It’s Time to Stop Baking Bread and Start Making This Foolproof Cake

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Across the country, home cooks are dusting their countertops, fighting over yeast packs, and showing their crusty, slashed-top loaves across social media.

Enough, says Dominique Ansel, one of the world’s most celebrated bakers. It’s time to move to simpler baking projects.

It’s not as if Ansel has anything against yeast doughs. His most famous creation, the Cronut, is based on one. But the founder of the Dominique Ansel bakery empire, which has stores in New York, London, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, is in a more basic mode now. His new book, Everyone Can Bake: Simple Recipes to Master and Mix (Simon & Schuster; $35), due out on April 14, wants to give confidence to even extremely novice bakers. It’s one of the growing category of books that uses a building block theory to help people master techniques, rather than blindly follow a recipe. (It’s not a new premise: Tom Colicchio published Think Like a Chef in 2000).

For example, Ansel’s go-to chocolate cake, listed in the book, can eventually become a show-stopping pear Champagne chocolate mousse concoction. His base cookie recipe and buttery tart shell, also have endless possibilities with assistance from dozens of embellishments in the cookbook.

Of all the unpretentious recipes, one of the simplest is for vanilla pound cake. If you haven’t thought about pound cake for a while, you should. It’s the most satisfying of desserts, and it’s infinitely adaptable. Delicious by itself, it can be dressed up with chocolate ganache, doused with a boozy syrup, or iced with a lemon glaze. Go ahead, top it with a dollop of jam that’s been hanging around. Get wild and use a scoop of ice cream, too. You deserve it.

“Pound cake is one of those simple one-batter recipes that you can easily make with a few ingredients you likely have at home,” says Ansel.

He’s right, up to a point: It calls for a half-dozen everyday ingredients such as butter, sugar, flour (although: Good luck!), vanilla, and baking powder. One element that not everyone might have, unless they’re a true lover of French dairy products, is crème fraîche. For Ansel, it’s the secret to his incredibly dense, rich cake because it’s creamier, with a more elegant tang than the sour cream so often called for.

“Crème fraîche keeps the cake really moist, and there’s a bit of acidity and tang that balances the sweetness. And it adds a rich texture that you don’t get from anything else,” Ansel says.

If you can find crème fraîche, you won’t be sorry. But if you can’t, don’t worry. In his book, Ansel tells a lovely story about the first cake he ever made, as a kid in France. It was gateau au yaourt, and it was based on a container of yogurt with the recipe on it; the empty container could be used to measure out the other ingredients. Ansel used that recipe “as a canvas” to experiment on—and never stopped. Which is to say that you can also use Greek yogurt in a pinch.

The following recipe is adapted from Ansel’s Everyone Can Bake cookbook.

My Go-To Vanilla Pound Cake

Serves 8–10

4 large eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
½ cup crème fraîche or plain Greek yogurt, at room temperature
2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for the pan
¾ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
6 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted, plus more for the pan
1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Butter the bottom and sides of a standard, 9-by-5-inch loaf pan and coat lightly with flour.

In a bowl, beat the eggs and sugar on high speed until light colored and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Stir a little of the mixture into the crème fraîche to lighten it, then add the mixture back to the bowl and lightly whisk until incorporated.

In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt. Working in three batches, gently fold the dry ingredients into the egg mixture until no flour remains. Whisk in the melted butter and vanilla just until combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 1 hour until golden, but the center still jiggles a little in the middle. Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then run a knife around the edge and turn the cake out of the pan. Set right side up on a plate and serve.

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