When a Salad Becomes a Cake

Behind the Scenes in our R&D kitchen with Pastry Chef Tammy Saunders

Hello my friends, 

Happy Monday…I hope you had a great weekend! 

Today I am again taking you behind the scenes of my restaurants and into our R&D kitchen in Washington, DC. Already we have gone there a few times, to learn about how to make a Golf Ball Cake in honor of the Masters with R&D chef Jesús Serrano, and we also watched R&D chef Hector Contreras developing a chawanmushi—a savory Japanese egg custard—with the vegetable called kohlrabi. Today we are sharing a recipe you may never have heard of, something wild and wonderful. It is…Salad Cake! Yes, you can have salad and cake at the same time and yes, it is delicious. 

The idea for this cake came from our amazing pastry sous chef on the R&D team, Tammy Saunders who made her version of the Japanese salad cake, the Vegedeco Salad Cake, that she had heard about. She decided to create a Seven Layer Salad Cake for a party we threw at my vegetable fast casual restaurant in Washington, Beefsteak: three layers are cake (one beet, one celery, and another sweet potato) and then she has four vegetable layers in between made from butternut squash, zucchini, purple cabbage, and carrots. These layers become the filling between the cake layers. 

As you’ll see in the video, to make this cake Tammy uses traditional pastry methods – like whipping egg whites and yolks separately. We do that to give the whites a lot of air to give the cake a fluffy and light texture. One trick we do to keep the cakes moist is to brush the layers with simple syrup…which keeps the cake very moist when it bakes.

For the vegetable layers, we spiralized the carrots, cabbage, and the zucchini, and we roasted the squash so it’s nice and caramelized…as sweet as candy. Then we puree that super soft squash with heavy cream with a setting agent so it forms a creamy but stable custard layer. 

When it is time to assemble the cake, we cut our cakes into circles (maybe we will use the scraps for cake pops!), brush the layers with simple syrup, and spread each cake layer with a buttercream made from cream cheese and beet powder, so it's a beautiful bright pink. On top of each frosted cake layer comes the vegetable layers. 

We decorate the outside of the assembled seven layer cake with peeled and raw vegetables like carrots and candy striped beets which make the cake look like something from a fairy tale. When you slice into it you see all those vibrant colors one on top of the other, like a rainbow.  

Chef Tammy putting the finishing touches on her salad cake!

When Tammy and the team finished making it, of course they had to try it! It was a hit, especially the contrast in textures of the crunchiness of the raw vegetables on top and decorating the sides, with the fluffy cake and creamy frosting. I think it’s a great recipe that is going to end up on our menu pretty close to what you see here. As Tammy says in the video: “It’s a weird success!” The best kind of success, right?