Giving Thanks

Ordinarily, I exercise restraint in self-promotion. Yesterday, however, I was honored by Cooking Light magazine (ironic, non?), and I feel compelled to share this exciting news. The Cake Book was included in Cooking Light’s top seven baking books of the past 25 years! Gads! Knowing there are so many great baking books out there, I recognize this as a great honor, indeed. Check out the article here, and read about the other six books – I am in very good company (congratulations to my dear friend Carole Walter, whose book Great Cookies also made the list). I sincerely thank the editors of Cooking Light, and wish them all – along with you, loyal readers of this blog – a wonderful, gluttonous, very happy Thanksgiving. ♥

Fresh Ginger Spice Cake: Mistakes, I’ve Made a Few

It’s a terrible thing when you make a mistake in a recipe and then that recipe is printed somewhere for the whole world to see. In a magazine, for instance or, even worse, a book. It’s happened to me more than once, I must admit, and it’s no good at all. Baking and 

dessert ingredients are not cheap, and when a recipe goes awry because of my mistake, I recognize it as a personal failure. When I was editing Chocolatier magazine, we occasionally printed a recipe that was missing an ingredient or had the wrong amount listed. 

Readers would inevitably call me, and I would explain how it happened and beg their forgiveness. My last book, The Cake Book, has an error in one of the recipes, and I’ve gotten several emails about it, so I thought this blog would be a good place to let the error 

and correction be known. The problem is in Fresh Ginger Spice Cake – to my horror, somehow, I left out the leavening. I’d like to call it a printing error, but that would be a fib. I have no clue how it happened, and all I can do is apologize and draw your attention to it. 

It’s a lovely, very gingery and very moist cake when you do add the baking soda, and makes a delightful accompaniment to a fresh strawberry and rhubarb compote and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. For a more polished look, dust the top of the cake with confectioners’ sugar or frost it with a cream cheese frosting.