Time flies and cravings change, however no matter present nostalgia hungers for, the sentiment reigns. Nostalgia guidelines. Current-day curiosity and the traditions of yesteryear collide, kindling fascination — and a eager for one thing it’s possible you’ll by no means have truly skilled.
If that sounds too heavy for a dialog about pizza, let’s speak about Brooklyn Blackout Cake and the recipe at hand, Brooklyn Blackout Pizza, for a second. It is a dessert that — whether or not culinary historical past issues to you or not — was created to show affection. In different phrases, in case you’re making it for somebody, you in all probability care deeply about them.
Brooklyn Blackout cake is a dessert obsession for New Yorkers of a sure age ( who you might be). The late New York Occasions meals critic Molly O’Neill explored Gothamites’ nostalgia for it within the Nineteen Nineties. It’s been written about and riffed on by writers, cake retailers and meals publications, from Bon Appétit to the Food Network, even because the quantity of people that can say with inceasingly hazy authority what the unique cake tasted like dwindles.
For the uninitiated: Business Brooklyn bakery Ebinger’s, based in 1898 (coincidentally, across the time New York’s first pizzerias rose to prominence), created Brooklyn Blackout Cake at the start of the twentieth century. The final Ebinger’s outpost closed in 1972, and its most treasured confection turned the stuff of legend. A 3-layer devil’s food cake layered with chocolate pudding, coated with chocolate frosting and completed with a dusting of cake crumbs, Brooklyn Blackout is a labor of affection. (Cookbook creator Katie Workman said it’s “an enormous, fats ache within the butt,” calling it “so tough, she suffers from what she calls PTCS: ‘post-traumatic cake syndrome.’”)
In response to a fantastic 2011 Edible Brooklyn article, Brooklyn Blackout Cake was initially referred to as “chocolate fudge cake,” with patriotic clients renaming it in honor of blackout drills carried out by the Civilian Protection Corps throughout World Conflict II. “When the Navy despatched ships to sea from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, all metropolis lights have been turned off, and home windows have been lined with black materials, lest enemy planes spot the battle-bound vessels,” the article notes.
“There was no different cake prefer it,” author Tish Boyle additional explains. “It had a chocolate-pudding filling, which gave it a restricted shelf lifetime of 24 hours and made it one thing particular. It additionally had an incredible look. It was like manna to chocolate lovers.”
When the bakery went bankrupt, Ebinger-ites purchased the final Brooklyn Blackouts and saved them in freezers (the story goes), carving off slices when cravings turned an excessive amount of to bear. Sadly, the unique recipe not exists. However, keen bakers have speculated about, imitated, argued over, lusted after, referenced, and riffed upon the fabled formulation because the final morsel of bona fide Brooklyn Blackout cake met its sticky, scrumptious finish New York Occasions’ Cooking part founder Sam Sifton referenced it just days ago!).
However what does any of this should do with pizza?
As a New Yorker sufficiently old to have heard the tales, Brooklyn Blackout Cake holds a selected… fascination. A couple of years in the past, Entenmann’s — the Brooklyn-born (now business) bakery that was a trademark of my childhood within the ‘80s — provided a limited-edition tackle this misplaced dessert icon. A friend turned me onto it, sending me on a wild chocolate cake chase to 5 supermarkets earlier than I discovered it. So sturdy was his nostalgia that even a business facsimile a long time faraway from Ebinger’s left a mark on me.
Now, I’m not likely a dessert pizza man. However the class exists, and the identical method I want there have been extra savory cocktails, I want there was a higher number of wonderful dessert pizzas.
Nutella pizzas are crowd-pleasers. I get it. These candy additions to pizzeria menus worldwide come topped with sliced bananas, strawberries, perhaps even some marshmallows or whipped cream. There’s nothing technically improper with them. They’re simply… all over the place. For years, I’ve questioned why pizza — the unique clean canvas for culinary creativity all around the world — appears to stall at Nutella in relation to dessert.
Enter Brooklyn Blackout Pizza: A candy end that marries essentially the most beloved and nostalgia-ensconced meals of New York — pizza — with one of many metropolis’s long-lost desserts. I’ve wished for years that another person would make it. They haven’t. I obtained uninterested in ready.
Ridiculous? Undoubtedly. Scrumptious? Sure.
To do a pizza riff on a Brooklyn Blackout Cake, you want a chocolate dough base, a pudding recipe and a satan’s meals cake recipe. I came across the dough in 2018, when Tommy DeGrezia, a pizza-maker in New York Metropolis maybe greatest identified for his 12-hour-risen DoughDici pizza, began taking part in with a cocoa pizza dough — his “anti-Nutella dessert pizza.”
DeGrezia, of Midtown East’s Sofia Wine Bar, lately shared his cocoa pizza dough recipe with Ooni. It doesn’t depend on sugar and is the least candy a part of any dessert pizza you make with it. He says it may be barely tough dough to work with due to how the cocoa absorbs moisture, however work it does — as a base for chocolate and white chocolate chips, marshmallow and graham crackers, ricotta and thinly-sliced fruit.
With that cocoa base locked in, a dough made with cocoa powder and melted baking chocolate — ethereal, not too candy, earthen — I assumed, “Why not attempt to pull off a Brooklyn Blackout Pizza?”
After taking part in with just a few recipes for the pudding filling and satan’s meals cake, I settled on some straightforward and sensible approaches that don’t require way more than a bowl, a whisk and a spatula. (You’ll have to attend two days for the cocoa dough to proof, although; no want for additional complication.)
Right here’s the attractive factor. No one actually is aware of what the unique cake tastes like! And Brooklyn Blackout Pizza isn’t a factor. (Nicely, now it’s.) So, you should use MY-T-Advantageous pudding or no matter business choice is on the market, and your favourite cake combine or store-bought chocolate cake for the crumb garnish. No one can say you’ve finished this improper — and it’ll nonetheless be an epic dessert pizza the likes of which few have ever seen!
This recipe leaves out the three cake layers within the unique iconic dessert, and it skips the frosting. Supposedly, a part of the explanation the cake obtained its crumbled end was to cover frosting imperfections. So, why go there? (And the way would you frost a pizza coated with pudding anyway?)
You gained’t need to bake the dough with pudding on it, so that you want one thing to weigh it down. You can blind bake with ice cubes or a metal dish within the middle. However right here, one of the rumored secrets to the unique cake’s deliciousness — a layer of candy chocolate (Hershey’s syrup or Brooklyn’s personal Fox’s U-bet — holds the important thing: A layer of chocolate chips on the dough for the bake.)
After cooking, it’s briefly cooled, then slathered with a thick layer of lush, darkish chocolate pudding, topped with a dry chocolate cake crumb dusting, and completed with moist chocolate cake crumbs. Three layers. An ode to the unique. It’s indulgent, messy, and all chocolate.
Usually, longing outlives understanding. However via doing and reimagining, nostalgia — whether or not relived or imagined; by way of elaborate whim or a labor of affection; for your self or for another person — can reignite the glimmer of a second of what has been (or what might be). That second can style candy and liberating. On this case, it tastes like chocolate pizza. Loopy? Yeah. However strive it. It is a good one.
Recipes featured on this article:
Arthur Bovino is Ooni’s Head of Pizza Content material. Arthur is the founding father of the 101 Greatest Pizzas in America and creator of “Buffalo Everything: A Guide to Eating in ‘The Nickel City’” and “The Buffalo New York Cookbook: 70 Recipes from The Nickel City.” You may observe him on Instagram @nycbestpizza.
