One great cookbook: 'Snacking Cakes'

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Baking is a precise endeavor. It's also often a messy one. Assembling a cake when at the mercy of our perverse imperial measuring system entails a floury, sticky parade of cups, tablespoons and bowls. So blessed be a cookbook that demands the minimal amount of baking equipment necessary to achieve sublime results. "Snacking Cakes" by Yossy Arefi is a compendium of 50 affable recipes for a variety of simple cakes, each mixed in a single bowl and all capable of being baked in many kinds of pans.

Versatility simplified

Arefi's core thesis is that this style of cake should be "low stress" and "not require much besides a reasonably stocked pantry, a bowl and a whisk." Gone are the prototypical cake-baking instructions that tell you to whisk together the wet ingredients like butter and eggs in one bowl, stir the dry ingredients like flour and nuts in a separate bowl, then combine the two — often with many additional bowls or a piece of specialized equipment like a stand mixer hopping in from the sidelines.

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Consider the Mostly Apples Cake. You begin by whisking for a good minute brown sugar and eggs until "pale and foamy." Then you add a neutral oil, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt, whisking until emulsified. In next go the flour, baking powder and baking soda. More whisking. You pour this batter into your choice of a square, round or loaf pan, top with chopped apples and toasted walnuts. Bake. Cool. Snack.

This is the core formula for all the cakes in the book's four chapters, heavy with a breadth of tantalizing recipes: Fruit Cakes, with that Mostly Apples Cake, alongside Berry Cream Cheese Cake and Swirled Jam Cake; Warm and Toasty Cakes featuring My Best Carrot Cake and a Powdered Donut Cake; Chocolatey Cakes, with 13 variations on the theme; and Not Your Average Vanilla Cakes, the heaven birthday cake ascends to when it dies.

Lily gilding, if enticed

Many of the recipes in "Snacking Cakes" are standalones. No icings or garnish-fussing required. Yet nearly every recipe also includes a section on flavor variations. If you were feeling sprightly you could yank the cake in a new direction.

That All the Spices Cake could have its vanilla and nutmeg replaced with cardamom and black pepper to flick at chai masala. Or you could top the cake with a fudgy caramel topping or an effortless glaze of powdered sugar beaten with milk and maple syrup and instant espresso powder. And, because whipped cream is always welcome with every style of cake, Arefi ends the book with the Put Some Whipped On It chapter. Cocoa, freeze-dried fruit, orange blossom water, créme fraîche, honey: All the kids are playing in this billowy sandbox. Cake has rarely had it this good and never this simple.