A blueprint for making your holiday more climate-friendly 🎁 🌿
Plus, a sustainable upside-down cake recipe to get you started 🍰
Climate Solutions // ISSUE # 102 // HOTHOUSE 2.0
Dear Reader,
As I write this, Cadence is traveling back home, and I’m packing my bags to fly out next week. However, we have a very special issue for you today.
If you read our newsletter earlier this month, we offered some food for thought (pun, unfortunately, intended) on how to make your holiday eating more sustainable. That issue was written by chef and journalist Caroline Saunders. Caroline has graciously allowed us to repost her recipe for an upside-down cake for your holiday meal.
If you make it, we’d love for you to share pictures of your holiday creations with us. With your permission, we’ll share them with our readers. If you decide to use Caroline’s tips for your own holiday meal, share those with us too!
Happy eating, dear reader. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. — Tekendra
P.S. Enjoy what you’re reading? Click here and subscribe to support this work for the long haul!
Solutions blueprint: How to make your holiday eating climate-friendly
Plus, a recipe for sustainable upside-down cake to get you started.
By Caroline Saunders
Make Your Holiday Baking Climate-Friendly
Prevent food waste by making dessert. Some of the world’s tastiest treats — from bread pudding to twice-baked almond croissants — began as thrifty ways to use leftovers. Train yourself to see spare ingredients in the fridge as the beginnings of something sweet: cooked rice could become an orange-scented rice pudding, and crushed-up Danish butter cookies could make a mean pie crust.
Bake with plant-based ingredients. Not every dessert can be recreated with vegan ingredients, but plenty can. (This four-ingredient chocolate mousse is a case in point.) And remember: Sometimes there’s a culinary advantage in choosing recipes that call for plant-based ingredients. Making an upside-down cake for your holiday meal? Recipes that use oil instead of butter result in a moister cake that doesn’t dry out after a day (or when chilled).
Experiment with climate-friendly flour. While subbing out all of a recipe’s all-purpose flour can majorly alter texture and flavor, microdosing alternative and whole-grain flours is generally safe. Substitute up to a quarter of the regular flour a recipe requires with another type, like einkorn or oat flour. Both have a mild flavor and are stocked in most grocery stores. This is an easy hack for agrobiodiversity, climate resilience, and health, too.
Recipe: Any Seeds & Nuts Upside-Down Cake
This orange-scented upside-down cake does it all, environmentally speaking. It prevents food waste by upcycling the contents of the nearly empty bags of nuts in your freezer that you refuse to throw out, and it’s plant-based — two carbon-saving moves. It also calls not just for all-purpose flour but for a portion of some other flour, too (use whatever’s in your pantry!), since branching out from the world’s most widely grown wheat is good for climate resilience.
Inspired by Alex Testere’s mixed seed upside-down cake, this sustain-ified version pairs a cake perfumed with orange zest with a seedy, nutty olive-oil caramel.
Use whatever nuts you have on hand: Raw or roasted seeds and nuts like pecans, walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, and poppy seeds are all good places to start.
(A word to the wise: if you have fennel seeds, use them! Your kitchen will smell like a holiday in Italy.)
Serves: 8
Ingredients — Topping
15g (1 tablespoon) olive oil
8g (1 packed teaspoon) orange zest, from about three-quarters of a medium orange
14g (1 tablespoon) orange juice
53g (¼ cup) brown sugar
Pinch of salt
40g (⅓ cup) mixed nuts, finely chopped
8g (1 tablespoon) mixed seeds
Ingredients — Cake
180g (¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons) sugar
12g (2 packed teaspoons) orange zest, from about one-and-a-half medium oranges
14g (1 tablespoon) orange juice
60g (¼ cup plus 2 teaspoons) olive oil
200g (¾ cup plus 1 teaspoon) plant milk, unsweetened
150g (1 ¼ cup) all-purpose flour
30g any other flour (volume amounts vary by flour)
1.5g (¼ teaspoon) baking soda
3.5g (1 teaspoon) baking powder
1.5g (½ teaspoon) kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 325°F (162°C). Line a nine-inch cake pan with parchment paper, making the paper circle slightly larger than the diameter of the pan so there’s a small lip (this will keep the caramel from sticking to the pan). Spray the interior of the pan lightly with baking spray.
Make the topping. In a small saucepan, whisk together all the topping ingredients except the nuts and seeds until smooth. Cook over medium heat, whisking frequently, just until the mixture reaches a simmer, about 1–2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the nuts and seeds. Spread the nut mixture in a thin, even layer over the bottom of the prepared cake pan.
Make the cake. In a large bowl, toss the sugar and orange zest together gently with your fingers until the mixture is sandy and fragrant. To the same bowl, add the orange juice, olive oil, and plant milk; whisk until well combined. In another bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 30–40 minutes, or until the cake springs back when poked gently in the middle (or a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean).
Wait three minutes or so, then invert the cake and gently peel away the parchment paper. Allow it to cool to room temperature before slicing. The cake will keep, tightly wrapped, for up to five days.
Notes: I’ve tested this cake with portions of oat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, einkorn flour, and hazelnut flour. Let me know what you try! (You could also use exclusively all-purpose flour, in which case you’d use 180 grams.)
Big shout-out to Philip Khoury, whose Earl Grey loaf cake recipe I used as a starting point for my recipe development. I eventually added more moisture, more acid, used different leaveners, and baked at a different temperature in a different pan to evolve the cake from a domed loaf to a flattish, slightly more open-crumbed single-layer cake — and used different flavors. His book A New Way to Bake filled a big gap in the world of vegan baking formulas and has made recipe development like this far more achievable.
This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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