The cream cheese contributes lactic tang the butter adds richness and the shortening keeps the cake light as a cloud. Like Zipes’s original, my Philly fluff cake recipe contains three types of fat: cream cheese, butter, and shortening.
#Blueberry crumb cake full#
While some spinoff recipes forgo one of these elements, trading the shortening for oil or skipping it altogether, I found in my testing that using the full trifecta is the key to Philly fluff cake’s miraculous light-but-dense texture. In his original recipe, Zipes upped the ante with three types of fat: cream cheese, butter, and shortening. Most cream cheese pound cakes contain just two types of fat: cream cheese and butter.
But what makes this one unique? I found the answer in a vintage copy of Bruce’s Bakery Cookbook. You’ll find cream-cheese enriched pound cakes across the country-they’re particularly popular in the Southern US. Philly fluff cake quickly became the bakery’s best-seller. Zipes swirled the batter with chocolate and baked the cake in a Bundt pan. The result was a moist, dense, super-rich cake, which has become our signature.”
“In this case, he took a basic pound cake and added extra cream cheese and lots of real butter. “My father Harry was constantly trying to make every item in his bakery just a little bit better,” writes Bruce Zipes in Bruce’s Bakery Cookbook, where he published his father’s recipe for Philly fluff cake. The Philly fluff cake was first invented by Harry Zipes at once-famed Bruce’s Bakery in Great Neck, Long Island. The versions from Serious Eats and Food & Wine both included a zebra-esque stripe of chocolate running through the cake which, as I’ve since learned, was how the cake was originally presented. Some food magazines and blogs have published recipes for Philly fluff cake, but none of them looked like my plush vanilla muse from Natale’s. But unless you’ve spent a significant amount of time in New York or New Jersey, you may have never even heard of it.
#Blueberry crumb cake professional#
Even after years of working in professional kitchens, this is the cake I still fantasize about. Baked in a tube pan, the cake is served with the bottom facing up to provide maximum surface area for the thick layer of powdered sugar on top (touch it and your fingerprints will leave impressions, like boots in the snow). What exactly makes this specialty cake so, well, special? The Philly fluff cake’s texture falls somewhere between angel food cake and pound cake-it’s both ethereally light and richly dense.
Throughout my childhood, the sugar-dusted cake showed up at almost every party, a permanent fixture at housewarmings, block parties, and Rosh Hashanah celebrations. And we are not alone: In our corner of suburbia, it has an avid fan base. My grandmother, my mother, and I are all bound by our love for this cake, a specialty of our local bakery in New Jersey. In my family the obsession with Philly fluff cake is multigenerational.
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