Welcome to Never Fail, a semi-regular column where we wax poetic about the recipes that never, ever let us down. This week: the pumpkin cake recipe that editorial web assistant Emma Wartzman just couldn't live without.
If you’re tired of pumpkin post-Thanksgiving, that's only because you haven’t had Tartine's pumpkin tea cake yet. Dreamed up by the incredible Liz Prueitt and published in the San Francisco bakery's first cookbook, it is so addictively delicious that its simple construction seems nothing short of a marvel. If it felt appropriate to eat pumpkin in warm weather, I would make this pumpkin tea cake all year round. But because it isn’t, I make it as much as I possibly can when the time is right—which, yes, includes the next several months. (And really, if you make it in July, no one will complain.)
I first had the genuine article at the actual bakery, along with a straight-out-of-the-oven loaf of bread and a handful of (ahem, like, six) other pastries. Even though pretty much every one of Prueitt's creations tastes like pastry nirvana, I never in a million years would have thought that the humble pumpkin tea cake would steal the show. And yet it did. The crumb was perfect, cake-y and moist and yet perfectly dense all at the same time, the exact way you want a loaf cake to be. “There has to be something magical in this,” I thought. “Some spice I’ve never heard of, or 12 different kinds of flour or a pro technique that will have me spinning in circles in my apartment.”
But I was wrong. So completely wrong. I bought a copy of Tartine the next day after flipping through it and realizing that all I needed were 11 ingredients, all of which (besides the canned pumpkin) I always have around. You might need to buy nutmeg or cloves (because I know you already have cinnamon in your pantry), but I’d be lying if I said I always use all three. Sometimes if I’m running low I will only add cinnamon, upping the amount by a big pinch. Once I winged it with some pre-mixed situation of warming spices when I was cooking in someone else’s kitchen. And guess what? It was totally delicious.
The method for combining the ingredients requires two bowls. Dry ingredients go in one, wet ingredients in the other. You can beat the latter together with a mixer if you so desire, but this godsend of a cake can be whisked by hand to no detriment of texture or flavor. The instructions also tell you to sift the dry ingredients, but I don’t do that either. You combine the two, being careful not to over-mix, and that’s literally it.
There’s a sprinkling of sugar on top to give the crust a sparkle and a crackle, which I put on if I’m in a sparkly, crackly kind of mood. You can add chocolate chips, because that’s never a bad idea. You can make a glaze if you want to go more festive. But my favorite way of all to eat this cake is with absolutely no embellishment at all, completely unassuming until you take your first bite.
In case its other forgiving qualities haven’t won you over yet, this cake cannot be over-baked. If you’re not a baker—or even if you are—the scariest thing about putting something in the oven is how to know when it’s done. But “about an hour” here really means about an hour. Check it at 50 minutes. If you’re unsure, keep it in for another 10. If you’re still unsure, keep it for another 5. And so on. All the oil and pureéd pumpkin makes drying it out nearly impossible. All the oil and pureéd pumpkin also means that it sits well wrapped up on the counter for days, even getting a little better after the first one. Though I suppose this last part doesn’t even matter, because there’s no way it’s going to last that long.