Let them eat pizza… cake? Not quite. We’re not telling you to top your pizza with cake or, better yet, make a whole pizza from cake. But cake crumbs do provide a nice textural contrast as a topping or garnish for dessert pizzas already coated with your favorite sweet spread (think Biscoff, Nutella, pudding, ganache, or even your favorite ice cream or gelato).

The crumbs in this recipe come from devil’s food cake, a moist, rich chocolate layer cake known for being airy and light. The recipe was developed as a component for a Brooklyn Blackout Dessert Pizza featuring a cocoa dough, and it taps into some of our favorite approaches used by Epicurious and Smitten Kitchen. In addition to combining some of our favorite elements of these and other recipes, we substituted sour cream for buttermilk and used extra-virgin olive oil instead of vegetable oil for a savory finish more redolent ofh pizza.

This recipe produces a very moist crumb. You can use these on their own, but we enjoyed toasting some of them, then blending them and serving them in tandem with untoasted crumbs for a lighter, dryer garnish full of textural contrast.

Featured in: Brooklyn Blackout Pizza: A Labour of Love and Nostalgia

Arthur Bovino is Ooni’s Head of Pizza Content. Arthur is the founder of The 101 Best Pizzas in America and author of “Buffalo Everything A Guide to Eating in ‘The Nickel City’”“and “The Buffalo, New York Cookbook: 70 Recipes from The Nickel City.” You can follow him on Instagram @nycbestpizza.