I am sitting on my balcony with a glass of cabernet and a cigarette, staring out over my garden and enjoying the cool spring evening right after the first good thunderstorm of the year. But what would make this night even more self-indulgently decadent is a slice of my absolutely wicked gingerbread.

I know gingerbread seems like a wintertime food, but this is not the dry, brittle gingerbread-man variety seen around the holidays. It is a lush, moist, poundcake-like creation that works as a hearty dessert or as a breakfast nosh to get you going in the morning. It is a modification of a recipe for Hot and Sassy Cakes from Todd English’s restaurant, Olives, in New York City. It most likely came from Paige Retus, the restaurant’s pastry chef, and was originally for small ginger and spice mini-muffins. My adaptation changes a number of the spices and is baked in a loaf pan to be sliced like bread.
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My mother’s side of the family is of hearty Eastern-European stock (German and Hungarian, with a touch of Romanian), so family gatherings always involve large quantities of hearty Eastern-European foods. One dish that is present almost without fail is Chicken Paprikash and Spaetzel (Paprika Chicken and Dumplings). Here I present a rough approximation of my mother’s recipe for this Hungarian meal-in-a-bowl. I say rough approximation because the only part of her recipe with any actual measures are the spaetzel ingredients, but the rest of the ingredients are pretty much what she hand-wrote for me from memory, with minor modifications¹. I will try to include approximate quantities, and will note any deviations from her recipe.
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