You can cake that s#$&: Random dairy

An addictive, citrusy loaf cake from cookbook authors Irene & Mei Li

Cake month continues with the second installment of you can bake that s#%&, a series that challenges you to look at leftovers and imagine them as dessert—in this case, an easy, addictive cake. 

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A nearly full jar of crème fraîche pulses like a tell-tale heart in the back of my fridge, bought for one dinner recipe and promptly benched. But it—or leftover sour cream, or plain whole-milk yogurt, or any thick dairy at all—could become cake and a climate solution. 

Reducing food waste might be the best first step in climate-friendly cooking, because it saves money and cuts trips to the grocery store—something I take seriously now that I lug groceries home on the subway, my hands curved into permanent claws. Food waste is also a climate problem that you and I can make an immediate difference on, because in higher-income countries like the US, households are where the most waste happens.

But changing our food habits at home can be tricky, in part because our kitchen environments can encourage inefficiency. No, really! Overlarge plates normalize portion sizes we can’t finish, bulk packages of produce go bad faster than we can cook them, and even the recipes we cook from can ask us to buy ingredients so specific we have nearly no chance of using them up in full before they sour.

That’s why I’m so obsessed with dessert recipes that take a laxer approach, calling for categories of ingredients, like any fruit for granita or, in this case, any thick dairy to moisten a cake.

But before we get to the recipe, I gotta tell you that the idea of cake flexibility caught me off guard. Cake recipes are some of the most rigidly written in the American dessert canon for one very good reason: loft.

As anyone who’s ever pulled a sunken cake out of the oven knows, Americans are discerning about a cake’s fluff factor. Unlike the French, whose word for cake (gâteau) can connote textures as far apart as crunchy (a dacquoise) and densely silken (gâteau au chocolat), Americans expect a fairly uniform softness, with a hint of squish. So for recipe writers to maintain said squish while letting cooks play ingredient roulette feels like nothing short of magic.

That’s the genius of the what’s-in-your-fridge citrus cake in Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking by sister co-authors Mei and Irene Li. Like the Lis’ other recipes, some of the cake ingredients form a sturdy backbone, while others—like the citrus juice and dairy—can vary depending on what you have. Orange juice or lemon juice is fine; and sour cream will do, but so will any dairy with a similarly thick texture, like ricotta or whole-milk plain yogurt. Those swap suggestions teach us to think in categories of ingredients, and they remind us that cake needn’t be such a strict affair.

This style of flexible cake isn’t so much new as it is a return to older ways. The author of American Cake,

Anne Byrn

, told me for my podcast in 2021 that thrifty home bakers used to make substitutions in cake recipes more freely. “People would have done that,” Anne explains, “because they maybe didn't have a full two cups of wheat flour. They would have subbed in others. They would have used what they had.” 

Recent recipe-writing trends may have coached us away from such Ratatouille-esque freewheeling; but if Mei and Irene have their way, we’ll all relearn this confidence, cutting waste—and making scrumptious things, like citrus cake—in the process.

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Recipe: What’s-in-your-fridge citrus cake

Excerpted from Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking by Margaret Li, Irene Li. Copyright 2023. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Even your neighbors who only like savory baked goods (you know who you are!) will love this cake.

Mei and Irene’s recipe headnotes: This is one of the easiest cakes out there (dump, stir, pour, bake) and oh-​so-​very flexible. When I first sent this recipe to my friends, we all went on a frenzy of citrus cake baking from North Carolina to Rhode Island to the Alpine village of Klosters, Switzerland. Over the weekend, we churned out about a dozen variations (and not because I made them do it, but because the cake is that good, I swear). Everyone made their own version based on the citrus and dairy in their home at that moment, from lemon-​yogurt to orange-​ricotta to grapefruit–​crème fraîche, and raves flew in from all locations. Whether you need to use up citrus, clear out some dairy products, or just bake a beautifully simple cake, this is the one for you.

Ingredients

• 1¾ cups all-​purpose flour

• 1 cup brown or white sugar

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• ½ teaspoon kosher salt

• ¾ cup sour cream, plain whole-​milk yogurt, ricotta, or a similarly thick dairy combination (see chart on page 331)

• 3 eggs

• ½ cup oil (neutral oil if you don’t want it to stand out, coconut oil for flavor)

• ¼ cup citrus juice

• 1 tablespoon grated citrus zest (about 2 lemons or 1 grapefruit)

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-​inch round cake pan or loaf pan.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a large bowl, whisk together the dairy, eggs, oil, juice, and zest. Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until everything is just combined and no floury bits remain (lumps are fine, though).

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a tester or fork poked into the cake comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes for a cake pan, 50 to 60 minutes for a loaf pan. Let the cake cool for 10 minutes or so, then run a knife around the edges to help release the cake before removing it from the pan. Glaze or soak the cake if desired (see Note) and store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days—​if it lasts that long.

Got extra juice?

If you have a bit of extra citrus juice to use up, combine it with a small amount of sugar to soak the cake or a large amount of sugar to glaze the top. To soak the cake, heat ¼ cup juice with 1 tablespoon sugar until the sugar dissolves, then pour over the cake while still warm. To glaze the cake, whisk 2 to 3 tablespoons juice with 1 cup powdered sugar and drizzle over the cake once cool.

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More tips on caking random dairy

• Crême fraiche and sour cream are generally swappable in cake batter, since they have a similar tang.

• Whole-milk yogurt will get the job done too, but may be a smidge less tangy, depending on the brand.

• If a recipe calls for plain whole-milk yogurt but you only have Greek, water your thïcc Greek yogurt down a bit (about 3 parts yogurt, 1 part water).