All About Cake

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,

CHRISTINA TOSI is the two-time James Beard Award-winning chef and owner of Milk Bar. Known for baking outside of the lines and turning dessert on its head, Christina founded Milk Bar in 2008, with locations now in New York City, Toronto, Washington DC, Las Vegas, with a Los Angeles location coming soon. Christina has been a judge on Fox's MasterChef series, and was featured on the hit Netflix docu-series, Chef's Table: Pastry. She is also the author of two additional cookbooks, Momofuku Milk Bar (2011) and Milk Bar Life (2015).

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