Turkish Coffee Icebox Cake

Kitra: A lot happened to bring us here.

Jordan: This is actually not the first time we’ve caked since our zucchini chocolate cake, but it is the first time it’s been worth writing about. Two weeks ago we attempted a blackberry cake for my boyfriend’s birthday, and it was… fine?

I never got to eat it, so can definitely say its googly eyes were the best part.

I did get to eat it, and I agree.

Kitra has been refinishing a table this weekend, so between her exhaustion and the un-noteworthy blackberry cake, we wanted something easy and foolproof.

And I wanted something pretty. Because I’m bored.

Which led us to chocotorta: an Argentinian chocolate/coffee/dulce de leche dessert that’s somewhere between tiramisu and an icebox cake.

There are few things in this world I love more than icebox cake and desserts you can eat with a spoon right out of the pan.

The problem is that back in February, Kitra moved from Columbia Heights to Eastern Market, which is pretty darn white.

*Hill East. But yes.

In Columbia Heights, we probably could have found dulce de leche at about seven different stores within three blocks of her apartment. Here, we tried every store we could without any luck. Kitra rejected my suggestion of using fleur de sel caramel sauce and making the whitest bastardization of this cake imaginable.

In an attempt to salvage the cake, since it took us all weekend to even decide on this one, Jordan suggested an adaptation. And I like cardamom, so.

So we ditched “foolproof” and did our own thing.

This turned out… really well?

Yeah, I would make this cake on purpose.

There are some things we’d change slightly (more on that in the notes), but we did high five after finishing the first of two slices.

Kitra: There are two dishes that define summer to me: ratatouille and this cake. What they have in common is that, like in most rural areas, where we grew up zucchini is both a gift and a curse. In trying to use it up as fast as it grows (impossible), people get crafty. Since this cake came into our lives, I’ve looked forward to zucchini season. And then “forgetting to clean up bits of grated zucchini and trying to scrape it off the counter weeks later” season.

I only have a hazy memory of where this cake came from. It’s on a printed ¼ sheet of computer paper, and in my head it came from someone at the school where our mom used to work.

Jordan: I had no idea, so we texted our mom to ask and she said “Somewhere in the back of my head I think someone at Riverside gave me the recipe, but I could be wrong.” At which point Kitra enthusiastically gave herself a high-five, then gave me a high-five.

Self-fiving didn’t work well enough, so I had to high-five the doubters.

Wherever it came from originally, it’s a great cake. It actually doesn’t use a ton of zucchini, but it has the benefit of being a great use for the infant-sized zucchinis we always had around, the ones that aren’t particularly nice to eat on their own.

You know, the ones that are better as weapons than as food.

In this case, the zucchini isn’t really noticeable but helps keep the cake nice and moist. This is a lightly chocolatey cake—light enough that even I, the person who doesn’t like chocolate cake and thinks chocolate chip cookies would be better without chocolate chips, enjoy it.

It’s a cake’s cake. Like a man’s man, but… a cake’s cake.

Jordan: This was going to be a bourbon cake.

Kitra: And then this happened:

And so somehow “let’s make a simple cake that we can take to work” turned into a ganache-laden marshmallow-filled graham cracker bundt cake.

But really it’s been building since about 2011:

(That was from back in my Boston Cream Pie phase.)

We took the structure from this Twinkie bundt cake, from Smitten Kitchen, but having made the graham cracker cake from the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook as an early Cake Day project and found it lacking, we turned to a Food52 recipe for the basis of the cake itself.

I’ve been pulling for a s’mores cake for the last month, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull Jordan out of her deep fruit rut.

It’s summer! There’s fruit! We can have cakes without fruit for the other three seasons.

See, this is what I’m talking about.

(Side note: Always refrigerate your fruit-based cakes if you live in a humid area. Otherwise they’ll get moldy and you’ll turn into a bitter anti-fruit crusader.)

(Side note to the side note: Fruit is dumb.)

Anyway. This cake was… an adventure.

And not just because we left to get a soft pretzel halfway through.

Soft pretzels are the opposite of adventurous, but okay. Point is, we made a lot of mistakes so that you don’t have to. Exhibit A: We started with a batch-and-a-half of the original recipe, realized it wasn’t going to be deep enough, and added another half batch on top like the cake version of the Washington Monument.

Overall, there’s nothing wrong with the way we did it, but this cake can be so much easier than we let it be. LEARN FROM US. Also, you should always use weights in baking but you should especially use them here because then you can measure things in grahams.

The instructions below are adjusted to be the way we should have made it, not the way we did, so you can trust them. Probably.

Although we made way more ganache than we needed (it’s cut in half here), and I’m not sure that was a mistake. Just eat that with a spoon, my friends.

Yay Cake Day

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Author: Jordan

Turkish Coffee Icebox Cake

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

S’mores Bundt Cake