Loaf Cake

My dad is the only person allowed to handle avocados in my family. Avocados are a very precious commodity, and in the hands of my father, reach their true potential: fresh homemade guacamole. Leave it to me to completely diverge from family rules. I developed this recipe out of my obsession with sweet avocado recipes. After a failed avocado milkshake and a disastrous avocado pancake, this pound cake totally satisfied my obsession. It's sweet, green, and has a slight bite from cornmeal. Yes, this cake is green, and tastes like avocado, but it's surprisingly delicious. Try it! You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Chef Raymond Vandergaag dresses up this citrusy cake with whipped cream and truffled honey, an unnecessary but welcome gilding of the lily.

Finely ground black sesame seeds create a deeply flavored and dramatically hued cake.

Purchase high-quality pistachios, and pick through the nuts for the greenest ones. After roasting, rub the nuts between your palms to eliminate as much of the brown skin as possible.

This cake doesn’t rise very much, so don’t be surprised if it is shorter than you expect.

One saturday, Greg Brainin, my director of creative development, threw this together for his daughters. When he made it for me the following Monday, I knew it would become a regular weekend treat for my family, too. It’s as comforting as a classic buttery coffee cake, but the crunch of raw sugar and sea salt in the topping makes it taste refreshingly new.

If you are using the miniloaf pans, place them on a baking sheet, and bake cakes for about forty-five minutes.

Poppy seeds give these cakes an interesting texture and appearance, but you can certainly omit them if you prefer.

This recipe does not contain the traditional pound each of butter, eggs, flour, and sugar, but its proportions produce the most delicious results.

There’s no need to perfect your piping skills to create beautiful flower-topped cupcakes. Instead, adorn them with a few fresh, edible flowers. Some of the best-tasting varieties include nasturtiums, pansies, hibiscus, snapdragons, violets, and marigolds (pictured). Use only flowers grown without pesticides, either from your own organic garden or from specialty suppliers. When making the little pound cakes, remember to cream the butter and sugar thoroughly to produce the right texture.

Pound-cake batters bake into especially rich and dense cupcakes, and the traditional recipe can be adapted in many ways to vary the flavor and texture. In this version, brown sugar replaces granulated for a hint of caramel flavor, while buttermilk makes for a more tender crumb than when made with regular milk. Nutty brown-butter icing pairs especially well with these cupcakes, but many other toppings would also work, including brown-sugar cream-cheese frosting (page 310) or whipped cream (page 316).

Every summer, my sister Beth fills her freezer with blueberries her family has picked. They eat as many as they can while the berries are in season, share some with friends and family, and then freeze the rest. This quick bread is good made with fresh or frozen blueberries, and Beth uses lemons from her own lemon tree, right in her backyard! (I’m jealous!)

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.