100 Recipes for Happiness
Because when it comes to happiness, you can always count on cake.
Sometimes a book can surprise its author as much as it surprises her readers. Anytime Cakes, my newest book (its birthday is October 21, 2025) caught me off guard. I set out to write a love letter to simple cakes – the cakes that can have frosting, but don’t need it; the cakes we nibble all through the day, cutting off slivers, slices or hunks and going back to the kitchen for more; the cakes we pack for picnics and school lunches; the cakes that come together easily; the uncomplicated cakes that capture our affection. And that’s what I wrote. What I didn’t expect was that many of these cakes would be bound up in memories. That was the surprise. And also the delight.
Working on the recipes, building the collection, I realized that I was recreating some of the sweetest memories of my childhood.
The anytime cakes of my early years were made by my grandmother. Sometimes she’d bring us her apple cake (the recipe I could never figure out, but now don’t have to because Sasha’s Grated Apple Cake delivers the same kind of joy), and always she’d bake us a honey cake with a few almonds on top that my mother nabbed (my cake is covered with almonds – my mother would have loved that!). When my grandmother no longer baked for us, my mother bought cakes from the local bakeries – she never baked a cake herself, never – and made sure that there was always a cake on the kitchen counter.
The counter cakes were simple. There’d be a lemon cake baked in a swirly Bundt pan, a marble loaf cake, fruit-speckled rounds, pound cakes, wonderful cakes with nubbly streusel and crumbs on top (my father’s favorites and mine too), cupcakes especially for us kids and on special occasions the beloved black-out cake from Ebinger’s, the famous Brooklyn bakery. As I worked on the book, I was surprised by the recipes that conjured the magic of these cakes, including a gorgeous Bundt that echoes Ebinger’s storied cake.
As always when I’m making a book, I baked what I loved, what I yearned for and what I wanted to share. I played around with a few of my old favorites – I turned the triple-layer Bill’s Carrot Cake, which I’ve made for decades, into a sheet cake; I made my trusty yogurt cake into a berry loaf; and I even had the courage to fiddle with my classic Swedish Visiting Cake (hint – the fiddle includes rum-soaked raisins). And I created cakes with ingredients I’m crazy about – I was tickled when I made Very Cool Brownies with peppermint patties and discovered that the mints, which baked into patterns like nebulae, held their signature flavor, and so happy when my small malt-and-banana cake was polished off on my granddaughter VV’s first birthday.
Rethinking some cherished recipes – they’re singled out in the book as “Treasured Favorites” and marked with a heart – and creating dozens of new ones was a joy. But the cherry on the cake, was having each recipe illustrated by Nancy Pappas.
Every time a new batch of paintings arrived, it felt like Christmas. The illustrations are a joy! I dare you to look at them without smiling. I can’t. Or wondering, as so many people have, are they paintings or are they photographs? I love that they puzzle at the same time that they please. Look carefully – you’ll find a touch of whimsy in each one, maybe a crumb that seems to dance or a glaze that sparkles like fairy dust. It’s the magic of something handmade by a spirited and boundlessly talented artist. I can’t wait for you to see the images for yourself.
I love this book and hope that it will spark the delight in you that it does in me. I hope it will send you dashing into the kitchen to …
Bake a cake.
Share a cake.
And spread happiness.
Because when it comes to happiness, you can always count on cake.
