Where to Find the Best Slices of Cake

Cake > Pie, always.

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My cookbook AMRIKAN: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora, is available wherever you like to buy books. I promise the book is worth it for the Saag Paneer Lasagna recipe alone — though lots of people can’t stop making the malai broccoli, chili cheese toast, moong dal waffles, shrimp moilee, and much much more!

It was also name one of Barnes & Noble’s best books of the year last week!

You can buy the book here.

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October always has me in a contemplative chokehold. My birthday is today, which always brings up a flash flood of thoughts — most of them about cake (and what the hell am I doing with my life?, but mostly cake). The only thing I ever really want on my birthday — besides luxury candles and this Gucci handbag — is a really great slice of cake. I am a cake girly through and through. I will choose cake over most desserts. There is no debating “Cake VS Pie” with me because even mediocre cake is still good. Mediocre pie is fully inedible.

There’s something about the porous and spongy layers, the thick swoops of frosting, the sprinkles or the edible flowers or whatever decoration has all the instagram bakers in a chokehold, and the height of a good slice of cake that is pure magic to me. It’s the dessert I crave most, and something that I would order for delivery all the time if it was available more easily! 

For so long, it felt like a space mission to acquire a single piece of cake, stacked with layers and a tender crumb. You could either buy a whole cake, maybe a square of sheet cake at the grocery store (I love sheet cake and always will), or you’re stuck with a cupcake. The novelty of the cupcake really took off the aughts, with singular cupcake bakeries punctuating the American dessert landscape, and in the case of Sprinkles, several American airpots in the form of their own vending machines. 

But a cupcake just is not the same as a slice of cake. It’s too much outer edge to inner edge ratio, just a singular layer of frosting to cake. It’s self contained. I love the exposed edges of a cake slice — all the tiny imperfections, the little pockets of flavor. Sometimes you just need a perfect slice of cake. 

For so long that meant either scouting the bakery section of a grocery store with the hopes they were selling singles piece of cake, or pretending that a cupcake shop would do. But over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed what might be my favorite new trend: the rise of the cake slice shop. Yes, just bakeries dedicated to gorgeous, individual, stacked, stunning, slices of cake.     

In the way that bakeries have doubled down on cookies (see CRUMBL) it warms my layer cake loving heart that a few have doubled down on slices of cake. Here are my favorite cake spots across the country: 

LOS ANGELES