Thursday, October 30, 2008

Basque Cake


A cake with some interesting textures and flavors. I first made this cake at school. It's a cake with a crunchy textured top and bottom, and then a soft middle. The filling is simply pastry cream. The cake we made at school consisted of a cake that was basically dripping with rum, a vanilla pastry cream, and dried cherries and slivered almonds on top of the pastry cream. 

When I made this cake at home I used pear liquor instead of rum, I made the pastry cream a star anise pastry cream, and then I caramelized apples in sugar, star anise and butter. Instead of almonds, I used roasted walnuts. It was strangely savory, bar the sweetness of the cake proper the anise certainly added some savory element that I wasn't expecting. 

The braeburn apples, the cake flour and  eggs (which had gorgeous deep orange yolks, which contributed to the crazy yellow color of the pastry cream) were from a local farmers market. It's so exciting going to farmers markets, I seriously love them. Everything is so amazingly fresh, and you get to know the people working there, really recommend you try some if you haven't already!

Basque Cake; not the prettiest cake, but an interesting one to make, and an easy one to play around with. 

1 comment:

Haley said...

I never cease to be impressed. what i want to know is how you have energy to cook when you get home from school everyday??