Hi friends!
I’m proud to introduce the Cooking With Maddie newsletter. At its core, this newsletter is a simple way for me to consistently share recipes, grocery lists, cooking tips and inspiration with my dearest friends and family. That’s you! But even more, I hope this newsletter acts as a weekly love note to all the people I’d love to be sharing meals with, but can’t because of distance, busy schedules and global pandemics.
My hope for this newsletter is that it inspires you to see cooking as a way to add more joy into your life. Too often, cooking is associated with stress, rules and perfection. Well, I’m here to tell you that that’s bullshit. Cooking should be fun! It shouldn’t be stressing you out, giving you anxiety or adding another chore to your list. It should be filling your day with more joy.
Whether it’s making fresh pasta for the first time (on my to-do list) or simply fancying up some toast (I ate tomato toast 4x last week), cooking doesn’t have to be intimidating or complicated. At its root, it’s just about making something that makes your day better.
I hope through my own stories of experiments, first-attempts and even failures, you’ll see that cooking doesn’t have to be this thing you dread. Instead, it can be a way to add more joy into your life. Hint: Most of my advice includes wine and kickass playlist.
For this first newsletter, what could be more joyful than a birthday cake? This week is Caitlin Quirin’s birthday, and in this household, there’s no better reason to stuff your face with cake than celebrating another great year of life.
For Caitlin’s big day, we’re making a cake inspired by a recipe found in Naked Cakes by Lyndel Miller. To be completely honest, we made this cake last year for Cait’s birthday, and we haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I’m a firm believer of “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” and there’s nothing broke about this cake, so we’re making it again.
Here’s what you’ll need for the vanilla cake:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
1 cup superfine sugar
4 eggs, separated
½ teaspoon vanilla bean paste or extract
½ cup milk
And the chantilly frosting:
2 cups heavy cream
2-3 tablespoons powdered sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste or extract
The middle and top layers are where you can really flex your creative strings. Love cherries? Throw some cherries in there. Are you more of a citrus girl? I’m sure that’d be bomb. For ours, we’re adding strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and mint.
The thing I love most about this cake (besides the eating part which will always be my favorite part) is the imperfection of a naked cake. The whole concept of a naked cake is that it isn’t perfect. It’s rustic. It can have flaws, and that’s the most freeing feeling you can have in baking. My biggest beef with baking is that so often, everything does have to be perfect. But with a naked cake, if it comes out a little lopsided, who cares! If your icing isn’t perfect, even better! Naked cakes are meant to be forgiving. The more imperfect, the more quirky it is. You can actually enjoy baking this cake because it allows you to scribble outside of the lines.
And because this newsletter is already over my 500 word-count goal, I’ve attached the detailed instructions for the cake instead of typing it all out.
In addition to sharing the recipes I’m making each week, I’ll also share what’s giving me life in this newsletter because it’s just another way of adding more joy into our weeks.
This week, Cheaper By The Dozen and Cheaper By The Dozen 2 are making me laugh my ass off and reminding me that Steve Martin is an American treasure. Don’t be surprised if you see me start a petition for a third movie because I must know what Charlie Baker has been up to the last 15 years. I’ve watched this Tik Tok over 100 times. These face masks made my Sunday scaries a little less scary. And this True Food chia seed pudding copy-cat recipe will be the recipe I’m trying for the first time this week.
I can’t express enough how excited I am to be sharing my cooking adventures with you all. I’m sure this newsletter will not always be timely and hopefully soon will be more designed than it is now (something's in the works!), but I do hope that each time you read it, it adds a little more joy into your day.
Wish I was with you,
Maddie