#bon apetit
Did the sixfanarts challenge!
The holidays feel like a lifetime ago, but that’s mostly because I got the flu and so spend the tail end of the year in a fevered state recuperating on my parents’ couch. But besides the holidays, it was also my brother’s birthday, and he flew in from the west coast so we could all celebrate together. Naturally, this meant I had to bake something, and I sent him a few recipes to choose from and we went with Alison Roman’s Raspberry-Ricotta Cake.
I’ve attempted the salted chocolate shortbread cookies before, and I also made her biscuits over Thanksgiving, which were delicious (and I keep meaning to post about them, whoops). So I felt good about how this cake would turn out.
All in all, it was an easy recipe and it turned out alright, except we had to keep it in the oven for an extra 30 minutes because the center simply would.not.bake. Clearly that has something to do with our oven, and you can see that the extra time made the rest of the cake a deeper golden brown than the BA recipe gets. The cake isn’t meant to be wobbly, and even with all that extra time our tester never came out clean in the stubborn center spot. We let the cake sit for over an hour and a half, and it set a bit more while cooling, but not entirely; c’est la vie. The ricotta we used was from a local farm, and it wasn’t super moist, so I’m not entirely sure why the center wouldn’t bake.
As you can see, I served myself a slice with a generous helping of whipped cream. This was simply plain cream; recently I’ve really wanted to experiment with a whipped heavy cream/crème fraîche or sour cream combo–I think that would work really well with a tart cake like this. The cake is so versatile that I think it might be interesting to substitute with mascarpone and blueberries in a future version, too.
It wasn’t too heavy, or too sweet, even with the full cup of sugar the recipe calls for. If I were left to my own devices, I’d have done my usual thing where I half the sugar so I can justify my baked goods as a breakfast food. By the day after we had this birthday cake, I’d completely lost my appetite to illness, but my brother reported that the slightly undercooked portion of the cake that was left over tasted very good the next day after a night in the fridge.
This past weekend I was in NYC so I hit up Abraço for my olive oil cake fix, and I tried the Red Gate Bakery in my old neighborhood, which I think I wouldn’t have been a regular at if I still lived in the LES, but I’m glad it’s there–1st street has been woefully deprived of proper baked goods since Bluebird closed. Anyway, classes start up this week, so my adventures in baking will most likely be limited to my weekly granola batch for the time being (my latest version uses canola instead of olive oil, but I’m using good maple syrup and since I don’t have raisins on hand I’ve been slicing dried plums for my fruit component–thrilling stuff, I know!). Let me put “make a blueberry-mascarpone cake” in my calendar for April now.
