Rambling Regarding Rhubarb

And cake. But who doesn’t like some late-night alliteration?

I got both strawberries and rhubarb in my farm share last week, so the logical thing to do with them seemed to be dessert. I’ve eaten strawberry rhubarb pie before, but had never seen raw rhubarb in person until this week. It’s so colorful!

As it turns out, I’m way too lazy to make a pie crust from scratch nine times out of ten (or more). And I’d already eaten strawberry rhubarb pie anyways. Time for something new: cake! Cake that doesn’t tempt me to use the octopus pan. Cake that works like a clafoutis or an apple charlotte; cake where you just pour batter over fruit and hope for the best… easy, tasty cake.

I pretty much just used a recipe from epicurious.com (Rhubarb Strawberry Pudding Cake) so I won’t repost it here.

I will, however, elaborate on some changes I made. I’m pretty sure no one ever follows a recipe exactly. I know I never do.

Changes:

• Produce- Sometimes, measuring things is for suckers. Not all the time, but in the case of adding fruit to this cake, it’s totally true. I used all the rhubarb and strawberries I had left, which were more and less, respectively, than the recipe called for. Given the nature of the cake, I know that as long as I’m not actually doubling or halving the amounts things should work out just fine.
• Sugar - Rhubarb is very tart. It’s tasty raw, but gives you a little bit of a sour face. Someone (I can’t recall who it was) told me that rhubarb is the sour patch kids of produce, which is pretty accurate. I wanted to preserve the tartness in the finished cake, so I dialed down the sugar a bit when making the cake, but only in preparation of the rhubarb. I probably only used a quarter cup of sugar for the rhubarb mixture, but I left the amount of sugar in the batter alone.
• Dairy - I didn’t plan correctly and didn’t have milk on hand. Instead of going out to the store, I rummaged around in my well-organized baking cabinet (it’s the only part of my belongings that I keep organized – I’ll post a picture some time) and found a packet of dry buttermilk. This stuff is pretty amazing. You mix the dry portion with the dry part of your recipe and then add to the liquid ingredients water equal to the amount of milk you would have used otherwise. Science is amazing like this. In addition to saving the day, the buttermilk added a tanginess to the batter that went really well with the strawberry and the rhubarb. I think I’m going to plan a bit for real buttermilk next time.

Powdered buttermilk solidifies into a solid over time. I thought I could break it up with a whisk or fork (not true, it was really solid). Instead, I broke out the mortar and pestle I bought when we moved in and had never been used. It was still in the IKEA shrink wrap. :-/

The cake…was well received by all. “All” means people who don’t hate either strawberries or rhubarb, since you can really actually taste both.

I’m certainly going to make this again the next time I get some rhubarb. Any suggestions for a non-strawberry accompanying fruit?