Delightful Kitchen-Counter Cakes With Dorie Greenspan
This remarkably flexible fall cake is perfect for casual mid-day nibbling.
I was primed to love Dorie Greenspan’s 15th cookbook because I adore Dorie. But also because this new book, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes (Bookshop here), is fundamentally unfussy. (Don’t ask me about my recent layer-cake debacle, I’m still not sure I’ve recovered.)
“The spirit of the book,” Dorie tells me on today’s podcast episode, “was cakes that just sit on the counter, cakes that are always there. So you come in from a walk, and you take a slice of cake. You’ve got friends staying over for the weekend. They can just walk into the kitchen and cut a piece of cake any time. And I loved that idea of always having something sweet for yourself, for your family, for friends. And just simple.”
We tend to focus on dinner here, but I love how these cakes fit into your everyday life. Talking to Dorie reminded me that baking can really help us home cooks tap into a sense of flow—and joy—in the kitchen.
Dorie says she thinks of baking “as this little cone of silence. It’s your private time.” She particularly loves when she’s “kind of in the middle of it. It’s that flow moment, almost, where you’re working, and particularly with baking, where you’re seeing the ingredients transform and change. I like the focus that comes with working in the kitchen.”
Dorie splits her time between Connecticut and Paris, and in our conversation, she highlights the differences between her cooking routine in each place, and tells a few stories about how her French friends think about baking—and dinner.
In Paris, she says, people “seem to have a much more casual attitude toward cooking and inviting friends over. They always say, ‘come home’ when they mean come for dinner. I love that.”
Dorie has lots of fall dinner recipes to recommend: “I bake all the time,” she protests, “but you know, I’m a responsible adult! I feed people food first!”
Of course, we got into Dorie’s new book, too, and she’s shared a little preview here for you today. Her Fall Harvest Cake is extra-tender from the inclusion of yogurt and olive oil, but the fun comes in when you start adding fall fruit, both fresh and dried.
But if you’d like to lean even further into those autumnal vibes, Dorie suggests adding in some very thin slices of butternut squash, or throwing a handful of fresh and dried cranberries in the batter: “I try in as many recipes as I can to give bakers and cooks a chance to play around, to use what they have on hand, to use what they love, and to just make the recipe the way they would really like it to be. And you can do that with this cake.”
Preheat your ovens and scroll down for the recipe—but first, can you double-check that you’ve hit “Follow” on The Dinner Plan wherever you like to listen to podcasts? That’s a crucial way that you can help keep the recipes and conversations flowing.
Win a copy of Dorie’s Anytime Cakes
This book is so delightful! Here’s how you enter to win a copy.
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Dorie mentioned:
Bill’s Big Carrot Cake: multilayer version; the sheet cake version appears in Dorie’s Anytime Cakes
Grandmothers’ Honey Cake (excerpted on Garden & Gun)
Colu Henry’s Maple and Miso Salmon (NYT Cooking, gift link)
Melissa Clark’s Sheet Pan Gnocchi with Sausage and Peppers (NYT Cooking, gift link) + this one from Ali Slagle.
Dorie’s Waffles from Morning to Midnight (Used on Alibris here)
NYT Cooking’s Easy Weeknight Dinners (Bookshop here)
Joanne Chang & Karen Akunowicz’s Myers + Chang at Home (Bookshop here), especially the kung pao chicken and Mama’s shrimp
Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts (the cover we discuss is this edition)
Dorie’s Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good (reprinted on The Kitchn)
From the ad break:
Guittard Chocolate: use code DINNERPLAN15 for 15% off.
Made In Cookware: Head to madein.cc/dinnerplan to unlock your discount offer.
Saturday Sauce: Use code DINNERPLAN20 for 20% off when you purchase two jars.
CookShelf: Use code DINNERPLAN10 for $10 off your first year.
Wildly Virgin Olive Oil: Use code DINNERPLAN15 for 15% off.
Unified Mills: Use code DINNERPLAN for 15% off.
Maggie mentioned:
Carolyn Cope’s Olive Oil Pumpkin Bread
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Fall Harvest Cake
Reprinted from Dorie’s Anytime Cakes by Dorie Greenspan. Copyright © 2025 by Dorie Greenspan. Used with permission by Harvest, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
It’s nice to add small bits of dried fruit to the batter for surprise, color, flavor and texture, but the fruit’s got to be soft and the pieces have to be very small. So take scissors to the chunky bits and then give all of the fruit a quick soak in hot water and a pat dry. I like dried cranberries, raisins and apricots here, but choose your own mix or go with just one kind of fruit.
Playing Around: Later-in-Fall Harvest Cake
As it gets closer to Thanksgiving, you might want to change up the fruit a bit. Keep the pear or apple, but add some very thin slices of butternut squash. Keep the grapes—they’re such a terrific part of the cake—but add some fresh cranberries to the top of the cake. And, if you’d like, add a small handful of both fresh and plump dried cranberries to the batter.
1 cup (200 grams) sugar
1 lemon
1 medium pear or apple
1½ cups (204 grams) all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
½ cup (50 grams) almond or hazelnut flour
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
¾ cup (170 grams) thick plain whole-milk Greek yogurt, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon pure almond extract
¾ cup (180 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup (about 150 grams) moist, plump dried fruit, cut into small pieces if necessary (see headnote)
A small bunch of seedless grapes, stemmed (about 1 cup; 170 grams) and left whole or halved
A small handful of nuts (about ¼ cup; 30 grams), such as sliced almonds, chopped pistachios, broken walnuts and/or pecans
About ½ cup (160 grams) lemon or orange marmalade or apricot jam for glazing (optional)
DIRECTIONS:
Center a rack in the oven and preheat it to 350 degrees F.
Coat the interior of a 9-x-9-inch baking pan that has at least 2-inch-high sides—this cake has a glorious rise—with baker’s spray and run a piece of parchment paper over the bottom and up two opposite sides. If you prefer, you can butter the pan, flour it, tap out the excess and line it with parchment.
Put the sugar in a large bowl and grate the lemon zest over it (hold on to the lemon for squeezing over the fruit). Reach into the bowl and use your fingers to squish and squeeze the mixture until it’s fragrant.
Peel the pear or apple, cut it in half from top to bottom, remove the core and trim the top and bottom. Place the halves cut side down on a cutting board and slice each one crosswise into scant-¼-inch-thick slices. Then cut each half in half down the center from top to bottom. Squeeze some lemon juice over the fruit to help keep it from browning.
Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in another large bowl, then whisk in the nut flour.
One by one, whisk the eggs and the yolk into the lemon sugar. You want to give the whisking a bit of energy and keep at it for a minute or two—you’ll feel the mixture thickening a bit.
Whisk in the yogurt, followed by the vanilla and almond extracts. Whisking all the while, gradually pour in the olive oil and continue to whisk until it’s thoroughly incorporated
.Pour it into the bowl with the dry ingredients and, still working with the whisk, gently stir until the mixture is smooth and homogenous. You’ll have a thick, shiny, kind of lava-ish batter.
Switch to a flexible spatula and stir in the dried fruit. Scrape the batter into the pan and smooth the top.
Top the batter with the sliced pear (or apple) and grapes—arrange the fruit any which way or in whatever pattern you like, lightly pressing each piece into the batter to anchor but not submerge it. Scatter over the nuts and pat them down gently.
Bake for 55 to 65 minutes, or until the cake is deeply golden and pulls away from the sides of the pan when gently tugged; most important, a tester inserted into the center of the cake (find a fruit-less spot to test) should emerge clean. Transfer the pan to a rack and let the cake rest for 30 minutes before unmolding.
Place a cutting board or a platter over the top of the cake, flip it over, remove the pan and peel away the parchment, then turn the cake over onto the rack. While it’s best to wait until the cake cools to room temperature to serve it, if you’re going to glaze it, now’s a good time.
Optional Glaze:
Heat the marmalade or jam with a few splashes of water in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring, or heat in short spurts in a small bowl in a microwave. Stir and add more water as needed to get a mixture that’s thin enough to brush on the cake.
Using a silicone brush or a regular pastry brush, coat the top of the cake with a thin layer of glaze—I use a combination of brushing and dabbing to cover the bumpy nuts as well as the cake. Let the cake cool completely.
Maggie, how I loved talking with you! Thank you so much for the good conversation and I'm so happy that you're loving Anytime Cakes - xoxo Dorie
I love Dorie xxoxo