Rhubarb Pudding Cake

I’m always looking to expand my arsenal of simple fruit cake recipes (more on fruit cakes—not the Christmas kind). This recipe is a fast contender for a summer favorite. You beat together some butter, sugar, an egg and flour, and plop the batter over chopped fruit. The recipe calls for rhubarb, but this would work just as well with apples.  The batter spreads as it bakes, creating a cake layer to cover the jammy, pudding-y fruit.

Here’s the recipe, via the Journal Sentinel’s Sunday food section, with a few modifications.

Cube rhubarb or apples into ½-inch chunks—you should have about four cups. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine 1cup flour, 1 ¼ tsp. baking power and 1/8 tsp. salt; set aside. In a big bowl, beat 5 tablespoons unsalted, room-temperate butter with a mixer until smooth. Add 2/3 cups sugar, beat well. Add 1 tsp. vanilla extract, ¼ tsp. cinnamon and 1 egg; beat well. Add the flour and ½ cup milk alternately to the sugar mixture; combine until just smooth.

Butter an 8-inch baking dish and spread the fruit in the dish. Sprinkle with about 2/3 cup sugar (less, maybe ½ cup, if you’re using apples, especially if they’re on the sweeter side). 

Spoon batter over the fruit—don’t worry if it doesn’t cover all the fruit; the batter will spread and plump up while baking. Bake about 45 minutes, and let cool before eating.

Good with whipped cream or ice cream…but who am I kidding, perfect when eaten with a spoon right out of the pan.

A Different Kind of Fruit Cake

I’ve never made a layer cake with frosting in my life, but I do like baking fruit cakes. Not the kind you make for Christmas (though I suspect they get an undeservedly bad rap), but simple cakes that involve fruit covered in batter. They’re easy to make, reasonably light, work for breakfast or dessert, go well with coffee, tea, milk, etc.

Sour apples like Granny Smith work really well in these cakes, but so do rhubarb, strawberries, peaches, blueberries--anything that's tart. You don't need to do anything with the fruit besides cut it into chunks, and frozen berries work great. It doesn’t hurt to add a bit of vanilla or cinnamon to the batter. See the recipes below for details.

These are the variations I like:

The classic Russian charlotte: 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup flour, ½ tsp. baking powder; mix; pour over fruit chunks; bake 60 minutes at 370. Here's my old apple charlotte recipe.

Yogurt cake: Similar to the above, but with 1/2 cup of  plain yogurt and sour cream, and a bit of oil for extra richness.A few weeks ago I made this cake using peaches for the fruit; recipe here.

Buttery cakes with a bit of yogurt or kefr for richness and moisture. See this rhubarb cake recipe for details.

Sour Cream Cake With Peaches

I hate to waste food. Homeless kittens and puppies tug at some people’s heartstrings, but a half cup of soon-to-expire sour cream in the fridge makes me cry. In my zeal to rescue the sour cream, I found myself making this cake at 10 p.m. on a weeknight--and I'm glad I did. 

My inspiration was Orangette’s yogurt cake recipe, in which I subbed sour cream for the yogurt. Dozens of yogurt cake variations have been floating around the blog world ever since Clotilde Dusoulier posted her now-famous recipe for this simple, traditional French dessert.

Yogurt cake is lightly sweet and mild, kind of like pancake batter, so you can add  fruit, or nuts, or chocolate to spice it up. For my cake, I added a couple of sliced, soon-to-be-squishy peaches (it’s not just leftover sour cream that makes me sad).

Sour cream makes the cake super-dense and moist, as does Orangette’s addition of lemon juice syrup that you pour over the baked cake. 

Here’s the recipe with my modifications:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a large bowl, combine and mix well ½ cup sour cream, ¾ cup sugar, 3 eggs and 1 tsp. vanilla concentrate.  Add 1.5 cups flour, 2 tsp. baking powder; mix. Add ½ cup canola oil, and mix well.

Dice a couple of medium peaches (or nectarines, or apples, or strawberries, or rhubarb—any tart fruit will work).

Butter a 9-inch cake pan, and pour ½ batter into the pan. Add diced fruit on top, and then pour the rest of the batter to cover the fruit. Sprinkle with raw sugar.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Cool cake completely.

Optional: Juice an orange and a lemon. Add ¼ cup powdered sugar to the juice and mix well. Pour over the entire cake, and serve.

Product Review: Wafer Cake

Whether it’s baked milk or pickled tomatoes, Russian and Eastern European grocery stores are filled with mysterious and sometimes delicious foodstuffs. In this occasional series, I review the good, the bad and the weird.

I saved this post especially for March 8, International Women's Day. In Soviet Russia--and, I suppose, to this day--March 8 is an all-purpose women's holiday, a mix of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. If you're from Russia, this chocolate wafer cake is a totally appropriate gift for the women in your life--along with a bouquet of mimosas, the traditional flowers for this holiday.

You wouldn’t think that a wafer “cake” (wafel’ni tort/вафельный торт) is anything special, but, according to my mom, getting your hands on one was a pretty big deal in the Soviet times.

This cake is basically a big wafer, usually covered in chocolate, and always sold in a cardboard box. The brand in the photo is called Kapriz (каприз)--that is, "caprice"!

The best versions of wafer cake crisp and fresh, and aren’t bad with a cup of tea or coffee. To serve, slice into neat square or rectangles, like a good Russian hostess.

For a guide to Russian/Eastern European stores in the Milwaukee area that sell this kind of thing, see my shopping guides.

Rhubarb Cake

The only desserts I like to bake are simple fruit cakes. They’re easy, low-maintenance and fairly light. Why bake huge cakes or batches of cookies for a household of two? My go-to recipes are this apple charlotte (can be made with a variety of fruit), this curd-cheese cake with apples, and, now, this rhubarb cake. The recipe, from the Estonian food blog Nami Nami, caught my eye because it calls for kefir or buttermilk. I love using cultured dairy in baking—it makes cakes more tender and balances excess sweetness.

Here’s my tweaked recipe. The rhubarb is from Witte's Vegetable Farm in Cedarburg, Wis. (at $1.50 per pound, it’s a very good deal).

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1.5 tsp. baking power
100 grams butter, melted and cooled
2 eggs, beaten
200 ml milk, yogurt, kefir or buttermilk (I used 50/50 milk and sour cream)
1 lb. rhubarb, finely diced

Preheat the oven to 370. Mix the dry ingredients (flour through baking powder) in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, add the milk ingredients to the butter; mix. Add the eggs and stir well.

Combine the dry and wet ingredients; mix. Fold in the rhubarb. Grease a 10-inch pie pan. Pour the batter into the pan; sprinkle with demerara sugar. Bake 50-55 minutes, until the top of the cake is golden-brown and a toothpick or knife inserted into the middle comes out clean.

If you like, sprinkle with powered sugar before serving.

Farmer's Cheese Cake with Apples

I did some tweaking in my old and all-time popular post: how to make your own farmer's cheese (also known as curd cheese and, in Russian, tvorog). Check it out and give cheesemaking a shot. What can you do with a few cups of farmer’s cheese? Make cheesecake. Cakes and pastries with farmer’s cheese are very popular in Russia and Eastern Europe.

One of my favorite dessert recipes comes from the excellent Estonian food blog Nami Nami. It’s for an airy curd-cheesecake with grated apples. I’ve made it once before, for Thanksgiving. Here's a slightly revised version:

Preheat the oven to 370. Grease a 9-inch pie pan.

Finely chop 1/4 cup each of apricots and dried plums (don’t call them prunes). Place in a small bowl, along with 1/4 cup raisins, and cover with boiling hot water. Put aside.

Combine 60 grams flour, ½ tsp. baking power, 50 grams sugar and ¾ tsp. cinnamon in a bowl. Peel, core and finely chop two large apples, preferably a tart variety like Granny Smith. Separate two eggs, and beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks.

In another bowl, mix 250 grams farmer’s cheese, 100 grams sour cream or Greek yogurt and ½ tsp. vanilla extract. Fold in the dry ingredients. Add the apples and the egg yolks; drain the dried fruit and add to the mixture; then add the egg whites. Mix well.

Pour the batter into the pie pan; bake 45-55 minutes, or until the top of the cake is firm and golden-brown. Let cool before eating, but serve warm, if possible. Goes great with strawberry jam.