This year, Met Radio is taking part in the time-honoured tradition of the year-end top ten list. Throughout the month of December, Met Radio staff and volunteers will be sharing their personal pop culture favourites from the year gone by. Visit the website every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to check out our best of 2023!
I always find list season a bit intimidating as it often feels like a chance for people to flex their most eclectic tastes for a crowd. Having just seen my Spotify Wrapped list for 2023, I can tell you my listening habits for the year weren’t avant-garde. What it reflects is that I like what I like. Wilco, Feist and Kendrick Lamar all made it on that top 5; artists who’ve been in my rotation for the past decade (or decades for the first two). So instead of looking back on the year through records that I maybe listened through once or twice or trying to pull together a list of 10 films when my first tip to the theatres this year was the spring release of John Wick 3, I’m going to focus on the recipes that I made for the first time this year, specifically the cakes, the cookies and the preserves of 2023.
A quick note: I’m a lover of cookbooks and I have quite a few. But I’m also a huge proponent of taking them out from the library to give them a spin. I’ve linked to any recipes that are available online with permission from the author (sorry, I know some are behind paywalls, but you can also access NYT Cooking with a library card) as well as links to the book if they are available locally.
Layered cakes
Miette’s Double chocolate cake
To start out the year, I made a lot of cakes and attempted to decorate them. I’m generally a “rustic” baker and have always focused on flavour first. For whatever reason, this was the year that I decided I wanted to be able to pipe with abandon. After a couple of light failures, an extremely talented pastry chef that I know suggested Miette’s book. This San Francisco pastry shop focuses on fussy but delicious cakes that are baked in 6” pans, a perfect size for trying things out and serving at a dinner party. This chocolate cake is moist and spongy with enough structure to be layered with tons of jam and icing.
Miette’s Hot milk cake
Another standard cake from Miette, this one is a white sponge that again, works well as a layer cake. This cake feels like it requires every pot and pan you have available and involves heating milk on the stove, an act that I hate doing (I don’t have a good reason for this) but it creates such a nice cake that I made it a few times.
Natasha Pickowicz’s Toasted sesame and citrus wedding cake
After playing around with my own flavour combinations, including a ton of home made preserves, candied fruits and a variety of icings, I decided to try an overly complicated recipe with a set flavour profile. I cut the recipe quantities down drastically and made this for a friend’s birthday. There’s a great video that goes through the entire process and the sesame crunch is an absolute highlight. I ended up decorating with candied kumquat flowers to add an additional finicky step. You can find the recipe here.
Other Bakes
Eric Kim’s Chewy black sesame rice cake
I cooked a lot out of Kim’s Korean American, including this cake. It has a mochi-like texture from the rice flour and the ground sesame kind of floats to the top of the cake creating some really cool looking layers. You can find the recipe here.
David Lebovitz’s French apple cake
Who doesn’t love a fall bake? I’ve made a much “cakier” German version of this recipe in the past but decided to give this one a go. It’s mostly apple and that’s probably the best part of it. Also I’m a sucker for a cake made in a spring form, it’s just so satisfying to release it from the pan. You can find the recipe here.
Camilla Wynne’s Whipped shortbread thumbprints
Okay, I mentioned that I like cookbooks and I should also mention that when I get really into one, I’ll often make a lot from it. So get ready for a bunch of recipes from Camilla Wynne. She specialises in preserving and pastry and her second book Jam Bake has been in heavy rotation for me both for the preserve recipes as well as the recipes that use the preserves. These shortbread cookies are a delight and I just made a fresh batch as part of my holiday bake this year.
Camilla Wynne’s Whisky Baba
This was my first go with a yeasted cake. While it wasn’t particularly impressive in terms of rise, copious amounts of marmalade and whiskey made it quite delicious
Preserves
Camilla Wynne’s Peach passion fruit jam, Strawberry margarita jam, Apricot and cacao nib jam and A different seville marmalade
Recipes for these preserves came from both of her books and all turned out delightfully. This was my first year of seriously trying to make marmalade and I spent January and February searching for the correct citrus and tracking down seville oranges. 10 out of 10 – would make all of them again.
Cookies of Christmas future
December is my big bake month and while I’ll be remaking some standards from years past, I have ambitions to try a couple of new things. These are from books that I adore so I’m just going to go out on a limb and say they’ll be delicious even though I haven’t made them yet.
Anja Dunk’s Schoko-Pfefferminztaler (Chocolate peppermint biscuits)
Anja Dunk’s Advent: Festive German bakes to celebrate the coming of Christmas is a staple of my seasonal baking and I’m hoping these cookies will become part of the repertoire. As a chocolate shortbread they’re a good candidate for vegan mods so that’s the plan. This book is broken down into 24 chapters and is organised by the lifespan of the cookies/bakes so you can start at the beginning of December with sturdier biscuits and take on delicate meringues and other delights later in the month.
Jesse Szewyczyk’s Buttered rum Sugar cookies
Cookies: The new classics is my idea of a perfect cookie book. Recipes are organised by flavour profiles and there are always copious notes for how to store them and what doughs can be made ahead of time. I have a number of go-tos from this book including some beautiful Campari shortbread and a perfect Matcha almond cookie. Buttered rum sounds like the perfect addition to liven up a plain old sugar cookie.
