Coffee cake so good you'll want it on your death bed

Culinary SOS is one of our most popular features -- you ask for a restaurant recipe, and the L.A. Times Test Kitchen does everything within the letter of the law to get it. Well, over years, one of the most...

Your morning cup of nostalgia: Cake baking in 1894

We like to think that we have one up on earlier generations when we talk about using the best ingredients -- fresh eggs, the best butter, the purest extracts.... But that's the same exact conversation that serious bakers were having...

Day Trip: Natural beauty, history and culture evident in Hillsdale

Going over hill and dale is fun when you end up in lovely Hillsdale, Mich. And that's the gospel truth -- even though our day didn't go as planned because of rain. That just meant we had to go over hill and dale again on a sunny day. Two doses of Hillsdale is good for the soul.

Best Bets: Sock It To Me Cake

The Sock It To Me Cake at Neely’s Bar-B-Que Restaurant ranks close to the late Mrs. Pandolfi’s pound cake. I use her cake as the standard to measure other cakes by. She ran the cafeteria when I was in grade school at Blessed Sacrament back in the 1950s and ’60s. One time I tasted her buttery-rich pound cake, which obviously was made from scratch. I’ve never forgotten it.

Deconstructing Honey Cake

‘Honey cake is not so much loved as revered,” Arthur Schwartz writes in “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited” (Ten Speed Press, 2008). Truer culinary words have never been written. Honey cake is a symbolic super food and an undisputed fixture on many Rosh Hashanah tables. But just as with fruitcake, which routinely is served and goes uneaten on Christmas, honey cake ...