Cemetery Cake — The Recipe I Made to Honor the Dead and the Cooking That Keeps Them Here

Summer. I wrote the Reynaldo summer series for the blog — the series about the recipes my father invented or adapted. Salmon sinigang. Moose adobo. King crab lumpia. Each post part recipe, part eulogy, part love letter to a man who's been dead fifteen years and whose recipes are more alive than most living people's conversations. The series was the most personal writing I'd done on the blog — more personal than the pandemic posts, more personal than the cooking-for-one posts, because the Reynaldo posts were about grief, directly, undisguised, the words saying: my father is dead and his recipes are the way I keep him alive and the keeping-alive is the cooking and the cooking is the love.

The salmon sinigang post described the recipe as "a conversation between a man and a country — the one he came to and the one he left." That sentence came to me while making the sinigang, the tamarind squeezing out the words the way it squeezes out the sour, the writing and the cooking the same action. The post got twelve thousand views. Several readers wrote that they cried. Several more wrote that they called their parents. The calling-parents response is the highest compliment a food writer can receive — the writing that doesn't just feed but connects, the words that carry the reader from their kitchen to their parent's kitchen, the bridge that is the recipe.

I made Reynaldo's salmon sinigang. The recipe from the post. The recipe that is the conversation. One more squeeze. For Papa. For the series. For the readers who cried. For the parents who got called.

After I made the sinigang — after the tamarind and the words and the twelve thousand strangers who cried — I needed something that said it plainly, without metaphor: this is for the dead, and the dead deserve sweetness too. Cemetery Cake has always struck me as the most honest name a recipe can have, the kind of name Papa would have appreciated, a man who never dressed grief up in anything other than what it was. So I made it the way I make all his recipes: slowly, with intention, and with the understanding that the person you’re cooking for doesn’t have to be in the room to be present at the table.

Cemetery Cake

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 55 minutes | Servings: 12

Ingredients

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup hot strong-brewed coffee
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• For the frosting:
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 1/3 cup whole milk
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 cups powdered sugar, sifted
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup crushed chocolate sandwich cookies (for the “cemetery dirt” topping)

Instructions

1. Preheat and prepare. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x13-inch baking pan and set aside.
2. Combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
3. Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the butter, oil, buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla extract until smooth and fully incorporated.
4. Bloom the cocoa. Stir the cocoa powder into the hot coffee until dissolved. Let cool slightly, then whisk into the wet ingredient mixture.
5. Make the batter. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently until just combined — do not overmix. A few small lumps are fine.
6. Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 32–35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes.
7. Make the frosting. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter with the milk and cocoa powder, stirring constantly. Remove from heat, whisk in the powdered sugar and vanilla until smooth and glossy.
8. Frost while warm. Pour the warm frosting over the still-warm cake and spread evenly. The frosting will sink slightly into the cake — this is intentional and beautiful.
9. Add the topping. Scatter crushed chocolate sandwich cookies evenly over the frosted cake to create the signature “cemetery dirt” finish. Serve directly from the pan, warm or at room temperature.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 480 | Protein: 5g | Fat: 20g | Carbs: 72g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 280mg