A friend asked me last week how long it takes to get a recipe right. I told him the only answer I know: As long as it takes. I’d like to be someone who could “adjust my expectations,” make peace with “close enough,” or have the slightest amount of chill when it’s clear that whatever I’m trying to do isn’t something I can pull off, but we’re wired how we’re wired.

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In 2007, when this website was still in its infancy, I shared a recipe for a layered strawberry chiffon shortcake. I’d never made a chiffon cake before, but I brought it to a friend’s rooftop birthday BBQ, correctly assuming that no one would be unhappy with a towering, featherweight cake sandwiched with whipped cream and fresh strawberries, however inexpertly made.

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Somehow, despite how impossible it seems (to me, a person who has neither aged nor matured a day), it’s been almost twenty years since I first told you about my family’s favorite coffee cake. It’s tall, plush, crisp with a flaky layer of cinnamon sugar on top, studded with a quilt of chocolate chips and is downright, well, adorable when cut into cubes because they’re a little wobbly. When one tumbles, it shakes off a little pfft of cinnamon sugar, like a pup coming in from today’s blizzard. It’s perfect. It needs no changes or updates.

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It’s been 17 months since I first questioned whether anyone even needed another recipe for a basque cheesecake — the burnished, custardy and uncluttered kind that hails from San Sebastián, Spain — and concluded that in fact, I did.

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Welcome to the cake that has terrified me the most. You see, I have two favorite cakes. The first is my Strawberry Summer Stack Cake, the layered strawberry, cream, and butter cake version of the Strawberry Summer Cake in Smitten Kitchen Keepers. The second is the Opera Cake (Gâteau Opéra), a stacked and striped dessert with thin almond cake layers soaked in espresso syrup, chocolate ganache, and a rich espresso buttercream. The difference between the first cake and the second is that the second recipe was never going to happen.

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High on the list of cooking things that I’ve got far more opinions on than anyone has ever asked of me (and may have even, at times, prayed I’d stop yapping about), are homemade ice cream sandwiches. Why? Because it’s devastating when you realize something that should bring us nothing but incandescent summer joy — ice cream! cookies! — rarely work as well as promised. Most cookies become so hard once frozen, you feel like you’re breaking a tooth with each bite. Unyielding cookies also squeeze the ice cream out the sides, leading to drips down your arms and an immediate bad mood (for adults; kids, naturally, love it). While writing Smitten Kitchen Keepers, I became obsessed with creating a deeply nostalgic homemade chipwich-style ice cream sandwich that did everything right and I had three big a-ha moments along the way:

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A dozen years ago I shared my mother-in-law’s recipe for apple sharlotka (which family just calls “apple thing”), a lightly sweetened apple dessert that’s as much a thick crêpe as it is a cake. It’s got a short ingredient list and is the kind of thing you make on a whim. It’s so rustic and simple, I honestly didn’t expect it to cause a ruckus — it’s not apple pie, crumb cake, or even my mom’s doorstop of an apple cake — but you surprised me. It has over 1000 comments and I’ve seen variations on it all over the internet. So where does this come in? I think of this as Sharlotka 2.0: Fancy Pants Edition.

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Confession time! As someone with more opinions than I can fit in three cookbooks, one audiobook, and even 18 years of archives on this website, sometimes when I want to grumble about something food-related but it’s not the time or place, I tuck it in a little document called “rants” that is so full of cringe, you only have my permission to publish posthumously. But I can’t write a headnote for this particular cake without first owning up to #23 on the list in advance: “Apple cider cakes are lies.” Which begs the questions: Who hurt you, Deb? What gives? Essentially, my quibble is that you can put all of the wonderful fresh-pressed apple cider you want in a cake, but it rarely comes through to actually taste like apple cider. The flavor is not robust enough. I’m not saying it can’t be wildly delicious with all of the cinnamon spice we also put in these cakes, but it rarely, to me, tastes like an accurate representation of its name.

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