This cake salé has the summer freshness of a caprese salad—ripe tomatoes, tangy mozzarella, bright, spicy and sweet basil. Just don’t be tempted by the fabulous milky buffalo mozzarella we all like to eat, but which contains too much water for baking. For this recipe, you want a good artisan mozzarella that isn’t sitting in water. Something you can slice through, without it being squidgy. As ripe tomatoes are also filled with water and vary in taste, I roast mine. But there are, in fact, three ways to prepare the tomatoes, and they’re all equally good. They can be baked in a 250-degree-Fahrenheit oven for an hour or two. They can be roasted in a hot oven, as I do here, for a mere fifteen minutes. Or, if they are truly flavorful, they can be sliced, sprinkled with salt and set over a sieve for a few hours to shed some of their excess liquid. As mozzarella is a great absorber of flavor but not inherently flavorful, I add garlic to the cake twice, more salt than usual, a spoonful of Parmesan, plenty of basil, and some chives for kick. If you want a spicy cake, add some crushed red pepper. Olives and sun-dried tomatoes can join the party, too. But what I love about this recipe is that it reminds me of that last bite of a Caprese salad—you know the one, when you slide an end of bread across the plate, catching the stray bits of mozzarella, a sliver or two of basil and a shimmer of olive oil, flecked with sea salt. The good news is that this cake can be made any time of year, as roasting the tomatoes draws forth their flavor, making something intense out of even those chilled supermarket things that offer no raw pleasure.