My new favorite cake has a judgy name.
“It’s called lazy daisy cake,” my friend Ursula Reshoft-Hegewisch said as she handed me a slice at a barbecue last summer.
Ursula is a highly skilled baker, but this cake, which her mother used to make, was utterly unlike her elaborate meringue-topped tortes or fancy nut dacquoises. It was so plain it verged on homely: a flat wedge with a speckled brown top, unevenly blackened.
Yet its inner beauty shone forth. Beneath that dowdy exterior was a refined crumb, lighter than butter cake, more tender than spongecake. It was covered with a brown sugar frosting that managed to be both brittle and candylike at the top, and soft and fudgy where it met the cake. The speckles turned out to be shreds of coconut, which added a nubby chew and a toasted marshmallow flavor on the bits that had singed beneath the broiler’s fierce heat.
The titular laziness of this vintage recipe from the 1930s, as Ursula informed me, refers to the icing — a basic broiled topping, as opposed to the painstaking festoons of buttercream or seven-minute frosting that were the standard back then.
What seemed lazy for bakers of yore looks like an inspired hack today. Just stir together melted butter, brown sugar and coconut, pour it on the cake, then broil until the sugar bubbles. If the lazy road leads to something this delicious, who’s going to judge you for taking it?
Beneath that easy icing, the cake itself is equally retro and simple to make. A Depression-era favorite known as hot milk cake, it calls for minimal butter and only two eggs, which, with egg prices the way they are, feels very 2025.
The cake’s ethereal texture comes from the air beaten into the eggs, which are stabilized with baking powder. Melted butter and hot milk whisked in give the crumb a fine, velvety texture. Some bakers add vanilla for warm floral notes, and I’ve swapped in cardamom, which gives a spicy perfume that’s lovely with the molasses-y topping.
Lazy daisy cake has an overseas cousin called drømmekage, or dream cake, that’s traditional in Denmark. Drømmekage has the same hot milk sponge base topped with a brown sugar-coconut frosting, but it goes by a less disparaging name. I like “lazy daisy,” though. After all, the journey to dreamland begins on a pillow.
