Three bite-sized ways to make your holiday baking climate-friendly

A guest post (and a recipe!) from Caroline Saunders, of Pale Blue Tart

When

Caroline Saunders

, of Pale Blue Tart, a newsletter on baking for sustainability, reached out to me about contributing to Wordloaf, I jumped on it. I love Caroline’s measured approach to nudging bakers toward a more climate-friendly and humane sort of home baking, based on the idea that every little effort counts, and that’s exactly what she sent me to share. And I can’t wait to make that cake!

—Andrew

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In kitchens near and far, sticks of butter are warming up to room temperature and tinsel-painted cookie plates are coming out of storage. Hark! Holiday baking season is nigh—the best time of year to dabble in climate-friendly baking. It’s easier than you might think. Read on for three à la carte ways to whip up sustainable treats and for a holiday cake recipe that mixes the three methods together. 

Make treats that upcycle forgotten ingredients 

Saving leftover ingredients from the trash by turning them into yuletide treats is climate heroism. It’s as simple as that. Food waste is a climate culprit of staggering proportions, causing eight percent of annual global emissions; and in many countries, individual actions play a large role. In the U.S., more food waste happens in homes than anywhere else along the production chain. That means coaching ourselves to see uneaten food as the future snackage it could become has big environmental (not to mention budget!) benefits.

Baked goods are the ultimate muse and destination for leftovers, I say, since heat and sugar—two factors that extend shelf life—are hallmarks of baking and dessert-making. So scan your fridge before you begin baking up a storm, and imagine what forgotten bits and bobs could become: Spare egg whites could be meringue cookies, each crisp-ridged droplet dipped in melted chocolate. A glut of cooked rice could live on as arroz con leche, each bite velvety smooth with coconut milk. Heavy cream that needs using? Chocolate truffles. Citrus rinds? Candied peels. Bacon? There’s an answer for that, too: Devils on horseback muffins. 

Flirt with plant-based baking

Another path to lower-carbon holiday baking is to swap one of your typical treats for a vegan one. Animal agriculture is responsible for between 10 to 20 percent of all the emissions produced around the world each year—yikes—which means that easing up on animal products when it’s comfortable enough to do so is a climate win. It’s worth knowing that red meat is in a carbon footprint league of its own among animal products; but swapping out baking staples like butter and milk adds up, too. Plant-based milks, for instance, produce about a third the emissions of cow milk, on average. Vegan butter has a similar advantage over dairy butter, as does sunflower oil. Olive oil is a good choice too, with about half the carbon footprint of butter. 

That’s why I love an oil-based cake, like the upside-down cake below, which wafts the scent of orange zest and caramel through your kitchen as it bakes. (That and the fact that oil-based cakes stay moist for longer than those made with butter.)

Veganized cookies and pastries aside, there’s also a wide world of holiday treats that are plant-based in their original forms. There’s tang yuan, the chewy dumplings served at Chinese Lunar New Year, made with glutinous rice flour and filled with fragrant sesame paste. There’s tembleque, a coconut pudding which wobbles atop many holiday tables this time of year, often served in a striking Bundt shape. And there’s nougat noir, one of the 13 desserts of Provençale Christmas—each slice of the brittle, nut-studded honey caramel its own bite-sized way into climate action.

Begin to bake like a grainiac

Baking beyond bread wheat (which will be familiar territory for many Wordloaf readers) is another simple way to help the planet when you bake. It helps with climate resilience. Agrobiodiversity is nature’s built-in safety net, ensuring that a bad crop here or there doesn’t devastate the food supply. But the modern industrial food system has whittled the number of crops that feed us down to a fragile few, and has narrowed America’s dominant baking grains down to one: bread wheat. That’s the species of grain inside every bag of all-purpose, cake, or bread flour, and it’s facing increasing risks from drought and heat. To be sure, incorporating any lesser-grown ingredients into your baking—whether fruits, spices, fats, or sweeteners—is great for resilience. But flour is a natural place to start diversifying, given its ubiquity in Western baking.

One approach? Add a new-to-you, grainy recipe to your cookie plate, like Swedish rye cookies or rainbow crunch spelt chocolate chip cookies. 

Or start microdosing whatever you normally bake with funky flours. It’s generally fine to swap in an alternative flour for up to 25 percent of the all-purpose that a recipe calls for. (Substituting more could alter the flavor and texture.) It’s also an even better way to start familiarizing yourself with what different flours bring to the table. Use a dash of oat in the upside-down cake below, and you’ll notice its amiable mildness. Use einkorn and it’ll add a barely-detectable, nutty warmth to the flavor. Toss in a dash of perennial Kernza, that carbon-sequestering superstar, and you’ll have a cake that smells slightly of butterscotch—and comes with a story to tell as you pass around slices.

Recipe: Any Seeds & Nuts Upside-Down Cake

Put all three of these sustainable baking approaches into action with this orange-scented upside-down cake. The recipe prevents food waste by upcycling the dregs of the nearly-empty bags of nuts in your freezer (just me? k cool); and it’s plant-based—two carbon-saving moves. It also calls not just for all-purpose flour but for a portion of some other flour, too (use whatever’s in your pantry!), since branching out from the world’s most widely grown wheat is good for climate resilience. Inspired by Alex Testere’s mixed seed upside-down cake, this sustain-ified version is topped with a seedy, nutty olive-oil caramel that comes together quickly on the stovetop. Raw or roasted seeds and nuts like pecans, walnuts, almonds, sunflower seeds, and poppyseeds are all good places to start, but let what’s on hand be a guide. (Though a word to the wise: If you have fennel seeds, use ‘em! Your kitchen will smell like a holiday in Italy.)

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Any Seeds & Nuts Upside-Down Cake

Serves: 8

• I’ve tested this cake with a portion of oat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, einkorn flour, Kernza flour, and hazelnut flour. Let me know what you try! (You could also use exclusively all-purpose flour, in which case you’d use 180 grams.)

• Shout-out to Philip Khoury, whose Earl Grey loaf cake recipe I used as a starting point for my recipe development. I added more moisture, more acid, used different leaveners, and used a different baking temperature and pan to evolve the cake from a domed loaf in his verison to a flatter and slightly more open-crumbed single-layer cake for my upside-down purposes. And different flavors. Philip’s book A New Way to Bake filled a gap in the world of vegan baking formulas and has made recipe development like what I did for this cake far more achievable.
  
  

Topping

15g (1 Tbsp) olive oil

8g (1 packed tsp) orange zest, from about three-quarters of a medium orange

14g (1 Tbsp) orange juice

53g (¼ cup) brown sugar

pinch salt

40g (⅓ cup) mixed nuts, finely chopped

8g (1 Tbsp) mixed seeds

Cake

180g (¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons) sugar

12g orange zest (2 packed teaspoons), from about one-and-a-half oranges

14g (1 tablespoon) orange juice

60g (¼ cup plus 2 teaspoon) olive oil

200g (¾ cup plus one teaspoon) plant milk, unsweetened

150g (1 ¼ cups) all-purpose flour

30g any other flour (volume amounts vary by flour)

1.5g (¼ teaspoon) baking soda

3.5g (1 teaspoon) baking powder

1.5g (½ teaspoon) kosher salt

1. Preheat the oven to 325˚F (162˚C). Line a nine-inch cake pan with parchment paper, making the paper circle slightly larger than the diameter of the pan so that there’s a small lip (this will keep the caramel from sticking to the pan). Spray the interior of the pan lightly with baking spray.

2. Make the topping. In a small saucepan, whisk together all the topping ingredients except the nuts and seeds until smooth. Cook over medium heat, whisking frequently, just until the mixture reaches a simmer, about 1-2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the nuts and seeds. Spread the nut mixture in a thin, even layer over the bottom of the prepared cake pan. 

3. Make the cake. In a large bowl, toss the sugar and orange zest together gently with your fingers until the mixture is sandy and fragrant. To the same bowl, add the orange juice, olive oil, and plant milk; whisk until well combined. In another bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the cake springs back when poked gently in the middle (or a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean). 

4. Wait three minutes or so, then invert the cake and gently peel away the parchment paper. Allow to cool to room temperature before slicing. Cake will keep, tightly wrapped, for up to five days.