chocolate olive oil cake + more book tour!

Two weeks from today, my second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant & Unfussy New Favorites will be leaving warehouses* to reach bookstores or perhaps your front door (if you’ve preordered the book) and I cannot believe it’s so close now. Last month, I shared the trailer for the book and told you all about the book tour that begins the day the book comes out and I promised additional cities would be added. Today is the day! The book tour page — see it in full right here, or click on the image below — now includes Minneapolis, Atlanta, Montreal, Kansas City, Denver, Boulder, Tulsa, Maplewood NJ and an additional book signing in New York City, in addition to the events already planned in Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles.

The book launch will be right here in New York City two weeks from tonight at Barnes & Noble Union Square. Amanda Hesser of Food52, New York Times, and James Beard Award-winning fame and I will chat, and a book signing will follow. Prepare to spot all sorts of Smitten Kitchen Family Members, eager to share stories about what a terrible cook I was as a kid.

Will you come say hi? I hope you do. I hope we get to hang out.

Is the book tour not coming to your town? I have you covered. No, I have not figured out how to clone myself (we all know I’d just make the clone do the dishes anyway) but even better, you can pre-order a signed cookbook inscribed any way you wish through The Strand, a beloved bookstore in my neighborhood. I am inscribing these books next week, so if you’d like yours to go out with the other preorders, with the goal of arriving when the book is released, please please please order before 10/16? I will still be delighted to sign all other orders that come in, but it will be when I can stop by between book tour stops.

Pre-Order A Custom Inscribed Cookbook

Finally, just a tiny update: The 92Y event with David Lebovitz had been listed as sold out but they moved it to a bigger room and now it is not. (Yay.)

* If you follow @smittenkitchen Instagram Stories, you might know I flew down to Maryland to personally visit them in their temporary home a week and a half ago.

Now, about that Chocolate Olive Oil Cake.

A year or so ago, I got really obsessed with the idea of making a chocolate olive oil cake for fall. Why is it a fall and not a spring or summer cake? I cannot answer this. I can only tell you that I made one I’d read a lot about but ended up underwhelmed. I’ve been asked before what I do when I bake something that comes out all wrong and I think it’s important that I eradicate any thread of an esteemed opinion you might have left for me with this: I have a tantrum. I stomp out of the kitchen in a huff, or at least the mental equivalent of it, and I’m crabby and cranky and resent the recipe that should have been better and the loss of time I could have been doing anything else. (Like cleaning out my closet!) (Let’s pretend I wouldn’t make 100 other cakes before getting around to it.) When I get past that, I rarely take another stab at it again the next day; we need some space. It’s usually “later,” i.e. whenever the craving strikes again or I think I have a fresh way to go about it. This time it took a year and it was a little of both.

The craving arrived because it was fall, which again, I cannot explain but it might have something to do with the subtle, earthier quality olive oil imparts in chocolate, especially when flecked with sea salt. It feels fall-ish, even if the weather outside is defiantly summer-ish. Separately, someone told me about his family’s go-to chocolate cake that’s made for every birthday that’s plush and perfect and never fails. The recipe had the title Wacky Cake on it. I had never heard of a wacky cake. It turns out I’m among the few.

Wacky Cake — a.k.a. “Cockeyed Cake,” if you’re a Peg Bracken fan, which really, who is not, or Depression Cake — is a single-layer chocolate cake that’s has 7 ingredients, all of which are in your kitchen right now, and takes 5 minutes to put together. Some versions are even mixed in the baking pan. I am completely burying the lede here, but it’s also vegan, as in, butter and milk-free and — this is the crazy part — egg-free as well, no flax eggs or canned bean liquid required. The chocolate glaze here is not traditional, but I couldn’t resist; it too is vegan if you use dairy-free chocolate chips.

Typically, it’s fairly thin and the proportion of cocoa powder to flour is relatively low; it yields a brown cake, but not one chocolaty enough to please the likes of me. I increased the proportions of the cake to make it taller and tweaked the cocoa to be more dominant and ended up with a nearly pitch-black cake. Typically, any oil is used but I found in this cake the perfect chance to realize my chocolate olive oil cake dreams in a cake I think we should all stop what we are doing and make right now. Because if there are people out there whose Tuesdays are not improved by a thick slice of perfect chocolate cake, well, I haven’t met any.