A New Column: Cooking with Kent and Vidushi

Dearest readers of Mirror,

We’re starting a cooking column! Why, you may ask? It’s our hope that this column will be a joyful celebration of community and culture through food. People bring recipes with them across borders and pass them down for generations. Our humanity is contained within these recipes and in the stories we tell about the food we prepare for each other. As college students, we are often far from the sweet familiarity of our families’ cooking and the stories that accompany it. In this column, we want to share some of those stories.

We believe the secret ingredient of cooking is love. In our own lives, we both have loved cooking and sharing food with our family and friends. Preparing food for others is a wonderful way to show your love for them. After all, when we share a meal, the most important thing isn’t what’s on the table, but who’s sitting around it. 

Foods also mark our passage through the year. That is why we are excited to debut our column with a recipe for strawberry cake to celebrate the summer berry, whose sweet taste is redolent of hot sun, picnics and endless summer days. Alas, an exuberance of berries in shades of the deepest vermilion and ruby red signals that summer is here. Is there anything more marvelous than strawberries at their peak? Without further ado, here’s Kent with his delightful strawberry-focused recipe. We hope you test it out!

************

Of all the summer berries, strawberries are extra special in my family. When we eat strawberries, my dad often tells the story of one of his first jobs: picking strawberries as a teenager in Washington state. 

In my hometown of San Francisco, visiting the Sunday morning farmers’ market on Clement Street has been a family tradition for years. For strawberries, Rodriguez Farms was our usual stop. They grow their strawberries about an hour-and-a-half drive south of the city, five miles inland, overlooking Monterey Bay. 

While back in San Francisco this summer, I returned to the farmers’ market and picked out three pints of Albion strawberries the other day from the Rodriguez Farms stand. They had both Monterrey and Albion varieties; the vendor said Albion is the sweetest. Indeed, they were exquisite, as intensely sweet and fragrant as any I have ever had. 

The berries went quickly. But two days later, I realized I needed to do something with what remained before they went bad — so I decided to bake a cake to share with my friends. Well, actually, I had originally planned to make a tart. I used a recipe for Alsatian tart dough from Deborah Madison’s stellar cookbook, “The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.” However, the resulting pastry rose too much to make a good tart and had such a cake-like taste that I decided to improvise. I sliced the “tart” crosswise, filled it with homemade strawberry jam and topped it with more strawberries. 

I’ve adapted that recipe here. It makes a most delectable and simple cake with a rich, eggy flavor that pairs particularly well with fresh fruit. Cooking is all about improvising! The possibilities are endless: add a drop of rose water to the jam or mix in some raspberries; serve it with clouds of whipped cream, a scoop of ice cream, or a cup of tea. But most importantly, share a slice with someone you care about.

Kent’s Strawberry Cake Recipe:

Ingredients:

1. For the cake:

• ½ cup unsalted butter
• ½ cup sugar
• 3 eggs at room temperature
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup flour

2. For the jam:

• 2 cups strawberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• Zest of ½ a lemon

3. Additional sliced strawberries for the top of the cake

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and butter a round baking dish.

2. Make the cake: using a handheld mixer, combine all ingredients but eggs, then add in the eggs one at a time. Pour the batter into the baking dish and bake for about half an hour, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

 3. Make the jam: add all jam ingredients to a saucepan. Smash the strawberries using a potato masher, then bring to a simmer and cook until the jam turns a dark shade of red and thickens — should take about 10-15 minutes. Refrigerate.

4. Slice the cake in half crosswise to make the cake into two layers. Spread the strawberry jam in between the two halves, and top with more jam and sliced strawberries.

---

---