After my rapturous excitement about the slow-cooked lamb shoulder, I thought that I would have a shot at the warm baked peach and raspberry cake, which featured in the same article in the Dec / Jan Delicious. It looked appropriately rustic for me to cook in an unfamiliar oven while we were on holidays. It was big enough to serve a crowd, and you served it up by scooping it out of a baking dish - the perfectly relaxed feeling I was after. Sadly, it was underwhelming, particularly when you consider that it took a dozen eggs, 500g raspberries, 8 peaches, 2 packs of butter and 5 cups of flour. In fact, I found it a bit dry and hard.
When I look for explanations of where I went wrong, I think that I just did not "get" the recipe. You make a softish batter, dot it with fruit, then top it with an egg and sugar mixture and then bake for two hours at 180C. The two hours was bothering me - cooking a cake for two hours seemed wrong and excessive. So because I was using several smaller baking dishes, I checked everything repeatedly from the 1 hour mark onwards, but, at least on the skewer test, it wasn't cooked until close to the 2 hour mark. The cakes were removed from the oven and left to sit because the oven needed to be used for cooking dinner, then the cakes were gently reheated at dinner time. The result was not worth the time and effort required, which makes me cranky.
If you made this cake and it worked, please drop me a note and let me know what I did wrong, or what you did right. If you are considering making this cake, I suggest you stick to the lamb in the same article, because I can promise you that is worth cooking.
Melinda from Melbourne Larder, and I are cooking our way through Delicious Dec/Jan issue at the moment, as part of our We Made It challenge. If you are inspired to join us, drop either one of us a note and join in - we'd love to have you.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment