Cooking
Though, to be fair, it’s hard to imagine a time when Rick Martínez’s chocolaty take on the classic dessert wouldn’t be welcome.
Nutella tres leches cake!
Sorry, I’ll calm down. I just really love tres leches cake — it’s cold and creamy, light yet dense, sweet but not one-note. As a kid, my favorite part of the birthday cake-ice cream combo was when the ice cream melted into the cake, forming an almost puddinglike creation that had to be scooped off the paper Lisa Frank plate with a spoon. Très tres leches.
So I am, of course, very thrilled for this new Nutella tres leches cake from Rick Martínez, which replaces the condensed milk with chocolate hazelnut spread, and whisks a combination of that and whole milk into the evaporated milk and heavy cream. To underline the cake’s chocolatyness (technical term), Rick blooms cocoa powder in hot coffee for the cake batter and adds Nutella to the whipped topping. Serve your tres leches after a dinner of Rick’s chicken enchiladas or pavo al pastor for a perfect meal.
Featured Recipe
Nutella Tres Leches Cake
View Recipe →
(For my fellow tres leches lovers out there: Here’s Samantha Seneviratne’s classic recipe, Melissa Clark’s mango tres leches cake and a Thai tea version from Sam Yoo and Ligaya Mishan.)
With that out of the way, let’s move backward to dinner. December, to me, is lasagna month. It feeds a crowd; there’s a version for every taste and dietary preference; and, decorated with a couple of basil leaves, it looks so festive with its red and green. A cold winter Sunday is a great excuse to stay in, play some Vince Guaraldi and make Samin Nosrat’s big lasagna, a dish that is grand in every sense of the word.
Any weekend is great for roasting a chicken. Sohla El-Waylly’s dry-brined, spatchcocked roast chicken is excellent. Not only does it cook in much less time than a whole bird, but cutting out the backbone with my trusty kitchen shears makes me feel like some sort of butchering wizard. Serve Sohla’s chicken with Gregory Gourdet’s beautiful carrot salad with oranges and cashews or, if you want something a bit crisper but still citrusy, this simple endive and arugula salad from David Tanis.
French toast is also an excellent winter-weekend treat — so much so that I make a point to regularly swing by the Vietnamese bakery near me to see if it has any marked-down, stale coconut bread I can use. That’ll get me part of the way to this ipo pain perdu, a coconut-bread French toast from Heimata Hall, adapted by Ligaya Mishan. Their recipe includes instructions for making your own ipo — a Tahitian bread made with grated coconut and coconut milk — and I will certainly try that. But I’ll also try it with my discounted bread, giving it that extra coconut goodness with a dunk in coconut milk and a sprinkle of coconut sugar.