Yottam Ottolenghi Archives

Each year, my birthday gift to myself is to spend the day creating an elaborate, multi-step cake. In 2019 it was this showstopper, in 2018 I spent all day creating this stunner, in 2017 I baked this beauty and in 2016, this was my featured cake.

Baking is my happy place and I love to challenge myself with advanced techniques to create something I have never done before. This vertical stripe cake has been on my list of “must bake” for quite a while now. Cutting into a cake and revealing vertical layers of cake and icing, instead of the usual horizontal, is such an unexpected delight and surprise. There are so few good surprises left in life anymore.

This cake is inspired by the Lemon and Blackcurrant Stripe Cake in Sweet. I could not find black currants, so I used blackberries instead. The berries are used to make a sauce to flavour the buttercream. In the original recipe, they used some of the sauce to create a “drip cake”, but I have never been successful in getting the sauce to drip artistically down the sides. I always make a bloody mess. I decided to just top it with some berries and flowers and use the extra sauce to serve on the side.

The batter for the cake is a light lemon sponge. It’s baked in a jellyroll pan.

Once the cake is baked, let it cool for 5 minutes. Then dust with icing sugar, and cover with a clean towel. Flip the whole thing over, peel off the baking sheet and parchment paper and roll up the warm cake in the towel.

This step “trains” the cake to roll up later without cracking. Once cooled, unroll and cut into three long rectangles.

Spread each rectangle with some of the buttercream. The original recipe called for a French buttercream. This type of buttercream uses egg yolks. I find it a bit too rich for this cake, so I went with a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which uses just the egg whites.

The three strips of cake are rolled up into one wide barrel. Stand it on its end and you have a vertical stripe cake. You can see in the photo below, where the strips have been joined. Then cover the entire cake in more buttercream.

I created a simple decoration of flowers and blackberries.

Click here to print recipe for Blackberry-and-Lemon-Stripe-Cake Download

Who among us hasn’t wished for more hours in the day? Well consider me your little “time fairy.” I’m going to give you 24 extra hours! In case you’ve forgotten, 2016 is a leap year. February 29, is leap day. With all that extra time on your hands, let me suggest that you make babka.

For the uninitiated, babka is a brioche dough (yeast dough enriched with butter), spread with a sweet filling, rolled up and then baked in a loaf pan. Many consider chocolate to be the ultimate babka. In fact, if you were even to suggest a cinnamon babka to these chocolate lovers, they’d likely gasp and and utter, “another babka“? They theorize that a cinnamon babka is a “lesser babka”.

My daughter was visiting this weekend and she wanted to help me with my next post. As we considered what to blog about, my suggestion of blood orange curd filled donuts, eclairs or tart were met with a less than enthusiastic ” oh, that’s interesting.” When I showed her the photo of Chocolate Krantz cake (aka Babka) in Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Jerusalem, she got quite excited. She is enthusiastically in the chocolate camp, while my husband has both feet firmly planted in the cinnamon camp. Luckily, this recipe makes two babkas. And so Battle Babka was on.The dough for babka can not be rushed. It requires an overnight rest in the fridge. Then, divide it in half and roll out the first half into an 11 x 15 inch rectangle.For the chocolate babka, we were inspired by an Almond Joy chocolate bar. After spreading on the chocolate paste, we added chopped toasted almonds and unsweetened coconut. Here’s where babka baking becomes fun. Roll up the dough into a tight roulade.Place roll on a parchment lined baking sheet and freeze for about 15 minutes, to firm up the dough. Once the dough has firmed up, it’s time to cut it in half, length-wise. A serrated knife makes easy work of this.Look at those gorgeous striations. To assemble, the two halves need to be twisted back together again .We repeated the process all over again, to make the cinnamon babka. Brush dough with butter this time, instead of chocolate.A thick layer of brown sugar and cinnamon go down next.Toasted pecans and dried cherries complete this version.The babkas are placed in loaf pans and allowed to rise for about 90 minutes. Because of all the butter in the dough, they only grow by about 15%.Once baked, they get doused with a brushing of simple syrup. This keeps the babkas super moist.After a tortuous cooling period, (with my husband calling from upstairs, every 10 minutes, “Is it time yet?“, we sliced into them and tasted. One vote for chocolate from my daughter, one vote for cinnamon, from my husband. The deciding vote was up to me. I declare that Cinnamon babka is most decidedly not a lesser babka. The tart dried cherries, combined with the crunchy pecans won me over. But don’t let me influence you. Decide for yourself. We discovered that babka tastes even better the second day. Sort of like stew, it needs time for all the flavours to develop. We loved it with a latte for breakfast.It was still stellar late that afternoon with a glass of milk.Not surprisingly, it disappeared quite quickly.