Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

A Perfect Breakfast Cake for Shavuot

I wasn’t raised Jewish but I did marry a wonderful Jewish man. One of the big ways I try to connect to his Ashkenazi background is by exploring and reproducing the comfort foods that make him tick. (The day that my mother-in-law openly bragged about my kneidlach remains one of the proudest moments of my life.)

I’m also constantly looking forward to the next holiday, when I have an excuse to go a bit over the top or look for things that will really shine. Last year’s Rosh Hashanah found me rolling bits of chopped apples into my challah strands and macerating apricots overnight in honey and spices for my cake. Last Hannukah, I didn’t just make latkes, I made the applesauce from scratch.

Related recipe

The whole point of this introduction is to explain why at eight in the morning in the middle of August, I was sitting in my apartment, holding a fork and yelling “Shavuot!” at one of my cats.

I’d made a breakfast blueberry ricotta cake the night before and after my first bite I knew this was something that needed to be trotted out again for a special occasion. Smothered in fruit and half-melted cinnamon sugar, the cake itself is melt-in-your-mouth creamy and not too sweet. It’s also beautiful and deceptively simple to make, and as I discovered when doing some nutritional calculations, it’s not even a particularly unhealthy breakfast. (Well, it’s healthier than a stack of pancakes covered in maple syrup, anyway.)

I knew in a flash that I had found something that would be in good company with the blintzes and cheesecake of Shavuot, a light and fluffy sibling that would make a perfect start to the day.

I’d like to think that my cat agreed.

Clara Drew is executive assistant at the Forward. Contact her at [email protected].

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.