Kind Of (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99). The author of "Twelve Recipes" opens the almond section with a quote from President Barack Obama and the line "1 miss President Obama" before free-associating about, among other things, horny Greek gods, Chez Panisse (where he cooked for nearly 22 years), Gabriel García Márquez and Mom's kitchen. In short, it's an extremely good read, with recipes that have a charmingly loose-limbed sophistication and range of references, be it the Aleppo pepper flakes in muhammara that trigger a line from Nabokov's "Ada," Caesar-leaning gougeres that Peternell developed for a friend in need of a killer morning-after egg dish or a baconwrapped potato gratín that's his attempt at "pushing the bacon envelope by actually making a bacon envelope and stuffing potatoes inside it." And the story behind those pork meatballs with farro, hazelnuts and sage His failure is your gain. Like the Chez Panisse alumna Samin Nosrat, Peternell explodes the formulaic recipe format, speaking directly and affectionately to his readers to help them use every sense - and every last anchovy - to become better, more instinctive cooks. Anita Lo, who was the chef-owner of New York City's Anissa for almost two decades, also has humor in her wellstocked arsenal. Dry, self-deprecating, sometimes shocking humor. (One of the recipe headnotes involves a dead body ... followed by a breakup.) She pairs it with her Michelin-starred chops in SOLO: A Modern Cookbookfor a Party of One (Knopf, $28.95). Rather than writing a cheffy book for entertaining, Lo - who says she put the "Lo" in "solo" and the "A Lo" in "alone" - wants those who cook for themselves to do it with (self-) love. Fans of the Franco-Yankee dishes in Judith Jones's "The Pleasures of Cooking for One" will be jazzed to spin the globe with Lo, whose travels and culinary background have made her fluent in Chinese, Korean, Thai and Japanese cuisines, among others. Lo never stints on flavor, often adapting restaurant- techniques for the toaster oven (amen). She also teaches memorable lessons in eliminating food waste, such as a panroasted chicken breast with roasted broccoli panzanella recipe that's accompanied by a "Don't Waste ft!" tip that recommends buying a basil plant so you'll have something to take care of. Not alone Even the recipe for "a single, broken egg on a bed of torn, wilted, bitter greens with blue cheese" can be doubled. Lo's book aims to avoid leftovers. Julia Ttirshen's celebrates them. NOW & AGAIN: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus and Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers (Chronicle, $35) provides seasonal menus - be it a summery birthday lunch for her wife, Grace, or a wintry steak house dinner for vegetarians - each followed by "ft's Me Again," a page of great ideas for the day after ... and the day after that. The book concludes with seven thoughtful lists: for what to do with takeout leftovers, cooked rice, not-so-new produce and so on. Ttirshen, who developed recipes for early-stage Gwyneth Paltrow and whose previous cookbooks are "Small Victories" and "Feed the Resistance," is at the forefront of the new generation of authentic, approachable authors aiming to empower readers who might be newish to the kitchen. Are her "card night enchiladas" going to move the needle on 21st-century home cooking No, but opening up readers' minds to the idea of turning that leftover kale salad into a delicious Spanish soup or Persian frittata just might. Food waste: so last decade! The cooks at Noma in Copenhagen know a lot about making scraps into Michelin stars. The hyperlocal, hyperseasonal restaurant has a long winter to slog through. The Noma chef René Redzepi's secret for building tremendous flavor when he's on month four of root vegetables is fermentation, so much so that he built a lab dedicated to the study of what enzymes do to food. As overseen by the Canadian chef David Zilber, the lab's vinegars, kombuchas, pickles, garums, black fruits and vegetables and inculcated legumes stealthily launch little flavor bombs on every plate. There have been plenty of excellent fermentation guides in the last decade - all leading back to the work of the master, Sandor Elix Katz's "The Art of Fermentation." But Redzepi and Zilber's the noma guide to fermentation: Foundations of Flavor (Artisan, $40) IS the scientifically geekiest, the most modern and the most radical. It's also one of the most illuminating. I'm someone who has all manner of Ball jars and mothers bubbling under her kitchen sink, but this book helped me to finally understand the processes involved, spurring me to dream of making crazier and crazier things. By detaching ferments from their cultural history (Why does sauerkraut have to be made from cabbage Miso from soybeans), they inspire you to think differently, be it kombucha made not from tea but from leftover coffee grounds or blitzed rose petals, or vinegar made from whiskey or butternut squash. Each recipe is accompanied by ideas for what to actually do with the stuff, bending the mind further to open new food pathways. Will I be making coffee-kombucha tiramisu and even braising parsnips in the stuff Yep. And I'm going to try my hand at hazelnut miso and roasted chicken wing garum. The guy living on the other side of my kitchen wall might not appreciate the fact that I've been blasted into another bubbly dimension of flavor, but my guests certainly will. SEASON: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food (Chronicle, $35) IS, like many of the books included here, highly personal. The San Francisco Chronicle columnist and photographer Nik Sharma began his food blog, A Brown Table, as a creative outlet while working as a medical researcher at Georgetown University. The blog was also a means to explore his identity both as a newly out gay man and as an Indian immigrant taking in the many flavors and cultures around him. His recipe collection is a moodily photographed affair, with black backgrounds putting Sharma's brown hands - a welcome sight in the food world - and vibrant food in chiaroscuro relief. Many of the recipes require a trip to Kalustyan's for Kashmiri chile, makrut lime leaves and jaggery sugar, but dishes like a spiky green-chutneyrubbed roast chicken, sweet potato fries with basil yogurt sauce and steak with orange peel and coriander offer both immediate satisfaction and cool new ideas. Not all of the recipes worked as written - that chicken is roasted at 400 degrees for two shriveling hours (!!!) - but since this is a book for experienced home cooks looking to broaden their palates, one can, as they say, work with it. The pizza trend isn't slowing down, in restaurant or home kitchens. While I loved Joe Beddia's "Pizza Camp" when it came out a year or so ago, Marc Vetri currently has my full attention. The Philadelphia chef spent time in Italy - bless him for his sacrifice - embedding with the masters of several styles to help us ace floppy Neapolitan pies, puffy-edged Roman crusts, rectangular pizza al taglio and more. MASTERING PIZZA: The Art and Practice of Handmade Pizza, Focaccia, and Calzone (Ten Speed, $29.99) goes deep each style, starting with the fundamentals. (Let's just say there is a full chapter on flour.) Vetri and his co-author, David Joachim, take every kind of pizza-maker into consideration. Whether you're using a wood-burning oven, a home oven or a Big Green Egg; conventional flour and storebought yeast or home-milled grains and natural sourdough leaven; whether you want an old-school Naples dough with 60 or 70 percent hydration, they've got you. Step-by-step photos and granular instructions ease fear and abet deliciousness, be it for a carbonara pie or an entry-level margherita al taglio, baked in a sheet pan for zero stress. I can't think of a better way to heat your home this winter. There are sweet new ways to warm up this season as well. Lisa Ludwinski's SISTER PIE: The Recipes and Stories of a Big-Hearted Bakery in Detroit (Lorena Jones/Ten Speed, $25) aims to warm the heart, too. The scrappy bakery has used pie, community engagement and employee #dancebreaks to transform a former beauty salon into a hub for all. The pies are of the bakers-in-cute-bandanna moment: seasonal, experimental and over-the-top delicious, with zero nostalgia. Why make pumpkin pie when you can serve cardamom tahini squash or buttermilk pumpkin streusei Apple So basic. Try apple sage gouda. Rhubarb meets rosemary, blueberries get balsamic and peach-ginger pie is topped not with crust but with cornmeal biscuits. The conversational instructions are steady guides: Even I, a lifelong crust-bungler, ended up proudly Instagramming the hell out of my lattice. There are also savory hand pies, altgrainy cookies and treats (the buckwheat chocolate chip cookies are exceptional) and pretty breakfast ideas like jasmine creme fraiche scones. Some "Sister Salads" of the barley and bulgur variety randomly pop up at the end. Both the book and the bakery are fun, earnest and succeeding in their mission: Pie is one of the few things that can still bring us all together. Ludwinski and her scarved sistren owe much to the success of Christina Tosi's Milk Bar bakery. Tosi tapped into sophisticated New Yorkers' secret craving for the sugary junk of their childhood, sanctioning cereal milk, cornflakes and mini-marshmallows. Her third book, all about cake (Clarkson Potter, $35), written with Courtney McBroom, lays bare just how much work - and boundary-zapping creativity - goes into each slice. There's no such thing as a dump-and-stir cake in Tosi's world. Wait, I take that back: She has recipes for a molten chocolate microwave mug cake and a banana-chocolate-peanut butter crock-pot cake. But if you want to make a birthday cake, you need to be up for constructing a "bailer birthday sheet cake" that, in addition to cake and frosting, involves a vanilla milk soak and something called birthday crumbs. The resulting cake makes people clap like 3-year-olds when they see it, and groan and/or squeal when they taste it. This is crazy, as in crazy-good. Should you work your way through the Arnold Palmer sheet cake and on to the popcorn cake truffles, which are hard to explain except to say that you can only eat one (happily) The capital-F fancy layer cakes are definitely something to aspire to. With their unfrosted sides revealing strata of filling, crumbs, cake and more frosting, they disrupt the cake space. As with taxis and groceries, we didn't know we needed a new cake paradigm, but we're so glad to have it. Food52, the website co-founded by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, is also a new cooking paradigm. It launched by crowd-sourcing recipes with a new twist: The most delicious ones were given an editorial stamp of approval to reassure visitors that they had clicked on the best salmon recipe in a sea of search results. Born of Food52 creative director Kristen Miglore's popular "Genius Recipes" column, GENIUS DESSERTS: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Bake (Ten Speed, $35) IS sourced primarily from published bakers, chefs and bloggers. Each recipe offers a hack to make you a better baker - or at least provides the definitive recipe for, say, lemon cake (via Maida Heatter and Toni Evans, which, along with Maialino's perfect olive oil cake, is also included in the delightfully illustrated "Cake" by Maira Kalman and Barbara Scott-Goodman) or peanut butter cookies (the City Bakery recipe, as tailored by The Times's Julia Moskin). The best light-bulb moments come from the Genius Tips, be it a food-processor frosting made from whipped cream and freeze-dried fruit, a three-ingredient cookie from the baking guru Dorie Greenspan or how to give stale cakes a new life. "Genius Desserts" saves us a search, whether digital or analog. Because if it's one thing those of us still in thrall to cookbooks need, it's a trusted editor who's actively cooking her way through the ever-growing pile. Let's hope that Food52, which is also behind the aforementioned phonecradling cutting board, is also working on a version that keeps your cookbook open to the right page. CHRISTINE MUHLKE is a contributing editor at Bon Appétit and the creator of the Xtine newsletter. She has written cookbooks with Eric Ripert and David Kinch. ONLINE: WANT MORE INSPIRATION Check out 30 additional cookbooks at www.nytimes.com/books.

Tosi, chef and owner of Milk Bar bakeries, showcases her bubbly personality and an enjoyable collection of cake recipes in her lovely third cookbook. Her anecdotes, like confessing to disliking cake as a child ("To me, cake was really a vehicle for a frosting fest"), are as fun as her sweet and savory flavor combinations, such as compost pound cake made with chocolate chips and potato chips, banana green curry pound cake, and popcorn layer cake with a salted caramel filling. However, there are some flavor combinations that slightly miss the mark, such as a celery root pound cake with pickled celery and a pancake layer cake with miso curd and black pepper butter. Fortunately, there are plenty more delicious recipes, including several from Milk Bar, such as double-layer birthday cake, strawberry-lemon cake truffles, and dulce de leche layer cake. Other recipes, most notably the cherry cola bundt cake, oatmeal-apple-brown sugar microwave mug cake, and creamsicle Crock-Pot cake, are inspired by her childhood. Tosi writes for beginners looking to make simple bundts and experienced bakers who could take on wedding cakes alike. Anyone who bakes regularly and is eager to try something new will want to take a look. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

the truth . . .  . . . of the matter is that growing up I didn't really love cake. (I KNOW!) I was a fool for dense, fudgy brownies, crazy cookies warm out of the oven, and--my childhood fave--gooey butter cake (which is technically not even a cake! It's a bar cookie.). Cake was a bit boring to me, almost always the same old formula: a spongy base with some muted flavor, sweet frosting on top. Nine times out of ten, I'd just scrape and eat the frosting off the snooze fest, leaving the cake behind, naked and afraid. To be fair, cake was fun to have at birthdays and celebrations because I do love dessert rituals. And it meant, if I played my cards right, I could finagle enough frosting to keep me going through the afternoon and still have a little for a slumber party pick-me-up. To me, cake was really just a vehicle for a frosting fest. It wasn't until 2005 that I started really thinking twice about cake. More specifically, layer cake. I had over a decade of home baking under my belt, been to culinary school, and worked my way up in top NYC restaurants, but had still never met a cake that made me swoon. I had started making desserts for the Momofuku restaurants and had found my voice as a pastry chef through the desserts that I adored--ice cream, pie, cookies. The thing I never dared put on the menu was the dessert I never felt was truly lust-worthy. But as my imagination grew, I became obsessed with figuring out how to fall in love with cake. I sat down and considered the things that bummed me out about cake: Cake flavors are dull and boring. Cake is usually overbacked to make it sturdy enough to be layered or topped. Cake is usually just one soft spongy bit. Why take the time to make cake so beautiful on the outside if it's just a snooze fest when you bite in? Cake, as I knew it, felt like a throwaway, a statue that told no story, and wasn't that awesome to eat. But it's tradition. We're told it's decadent, so we turn a blind eye, or turn off our taste buds, and lift our forks anyhow. We can do better than that! If the world is really going to embrace life and dive face first into a dessert, we deserve more than that. Cake should have personality! Integrity! Texture! And a visual appeal that draws you in and gets you excited about eating! I had a lot of work to do. I believed cake had the potential to be a great vehicle for many things--perspective, point of view, flavor, bits and pieces of goo, graham, glaze, and goodness. But first I had to define a formula for myself, then get the world to trust me and dig in. I needed to make a direct contradiction to all the reasons cake let me down in the past, and so I decided these would be my cake ground rules: The cake must have a strong point of view, a flavor "story." Every single layer must be amazingly delicious on its own. Hidden gems of texture within are key. And there is no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks we're going to hide ALL that ingenuity behind a thick coat of frosting. I want to let the people IN, and so I won't frost the sides of the cake. And so it began, my little love story with cake. I'd make it every day. Multiple times a day. I'd use ANY cake-worthy opportunity in life to test out this new perspective. A friend's birthday. A dog's birthday. A wedding. First day of vacation. Last day of vacation. A housewarming. I got in there, all for the love of the game, to start loving cake, to make cake lovable. Once I found someone to bake for, I'd analyze their favorite desserts, and I'd set about devising their cake, layer by layer. Love for strawberry shortcake, lemon chiffon pie, and classic New York cheesecake inspired the Strawberry-Lemon Layer Cake (page 221), a goingaway party for someone who loved making tropical cocktails gave birth to the Pineapple Upside-Down Layer Cake (page 237), and someone's love for pancakes, any time of day, paved the way for the Pancake Layer Cake (page 255).  I became a woman possessed in this new universe of layer cakes--curious sponges, soaks, outside-the-box fillings, crumbs, crunches, ganache, unfrosted sides. Occasion by occasion, I baked my way into my now deep and abiding love of cake. No one teaches you how to be prepared for the things you chase down in life. And so I never really considered that this internal, deep-dive study of mine would be something that inspired others . . . and would maybe change the dessert world forever. In 2008, when me and my guy and gal pals opened the doors to Milk Bar, we challenged the way lots of people think about baked goods: cookies with sweet and salty bits, cereal-flavored anything, "crack" bars and pie, rainbow-sprinkled "birthday" flavor . . . and especially cakes. I must admit, people were confused at first by the naked-looking sides of our layer cakes, with composed flavors and bits and bobs peeking out. But we gave them the Milk Bar Sweat Down, where resistance is futile, where we keep shoving slices of cake their way until they cave in. Nowadays, at Milk Bar, it's no secret that we love cake. It has quickly become a way of life. From layer cakes to cake truffles, cake is what makes our operation go 'round. This book is our ode to that. We're so cuckoo for cake, every weekend at our Milk Bar shops, we throw impromptu parties, where we stop the madness for just a moment or two and celebrate over a #cakebreak. We dance, jiggle, and shake alongside our guests and neighbors to celebrate our everyday lives over cake! When our local school needs to raise some funds, our cake shows up, too. And cake follows us off the clock, beyond the doors of Milk Bar. After all, when you are that obsessed with something, you find it and carry it with you in any and every form. Real Talk: When I'm home, sometimes the last thing I want to do is fuss over a layer cake, which is when a simple bundt or pound cake comes in. And if I'm being really honest, even turning on the stove sometimes feels like a chore. So enter: Crock-Pot and microwave cakes--if you're into the warm and fudgy, my friend, I've got your back. Sometimes your crew of friends is more the sheet-cake crowd. And other times, the young 'uns in your kitchen, dying to get up in the mix, are more the cupcake type (the only reason we'll allow for them). We're so into spreading the love of cake that we have recipes for those who don't have a baking bone in their body. As for cake balls, cake pops, or call them what you will, we whisper our secrets for transforming bites of cake into our legendary "cake truffles" in the pages that follow, too. And, for those fussier perfectionists and pros who just can't get enough, we'll get down in there, too, with recipes, processes, tips, and tricks from our classic 6-inch layer cake all the way up to our insane multitier wedding cake architectural feat, if you're really set on going for it! I went from being a cake hater to a cake revolutionary. And if there's one more thing you must know about me, it's that talk is cheap, especially in the kitchen. Seeing, tasting, is believing. Come on in, tie that apron 'round your waist. A headscarf for flair will get your imagination in the right place, or put on some tunes to get you bouncing. Heat the oven and start nosing around in your fridge and cupboards. I want you all in, as I welcome you into our wild, wonderful world of CAKES! Excerpted from All about Cake: A Milk Bar Cookbook by Christina Tosi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.