Check out this beautiful cake, made using every bit of the cauliflower–stalks, leaves and all!
Christina Badaracco, a resident of Washington, D.C., made this cake as part of her entry in the 2025 Food Waste Prevention Week Cooking Challenge (which I’m lucky enough to coordinate and judge). This cake won an honorable mention in the contest!
The 2026 Cooking Challenge will be open to entries from Sept. 1 – Oct. 6. Enter here during that window!
The original recipe, from Yotam Ottolengi’s Plenty More: Vibrant Vegetable Cooking from London’s Ottolenghi, only called for florets. But Christina didn’t want any bit of the cauliflower to go to waste, so she finely chopped the stem and leaves and incorporated them into the cake. She reported that it turned out great!
Find the recipe here, and just remember to finely chop “extra” parts of the cauliflower.
Christina is a nutritionist and her take on the cauliflower cake, included some other health and sustainability minded touches. Here’s her original entry:
“I love to cook with cauliflower and am so often disappointed when recipe writers waste the stalk and leaves that are such great sources of nutrition. I made this cake following an adapted version of Ottolenghi’s recipe, in which I finely chopped the stem and leaves and incorporated them along with the florets into the rest of the cake. The basil was grown at home, negating the need to buy a small amount of the herb in plastic. I also used a whole-grain flour, rather than refined flour, to add nutrition.”
And before we wrap up this post, Christina is on the board of Slow Food DC. Check out their work!
