Fig Danish "BUTTER” Cake
Apartment café: bread & butter party. What happens if you merge an apartment cafe, a birthday party, and 50 sticks of butter
Ryan Nordheimer•
November 1, 2025
Remember last week how I said I was done making birthday cakes for my friends? Well let’s forget I said that. Because I just made a 10-pound butter-themed sheet cake for this month’s apartment café / my co-host Christine’s birthday party. You read that right. This month’s apartment cafe is also a birthday party. As if it couldn’t get any more chaotic than usual, let’s invite an additional 15 people to the function!
Since it’s Christine’s birthday she got to make all the rules. And she got to choose the theme: bread & butter. (Her favorite food groups). I’m just gonna declare 2025 as year of the butter (as if it were a zodiac animal). Between KitchenAid stand mixers, radish butter terrines, and butter dinner parties, I swear I see butter on my feed nearly every day. But of course we can’t be normies and have to put our own twist on the butter party concept. So how about its best friend bread? And thus, bread & butter apartment cafe was born.
A lot of you might be wondering how I even know Christine and why the heck she’s at every event I ever throw. I always get asked how long we’ve known each other. Many people assume we’ve been friends since college or even longer. Truth is, I’ve only known Christine for a year and a half. When we started the apartment cafe back in January, we’d known each other for less than a year. Crazy right? So how did we even become friends and essentially content partners so quickly?
I guess it was just one of those random life moments that you don’t realize was so pivotal until you reflect back on it. I met Christine at a casual cookbook club in East Williamsburg. I had made a chocolate hazelnut layer cake (fittingly), and she had made cardamom sticky buns. We started making small talk. I complimented her buns (lol), and we realized our lives were so similar. Both passionate about food. Both working in corporate America doing food on the side. Both lived in DC and the Midwest at different points in our lives. And our personalities clicked. Extra. Hard-working. Creative. High-achieving. Realistic.
From that moment on we became attached at the hip. Attending food events, hosting events of our own (both public and private), going to restaurants, and planning birthday parties together.
So when Christine decided to center her birthday party around September’s apartment cafe, I was on board and knew it would be completely iconic. I also knew I had to make her birthday cake. I originally had the idea to literally make her cake look like a massive rectangular stick of butter, wrapper and all. But then I spent a few days in Oregon with Justine Doiron (butter board inventor) and took the cake in a more rustic, abstract direction. Deciding to decorate it with swooshes and swishes, much more whipped-butter in style. I engraved “BUTTER” (very Off White, I know) on the top just in case anyone missed the idea. And for the flavor profile, I had originally wanted to do a St. Louis gooey butter mousse filling. But Christine vetoed it. So I switched to inspiring the whole taste story around a danish: brown butter cream cheese filling, fig jam, and nutmeg streusel crumbs. The whole thing encased in enough silky french buttercream to tranquilize a small elephant.
This is what everyone else brought:
- me: fig danish "BUTTER” cake
- Christine: almond croissant sourdough, radish terrine on sourdough
- Deepika Kalla-Paul: brown butter sour cream basque cheesecake
- Allison Chen: brioche rose
- @arlynosborne: raspberry crumb danishes
- @kdmkitchen: stratticcella butter board
- @atinykitchen: butter mound
- Zack: sourdough
Theo: Irish soda bread scones
But since we also had another 15 party guests attending outside of the bakers, we also instructed the “regular” people to bring bread and butter too. Which is how my living room table ended up being converted into an entirely separate bread & butter station. The highlights from that table were the kimchi compound butter, farmers’ market concord grapes, and a few excellent baguettes.
And to make the apartment truly tricked out, we bought a crap ton of butter-colored balloons, butter matchboxes, butter to-go containers, and butter-labeled wine. I wore a baguette T-shirt. Many people wore butter yellow. And Christine blew out her birthday candles via baguette.
So if you were ever wondering what would happen if a leo & a virgo got together to plan a party, this is it.
Happy birthday Christine,
Ryan
Hey! My name is Ryan Nordheimer. Welcome to my cooking and baking site. I’m a 25-year old home cook living in the East Village in New York City. Hopefully you enjoy my food through my own, tried-and-true recipes.
Ingredients (29)
Ingredients (29)
Quarter-sheet chiffon cake layers
French buttercream
For the brown butter cream cheese frosting
For the danish crumbs
For the assembly
Instructions
Quarter-sheet chiffon cake layers
Preheat oven to350 °F with a rack in the upper and lower thirds. Lightly grease only the bottom of 3 quarter sheet pans. Line each with parchment paper and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the egg yolks (6), oiloil, water (½ cup), vanilla (1 Tbsp), almond extract (½ tsp), 1.5 cups of the sugar, and 1/2 tsp of the kosher salt.
Then sprinkle over the baking powder and 1 tsp baking powder and all-purpose flour (1 ¾ cups) and using a spatula mix together until 90% combined. Set aside.
In another large bowl, add the eggs whites (6) and the remaining kosher salt. Using an electric hand mixer, start mixing the egg whites on medium-high speed. Once they are very foamy, start streaming in the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar. Continue whisking until the egg whites hold soft peaks.
Fold 1/3 of the egg whites into the cake batter until just combined. Then repeat with another 1/3, then the final third of egg whites. Equally divide the cake batter into the 3 prepared quarter sheet pans (try your best to be equal). Smooth out with an offset spatula.
Bake the cakes with 2 pans in the lower rack and 1 in the upper rack for 15 minutes. Then carefully switch the sheets and continue baking until the cakes are golden, feel firm when you press on their centers, and a toothpick comes out clean.
Let the cakes cool until warm. Then take a paring knife and run it around the perimeter of the pans to release the cake from the sides. Cakes can last covered with plastic at room temperature for 1-2 days.
French buttercream
Add the egg yolks (3) and eggs (3 whole) to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Set aside.
In a medium saucepan, add the sugar (2 ½ cups) and water (¾ cup). Set over medium heat and stir with a spatula until the sugar dissolves. Increase heat to high and let boil until the mixture reaches 250 °F on a cooking thermometer.
Set the stand mixer to medium-high speed. Carefully stream in the hot sugar into the mixing bowl so the sugar sort of dribbles down the side and into the whisking eggs.
Once all the sugar is added, let the mixer run for another 8-10 minutes on high speed, until the bowl feels room temperature.
Add the butter (4 ½ sticks), tablespoon by tablespoon, until completely used up. Add the vanilla extract (1 Tbsp). If you like an extra smooth frosting, you can switch to the paddle attachment and beat the frosting for 1 minute. The frosting can be kept at room temperature covered with plastic wrap for up to 2 days.
For the brown butter cream cheese frosting
In a large bowl, add the cream cheese (16 oz). Mix with an electric hand mixer on medium-high speed until softened, about 1 minute.
Then add the cooled brown butter (2 sticks) and continue to mix until it absorbs evenly into the cream cheese.
Add the salt (½ tsp) and on lower speed add the powdered sugar (½ lb) in increments until also worked into the frosting. Taste for sugar and add more if you like. Set aside.
For the danish crumbs
Preheat oven to 325 °F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Mix the flour (1 ½ cups), sugar (⅔ cup), salt (½ tsp), and nutmeg (½ tsp) together in a large bowl. Drizzle over the butter (12 Tbsp) and stir to combine. Break the crumbs up over the prepared baking sheet and spread out.
Bake the crumbs until golden, about 20 minutes. Let cool completely, then break into finer crumbs.
For the assembly
Add one of the cake layers smooth side down to a cardboard cake rectangle or a serving platter. Dab some milk (¾ cup) with a pastry brush over the top of the cake until it seems a little moister.
Spread about half the cream cheese frosting over the cake. Then spread half the fig jam (16 oz). Then crumble over an amount of the danish crumbs that makes you happy.
Place the second layer on top. Repeat the above filling process. Then top with the last cake layer and dab with milk (¾ cup) too.
Smooth any excess cream cheese frosting that oozes out around the cake. Then take about 2 cups of the french buttercream and give the cake a base layer crumb coat. Set in the fridge for 15-20 minutes, or until hardened.
Continue frosting the outside of the cake to your heart’s content. If you’d like to learn how to make the engraved “BUTTER” design, check out Kassie Mendieta’s substack. She has a whole article about it.
The cake will keep in the fridge for up to 3 days. Let it come to room temperature a bit before serving.
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