The laziest climate solution is trifle

Leftover cake? You can bake that shit

This one goes out to all the hardcore bakers who periodically have extra cake leftover, and also to anyone who’s ever bought a slice of cake so gargantuan that after shouldering your way through a third of it, you’ve thought to yourself: ‘What in the Betty Crocker am I supposed to do with the rest of this?’

Baking buds, leftover cake—whatever its cause—is a good problem. A very good problem. If you have extra cake, you have the makings of trifle—the ultimate lazy-bud dessert that also happens to be a climate solution. 

Over the last month, we’ve been jabbering fluently about plant-based baking (did you catch my profile of Philip Khoury yet?), but let us not forget: Turning leftover ingredients into dessert is also superhero-level kitchen climate action.

Here’s why: The food system is responsible for a third of global emissions. Food waste is responsible for half that amount, according to a recent estimate. And in wealthy nations, most food waste happens in households. That’s a big-boi-level climate problem with a solution we can all get in on just by using what we’ve bought. No new ingredients or baking techniques needed. Just ideas. So for every odd and end in sight, I say—whether stale bread, half a tub of sour cream, or a single yolk—let there be a dessert!

Leftover cake is one of the best odds to have, because its most fabulous second coming, trifle, is never farther away than the time it takes to plop together cake cubes and other stuff that’s probably already in your fridge. It’s more formula than recipe, really. And the formula, at its most basic, goes like this:

cakey thing + creamy thing + syrupy/fruity thing (or sometimes crunchy thing)

Lo, consider the possibilities. If you’ve got cookies or candy bars or pudding in excess, you could make Dan Pelosi’s Death by Chocolate trifle. If you have half a bottle of dessert wine sitting in your fridge, you could channel

Tamar Adler

and make Tipsy Trifle, layering together cake, Sauternes, and whipped cream dressed up with ricotta. Or if, like me, you are awash in summer berries, you could macerate said berries in sugar and a bit of balsamic, thereby coaxing out a zingy syrup that ties together the flavors and textures of cake and cream rather admirably. 

My goal when I developed the formula I’m sharing below was firstly to use up my test cakes from the balsamic-chocolate cake (my poor roommate deserved some freezer space back!), and secondly to nail my preferred trifle ratio. Some like their trifles cream-forward; I found I like mine cake-forward.

2 parts cake to 1 part whipped cream to 1 part syrupy fruit is just the ticket. Within that formula, you can riff: use any flavor of cake and whatever summer berries or even stone fruits need using up. Macerate the chopped fruit in balsamic vinegar or in any citrus juice, depending on what will pair well with the cake. And scale up or down depending on how many buds you want to serve.

To bring this formula to life, I knew I needed to call up

Nicole Kelner

, the climate artist extraordinaire whose Substack you should subscribe to if you don’t already. Girl’s got a way with distilling shit, whether it’s heat-pump technology or how to make cheesy-crisp croutons, which she painted for Pale Blue Tart in May. A full recipe for summer fruit trifle follows, but pretty much everything you need to know—as is probably also true on some more existential level—is in watercolor.

---

Art by the incomparable climate artist Nicole Kelner, a real-life friend of mine who I met through Substack. Always shoot your friend-shot on Substack!

Makes 3 single-serving trifles, in 15-oz stemless wine glasses

Ingredients

3 cups leftover cake cubes, without frosting

Macerated fruit

• 2 cups chopped summer fruit, like red berries

• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar or lemon juice

• 1 tablespoon white or brown sugar

• Pinch salt

Whipped cream

• ⅔ cup heavy cream

• ¼ teaspoon vanilla

Macerate the fruit by adding chopped fruit, sugar, acid (like balsamic or lemon juice), and salt to a medium bowl and stirring thoroughly. Set aside at room temperature for at least a half hour and up to a few hours, during which time a syrup will form at the bottom of the bowl. Toss occasionally. 

Whip the cream to just past soft peaks, then mix in the vanilla. I don’t add sugar to the whipped cream because I think the fruit syrup adds plenty of sweetness.

In each stemless wine glass, add the three components in the following order: ½ cup of cake cubes, ¼ cup of whipped cream, ¼ cup macerated fruit. Repeat once.