A Special Dessert No Matter What’s in Your Pantry

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/magazine/french-icebox-cake-recipe.html

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And so now we are four: On March 17, days after New York City “paused,” our son, Joshua, and daughter-in-law, Linling, came to live with us in our house in eastern Connecticut. Joshua was in preschool when we bought the house, and back then, we’d come here for weekends. His Lego villages are still intact, the models he built are still on shelves and there are still enough of his T-shirts around for him to grab one and go practice foul shots. But ever since Michael, my husband, and I moved here fuller time about a dozen years ago, we’ve claimed corners of the small house for ourselves. Joshua’s childhood bedroom is now Michael’s office, as well as the room with the TV. There are bookcases everywhere and chocolate in cool, dark places upstairs and down. While there are enough plates, bowls and serving dishes to set the table for a banquet, the house can’t hold a crowd. It’s doing the best it can with four of us here. So are we.

I tried to convince myself that Joshua and Linling were here because they wanted to leave New York, but I always knew the truth: They came because they were worried about us, because they realized for the first time that we are older than we feel, older than we act and old enough to be at a greater risk from the effects of the coronavirus. They came to help us, to shop so that we wouldn’t have to leave home, to keep us safe. I fumble trying to find the words for my gratefulness and come up short trying to show it, so I cook. For them, for us and for myself — knowing that I’ll be cooking dinner for my family sustains me.

I cook most, but not all, nights. Michael makes pizza every Tuesday. Joshua and Linling make elegant pasta dishes and vegetable plates on the weekend. Linling makes the salad every night — I love how her palate tips bitter and how smart she is about mixing things when we’re short on greens, as we are a lot lately. I make food from cookbooks I never opened before, from recipes I created a long time ago and haven’t thought about for years, from inspiration, from whim, from necessity: the wrinkled apple and the sprouted onion were braised with a chicken. When I made the Moka Dupont for dessert, the kids were as surprised by it as I was when I first tasted it.

The recipe comes from Bernard Collet. Bernard and his wife, Martine, Parisians, have been our friends for 40 years. We’ve eaten at each other’s homes countless times. (Well, countless for me, but knowable for Martine, who keeps handwritten notebooks detailing the meals she cooks for dinner parties.) Given how long we’ve known each other, it’s odd that it was only 10 or so years ago that I learned about the Moka Dupont, the cake that Bernard often has on his birthday and the one he often makes for family celebrations. When Bernard served it to us, I missed a beat before smiling. I’d been expecting a cake-cake, something tall, soft, frosted and fit for candles. I was waiting for a gâteau but got four layers of cookies held together with four layers of frosting. Bernard’s cake is an old-fashioned icebox cake! It’s homey — it’s meant to be — with a sleek, spare look.

The first person in Bernard’s family to make the cake was his grandmother, who got the recipe from her neighbor, a Madame Dupont, from whom the dessert gets its name. Bernard thinks he had his first Moka Dupont in the 1950s, maybe for his 5th birthday. The recipe, as it was given to Bernard and as he always makes it, calls for Thé Brun cookies, store-bought tea biscuits that are common in France. (I think it might have been a back-of-the-box recipe, since I’ve come across similar ones, but Bernard holds to his family’s story, and I like that.) The cookies are dipped in espresso — the “Moka” — arranged on a platter and then smoothed with a thin layer of chocolate buttercream. The buttercream is very sweet, but the espresso is very strong. They bring out the best in each other. Bernard runs a fork across the last swish of frosting, his hallmark on the cake. I don’t, and he seemed a bit disappointed when he saw that I topped the cake with grated chocolate.

I’ve made other changes. I couldn’t find Thé Brun in America, so I constructed the cake with Petit Beurre cookies. And now I can’t even find those. My latest Moka Dupont was made with Nabisco Social Teas, an exceedingly plain cookie that’s even older than the recipe. While Bernard is precise about the type and number of cookies he uses, the layout and the layers, the top decoration and the amount of seconds each cookie should be dipped in the coffee (too long and the cookies are too soft; too short and you don’t get enough flavor), I take a more casual approach, one that felt quite American to me when I first made the cake and one that’s perfect for this moment. I consider the recipe a template, using whatever cookies I’ve got and sometimes just making little sandwiches rather than a whole cake.

Every time I make a Moka Dupont, I remember how delighted Bernard was when he presented the cake to us. I feel the same delight sharing his cake with my family, passing it on to another generation, offering it as comfort during complicated times. And so I bring this pretty cake to them as a treat and a thank you, hoping that when they recall these months, they’ll remember the sweetness of sharing something simple, made by hand, just for them.

Recipe: Moka Dupont