Have a hot pink weekend
with Lisa Donovan’s strawberry cake
Strawberry cake forever
“My mother hates when I talk about these things…”
Lisa Donovan is going to tell her story no matter what. The Southern writer, New York Times columnist, and memoirist is our guest this week on She’s My Cherry Pie. She tells host Jessie Sheehan about growing up in a “Little Debbie house” and her first “pastry chef endeavor” (heating Chips Ahoy! cookies in the toaster oven and squishing a marshmallow between them). A sign of good things to come.
Lisa’s path is interesting because while she worked in restaurants and sold pies “literally out of the trunk of my car,” she was enraptured by the world of narrative writing, not necessarily recipe writing. After publishing a powerful essay in Food & Wine during the depths of the Me Too movement—for which she’d win a James Beard award—she sold a book that would enter the food memoir canon, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger.
She combines both in her column at the Times, where you can read beautifully told stories about Southern living and then heat the oven to make her famous Buttermilk Chess Pie, or roll up your sleeves to make her grandmother’s fantastic flour tortillas. Lucky for us, the topic this week was her pinker-than-pink Strawberry Layer Cake, a Southern classic that looks and tastes like summer. If you’ve got plans this weekend, we hope they include making this cake.
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Lisa loves 9-inch cake pans
How to Cook a Wolf, a classic by M.F.K. Fisher, was a huge inspiration for Lisa’s writing career
A pink-perfect plate for your cakes
Coach’s cute strawberry earrings are half-off
Wise words
“[Strawberry cake] reminds us that there is life to be had and cake to be eaten,”
–Lisa Donovan in NYT
Rabbit hole to chase
Lisa mentions the Southern culture of layer cakes known as “church cakes”—served at post-church gatherings—as does author Cheryl Day on the Cherry Bombe podcast, a dessert that conjures up a whole community. Need a book on this!
Tip of the week
For an extra fluffy strawberry frosting, Lisa starts with butter and cream cheese in the stand mixer with a paddle, then switches to the whisk attachment to gradually aerate the powdered sugar. So fluff.
Question for the class
Lisa mentions making “doughnuts” with smushed up Wonder Bread rolled in cinnamon sugar. Have you ever??
Fresh baked news
And Clare de Boer’s strawberry cobbler
We need this fruit platter
The Lenox spice village: cake edition
From the archives
Cheryl Day chats all about biscuits
The cherry on top
Jubilee L.A. tickets are on sale now
PDX Bombesquad! Join us on Friday, July 25th, for a special event
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POV me chasing down that rabbit hole
Re a “church cake” cookbook. They already exist. I have The Church Ladies’ Divine Desserts by Brenda Rhodes Miller & then there is Joyce White’s Brown Sugar: Soul Food Desserts from Family & Friends. A companion to her Soul Food: Recipes & Reflections from African-American Churches.
& who can forget the homecoming/reunion chapter in Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking with the meal her mother brought for what some call supper on the grounds.