Christina Tosi - All about Cake

acknowledgments

To Courtney McBroom: My sister from another mister. My counterpart in all things cookbook. My bicycle riding OG HARDBODY. Thank you for putting up with all the terrible and wonderful things I bring to our friendship. You are brilliant. An outstanding human being. And an incredible Texan.

To those who got in there as we mixed, baked, shot, tested, and tasted All About Cake: Peter Meehan, Gabriele Stabile, Mark Ibold, Walter Green, Jonathan Santiago, Hannah Clark, Bradley Goodman, East Village Community School, New York City Hall and its beautiful brides and grooms, Caf Altro Paradiso and team, Annie Leonard, Hilary Fann, Tess Mahoney, Lydia Yeakel, Tarran Hatton, Sarah Wimberly, Sarah Heasley, Katya Ekimoto, Marisa Iapicco, Stephany Cruz. Thank you for pushing through the many tummy aches too much cake surely brings. For your insane dedication, for embracing TMI, for crushing and for loving cake as much as I do.

To my Milk Bar family: You put up with and embrace my obsession with cake. You make it your own, and oftentimes make it better. You bring the thunder every day and continue to inspire, create, and change the world of dessert. Thank you for your ride-or-die mentality. I am one proud cake mom.

To Kim Witherspoon: For always ensuring my crazy ideas come to life through the pages of words and photos we dream up.

To the honorary hardbodies at Clarkson Potter: Francis Lam, for believing in 200+ pages of cake and putting up with our bad jokes, and to Rica Allannic for picking up this project from the start-and running with the first two cookbook dreams I brought to her doorstep. (Im pretty sure the rest of the world already knows this, but still.) To copyeditor Kate Slate, for every gram, ounce, and scant pinch. You put my attention to detail to shame, you saint! To Jen Wang, for helping wrangle the design. Marysarah Quinn, for her courage in working alongside us once more and bringing her angelic attitude to the madness of making a book!

To our most generous and awesome bakeware friends: Adele Schober and Breville and Gretchen Holt and OXO. We would be lost without your killer mixers, bowls, baking pans, and beyond. You both win Best Supporting Role in a Cookbook/Documentary. Thank you for your kindness, friendship, and bigheartedness.

To my family: Why is it that writing ANOTHER cookbook amid building and growing an insane business while trying to remain a stand-up daughter, niece, sister, aunt, and wife seems like a good idea? Your guess is probably as good, if not better, than mine. Thank you for always doing your best to understand, but never question the why in what I do. Thank you for teaching me to love, and to pursue love. And for eating all the cake scraps that I leave a trail of so loyally.

To cake: The boring old stuff, and the exciting new wave of it happening in our kitchen, and hopefully at this point in yours. Never say never, my friend. As long as you have a whisk and some sugar, something great is just a few (cup)cakes away.

CHRISTINA TOSI is the two-time James Beard Award-winning chef, founder, and owner of Milk Bar. Known for baking outside of the lines and turning dessert on its head, Christina has been a judge on Fox's MasterChef series and is featured on the hit Netflix docu-series Chef's Table: Pastry. She is also the author of the cookbooks Momofuku Milk Bar and Milk Bar Life.

tmi

The beauty of too much information is that, depending on your personality, mood, or desire to absorb, it can be just the right amount of information. If youre up for it, dive into the depths of this section for an assessment of your gear, and set yourself up for success when writing out your shopping list for our world-of-cake essentials. If youve baked your way through any of our books and/or make cakes from scratch, you already know much of whats to come. But heres a refresher. And if you need a little dose of life advice, theres some of that here, too.

the goods

We choose the ingredients or goods we use in our cake recipes wiselywe know WAY too much about the vast world of chocolate chips, which is how we know which brand and size we like best. This section is your guide when you grocery shop or take inventory of your kitchen cabinets.

Cant find an ingredient at your local grocery store? Never underestimate the power of amazon.comwere their unofficial spokes-bakery. (Dont worry, our payday is near)

Bananas, rrrrrrrrripe

Bananas are easy to procure, but ripened bananas is an art we take quite seriously. Buy them a few days before you plan to use them. Ripen them on the counter, in a brown paper bag, or in the freezer (my fave pro tip!), until the skins are jet-black and the fruit has turned to mush. Though visually unappealing, this is when bananas are at their absolutely most flavorful! If youre a household that keeps a heavy stock of bananas, pay it forward and always keep an airtight container of very ripe bananas frozen (still in their skins), so you never have to wait to make the Banana-ChocolatePeanut Butter Crock-Pot Cake (). Just remember to defrost and remove the banana from its blackened skin before using!

Butter

I know you know what butter is. We love butter at Milk Bar and spend a lot of money on the really good stuff (Plugra). Unsalted, European-style butter is the best of the best for these recipes; its higher in fat, typically 82 percent.

Chocolate, all of it

Generally, we stand by Valrhona for 55% feves, 72% feves, and cocoa powder, and suggest you do the same. Baller chocolate in a recipe = insanely delicious cake out of the oven. (Also feves = flat wide disks of chocolate that make melting easy. If you can only find chocolate in a block or brick, just be sure to chop it down well for even melting.)

Mini Chocolate Chips: Semisweet mini chocolate chips are our chip of choice for flavor and distribution. Nestl and Barry Callebaut do the job just right.

White Chocolate: is not even technically chocolate because it contains cocoa butter, but no cocoa solids (the stuff that makes chocolate brown and delicious). We use it as a thin shell around the cake truffles, and as a base for certain cake swirls, but mostly rely on it for its technical properties like setting a glaze and giving a great mouthfeel without adding a competing flavor. Feel free to choose whatever white chocolate (even in chip form) you can get your hands on.

Citric or ascorbic acid

You can find citric or ascorbic acid powders marketed as sour salt in the spice aisle, or as vitamin C powder in the vitamin aisle, or just buy them by their own name online. We use them interchangeably to enhance the flavor in many of our citrus-based recipes.

Corn powder

We invented corn powder, but well give away our secret: Its freeze-dried corn kernels you can buy online or at a Whole Foods near you. Then in a blender, grind it into a flour-like consistency, and store it in an airtight container. It is yellow gold, this I promise you. It is the hard-to-put-your-finger-on flavor in our cereal milk ice cream and crack pie filling and adds an insanely fresh and natural depth whether the flavor goal is straight-up corn or not, without disrupting texture or consistency. There is absolutely no substitute for it, and we use so much of it that we figured we should start selling it in our stores and at milkbarstore.com, too!