Cake baking, like painting or ceramics, is an art honed with time. That’s only part of why my latest recipe, a persimmon cake, feels like such a celebration of growth.
Arriving at this moist, bouncy recipe was not easy. Along the way, there were many flops that came out too boring or too bland. There was the version with soggy persimmons and soggier cake. Another started with butter creamed with sugar, the classic way, but the crumb was tough and greasy. For one test, I macerated the fresh fruit in maple syrup and spooned it over a yellow sponge, which felt like cheating because it wasn’t a persimmon cake, really — just a cake with persimmons.
The best persimmon is ripe, sliced and eaten over the sink. Was that, in part, why it was so hard to bake into a cake?
“They seem to be a fruit that many home cooks find challenging,” said Ethan Pikas, the chef and owner of Cellar Door Provisions in Chicago. He and his team seem to relish persimmons, serving up many a dessert over the years, including persimmon sticky toffee pudding, persimmon upside-down cake, smoked persimmon beignets and a custard-based persimmon torte Mr. Pikas is working on now.
I’ve not been as adept in harnessing persimmon’s potential. But, after even more tinkering and hair pulling, I’ve finally started to crack its code — five years on. It was well worth the wait. The resulting cake has one of the best textures and flavors I’ve ever achieved from scratch, something a box cake could never do.
Here are the three keys to unlocking its magic.
Draw out persimmons’ moisture
One difficult thing about baking with many fruits, and specifically persimmons, is that they’re dense with juice, which can seep into the batter as it bakes and turn an otherwise light cake dense.
“Why don’t you roast the fruit before baking with it?” my colleague (and fabulous baker) Yewande Komolafe suggested, as I lamented to her about this recipe.
Her advice turned out to be immensely useful: Baking wedged persimmons until their moisture dissipates and their flavor concentrates leaves you with syrupy fruit that doesn’t sog up the cake later, giving you more control over the final crumb. Even better, the peachy orange chunks maintain their structure once baked into the cake.
Add whipped cream
After studying all of the cake books on my shelf, I learned that the right mix of both baking powder and soda results in the softest crumb, but it wasn’t until I folded whipped cream into the batter that my cake finally got its desired airiness. Whipped cream, it turns out, “evens out the crumb,” said my friend and New York Times contributor Ella Quittner, who also employs this technique in her recipes.
When the pastry chef Heather Dekker-Hurlbert was working at Cherokee Town and Country Club in Atlanta, one of the members, the cookbook author Shirley O. Corriher, loved Ms. Dekker-Hurlbert’s pound cake, which used whipped cream in the batter. “It turned my world upside down,” Ms. Corriher wrote in her book “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.”
The idea “came out of curiosity,” Ms. Dekker-Hurlbert said to me recently. “I had a great pound cake recipe using liquid cream but found it dense so thought the whipped cream method might work better.” Folding whipped cream into her batter lightened it by adding air bubbles, a technique she borrowed from another recipe that used meringue for the same effect.
Here, whipped cream isn’t just a leavener. A spoonful on top serves as a foil to the spiced cake and a complement to the persimmons.
Avoid competing flavors
The flavor of persimmons — almost pumpkinlike, reminiscent of figs but spiced and honeyed — is remarkably delicate. To properly capture it, you’ll want to avoid strong flavors that might mask it, like musky vanilla and molasses-rich brown sugar.
Once I began using ingredients that bolstered that elusive flavor without competing with it, the cake finally sang. A little coconut extract, a whisper of the tropical, props up the gentle sweet aroma of ripe persimmons in a way that vanilla extract can’t. A sprinkle of cardamom sugar on top before baking gives the cake a glorious caramelized crust without too much extra sweetness, and highlights the fruit’s floral qualities.
I like refrigerating the cake, taking slices from it throughout the week and microwaving them. The persimmon is a fleeting pleasure. It deserves a cake that lasts.
Whipped cream both lightens the crumb and tops the cake.Credit…Nico Schinco for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Kaitlin Wayne.
Recipe: Persimmon Cardamom Cake
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