Bread & Babka at GoldStone Farms

This cake is a non-dairy version of Amanda Hesser's Almond Cake, found in the New York Times Essential Cookbook and earlier in her column in the New York Times, August, 2001. Not all cakes can make the jump from dairy to non-dairy without suffering for it - but this one, which I've made several times, really stands up to the modification. This cake looks much like a nut torte, but does contain flour. Amanda Hesser credited the recipe to her mother-in-law, Elizabeth. She wrote that her mother-in-law described the cake as, "The Shar-Pei of cakes."  Assuming that her mother in law meant ugly but delightful, it's an apt description. The cake crumbles a bit along the edges and doesn't always slice perfectly; however, it's rich and very yummy. Choreography: The cake is assembled without any special tricks: creaming fat and sugar, adding other fat ingredients (almond paste and egg yolks) and moving onto liquids and solids.  The leaving agent is a combin

Egg Kichel  Recipe, thanks to  Inside the Jewish Bakery  by Ginsberg and Berg. Kichel  (Bow Tie cookies) often tastes like sugar coated cardboard. As a kid it was one of the few sweetened carbs that I could skip. With the advent of packaged "bow tie" cookies I think the product got even worse; however, leafing through Ginsberg and Berg's Inside the Jewish Bakery   a few years ago and reminiscing about many of the baked goods displayed I suddenly had an unexplainable yen for the kichel I never cared for. We delightfully found that home made kichel is delicious: crisp and not too sweet. I will make a comparison that some people will understand: it's like eating a sweetened version of chow-mein noodles (the wide kind). light, airy, crisp and way too easy to eat too many.  Egg kichel, along with less than delicious honey cake and tasteles chiffon cake was, at one time, a mainstay of the "basic" Saturday kiddush at the end of synagogue