These are our most popular recipes this week, from Cantonese-Style Sweet-and-Sour Pork to buttery Skillet Pancakes.

Apple Cake (Torta Bolzano)

This rustic apple cake sports crisp, deeply caramelized edges and a custardy interior, a texture achieved by coating a heap of thinly sliced fruit in crepe-like batter. We learned it from home cook Franca Giuliani in Padergnone, in the Trentino region of northern Italy. To add deep, nutty notes, we brown the butter.

Emergency Chocolate Cake

This ultra-easy chocolate cake, made without eggs, milk and butter, is also known as crazy cake because it doesn’t require ingredients standard to most cakes. It’s said to originate during the Great Depression when ingredients were scarce—hence another of its monikers, chocolate Depression cake. Cocoa powder rather than bar chocolate supplies the chocolate flavor and rich color. Either Dutch-processed (i.e., alkalized) cocoa or natural cocoa works, just be sure it is unsweetened. Water is the traditional liquid for these cakes, but we prefer coffee, as it bolsters the chocolate notes.

Cantonese Sweet-and-Sour Pork

In Hong Kong, we sought out true Cantonese sweet-and-sour pork, predecessor of the gloppy, overly sweet versions served in many Chinese American restaurants. After sampling dozens of versions, we created our recipe by combining the attributes of the best ones we tried. Though the pork typically is deep-fried, we keep ours lighter by pan-frying it in just ¼ cup of oil to crisp a thin cornstarch coating. Traditional versions are flavored with hawthorn berries, a crabapple-like fruit. To approximate the flavor of hawthorn berries, we use apple jelly—it provides fruitiness, sweetness and a little body to the glaze-like sauce. Finally, a little MSG amplifies the savoriness, but it’s optional.

Oaxacan Chickpea Soup (Sopa de Garbanzo)

At Origen restaurant in Oaxaca, chef Rodolfo Castellanos taught us how to make sopa de garbanzo. His version of the soup is light, smooth and velvety but doesn’t require a blender because he uses chickpea flour, not whole chickpeas. The key to developing rich, nutty notes and earthy complexity is toasting the flour to the color of peanut butter. We found the easiest way to do this is to start in the oven, where the heat is even and all-encompassing, then finish on the stovetop in the pot in which the soup is simmered. We follow Castellanos’ lead and embellish the soup with poached eggs, making it substantial enough for a light main. Mint and ground chipotle chili bring freshness and spice.

Skillet Pancake

At Anea Café in Tokyo, we tasted a pancake that was a deep-golden, saucer-sized, inch-thick disk resembling skillet cornbread. Toppings included whipped cream, ice cream and butter, along with a generous drizzle of syrup. We were unsure of whether we were enjoying breakfast or dessert, but were smitten with the crispy exterior that contrasted the cakey interior and rich, buttery flavor. This recipe is our attempt to re-create that pancake. A combination of rice and all-purpose flours delivers a delicately crisp crust and gives the crumb a pleasant chew without weighing down its texture. If you like, garnish with fresh berries.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.