The One Cake Recipe That Never Lets Me Down (2024)

• Recipes
• Desserts
• Cakes

updated Jun 2, 2023

Kitchn Love Letters

This easy pantry cake comes together quickly and can be topped with whatever fruit you have on hand.

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When people wax poetic about recipes, it’s often a charming tale about dishes their mom or grandma made for them. And while I appreciate those stories, I really can’t relate. Both of my grandmothers were great cooks, but I grew up far away from them, so cooking at their side was a rare occurrence. And while my mom is a very loving person, cooking isn’t her love language. When I was growing up, family dinners were quick and practical: ground beef casserole, Chef Boyardee ravioli (my favorite!), soup and sandwich. And don’t worry, there was always a green veggie on the side, too.

So how in the world did I end up as a food writer and editor? In a word, dessert. Although sweets weren’t a big part of my daily diet, I loved cruising the baking aisle at the grocery store while my mom shopped. I liked sweets, sure, but even more than that I loved the idea of making an elaborate treat for serving at a dinner party. When I was a kid, I thought that Jell-O no-bake cheesecake with canned strawberry pie filling was the height of sophistication. That’s not the kind of thing that my family of three had very often, but when we did I made it — and boy was I proud of myself.

Practicing My Decorating Skills

These sweet dreams extended to 4-H. My family lived in town (it was 700 people, but still), so I didn’t have any livestock to raise and had to get creative with my areas of focus. What did I choose? Leather working (key chains for everyone!), wardrobe planning, and cake decorating. My Dad wore the personalized belt I made for him until it broke, but I was most proud of the boxes that I frosted and topped very carefully with icing flowers. (We frosted boxes instead of actual cakes so we could practice our decorating skills without wasting food.) I studied the Wilton cake decorating handbook carefully and dreamt of a day when I could create 3-D cakes with star-tip details.

That day eventually came (see exhibits A and B), but along the way I learned to also appreciate simpler treats. Banana bread, muffins, and a galette instead of a lattice-topped pie — or the ultimate example, the famous Marian Burros Plum Torte. Burros, a cookbook author and New York Times food reporter, first published the recipe in the NYT in 1983 and it went on to become one of the paper’s most requested recipes.

It’s the kind of recipe that’s famous in certain circles, one of which is the food media sphere. It took me a few years to try it after bookmarking it, but once I made it I too fell under its spell. The original recipe calls for Italian plum prunes, which are very seasonal and can be hard to find. I found them once when I lived in Brooklyn, which is when my torte-making began.

Trying Marian Burros’ Plum Torte Recipe

The recipe truly couldn’t be simpler. You just cream butter with sugar, then you add a couple eggs, and then the flour and leavening mixture. Spread the slightly stiff batter in a pan; top with the plums, a little sugar, and some lemon juice; and bake. That’s it.

It sounds dead simple, and it is, but what emerges from the oven is pretty extraordinary. Tender cake with pockets of jammy fruit and a treat that’s sweet enough for dessert but also fruity enough that you can totally feel OK eating it for breakfast. As a rule-follower by temperament, I made it Marian’s way a few times, but then I stumbled upon a Times piece that mentioned that cooks had successfully played around with the recipe.

I was intrigued. One of the reasons I like sweets is that following instructions is calming for me. In other words, I’m not going to be cast as a Chopped contestant anytime soon. But I figured if other people tried it, why not give it a shot. And that’s when my world opened up.

Tweaking The Original Torte Recipe

I tried regular plums (such a risk-taker!). Delicious. I swapped in raspberries, then blackberries, then strawberries. Incredibly tasty! I skipped the lemon juice. No problem. I wanted to make it at my parents’ house and they didn’t have the 10-inch springform pan I always used, so I tried it in a 9-inch pie pan. It worked!

Feeling confident in my torte-tweaking abilities, I decided to really go for it and swapped out all of the white sugar for brown sugar, added some vanilla extract, and topped it with sliced peaches and a healthy amount of turbinado sugar. Holy crap! Replacing brown sugar for white sugar changed the dessert completely. The cake took on a caramely flavor and had a texture that fell somewhere between a cake and a blondie. It was rich but not overwhelming and the softened, slightly tangy peach slices were the perfect foil for the cake.

I was hooked. I tried my new version with blackberries and peaches, raspberries plus chocolate chips, and even thinly sliced apples. Good, good, and good. I swapped out half of the white flour for whole-wheat flour. No problem. I went back to white sugar for a hot second and added a bunch of frozen blueberries and then topped the cooled cake with a simple powdered sugar glaze. Yum! It tasted like a giant blueberry muffin. Drunk with power, I made the brown sugar version, divided the batter among a 12-cup muffin tin, and topped the muffins with chopped peaches. Amazing!

I was certain one of these variations would break the recipe, but Marian has done what rarely happens: She’s written a recipe that invites you in, shows you how it’s done, and then encourages you to take a risk and see what you can do. And when it works, you feel like a rock star. I went looking for dessert and found confidence, freedom, and something I could call my own. And what could be sweeter than that?

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