ABOVE: A hastily baked raspberry buttermilk cake. Looks aren’t everything.
5/26/2009
Paging through the most recent Gourmet, this raspberry buttermilk cake caught my eye. As Deb, the prodigious poster behind the Smitten Kitchen blog remarks, “I have a serious soft spot for everyday cakes.”
While I hadn’t really contemplated desserts in these terms before, I am ready to embrace the concept of the everyday cake and this is a good example. With minimal preparation, using ingredients easily kept on hand, you can’t go wrong with this recipe for a simple summer dessert.
Besides, I’m always looking for reasons to demonstrate that my recent purchase of a six-quart mixer was not a superfluous and extravagant acquisition. My one-time panic at the prospect of creaming butter by hand has been superseded by ceaseless Internet research into the chemistry of this most basic baking operation on the microscopic level, the ideal initial temperature of the ingredients, the rate at which said ingredients warm relative to the speed of the mixer and let us not forget the of principle of emulsification.
I call it a draw.
So, after covering the Stamford Memorial Day parade with reporter Devon Lash – who was also my ride – we ducked into Stop & Shop at Ridgeway so I could pick up a few staples, including ten pounds of flour and a carton of raspberries. [Though, whatever frozen fruit I had at home would have worked equally well]
I came to find out only later that Smitten Kitchen not only had converted the measurements into weight in metric units – which appeals to my self-diagnosed OCD – but also slightly modified the recipe with the inclusion of a little lemon zest. I’ll try that next time.
–CP
RECIPES: The Gourmet original, and Smitten Kitchen’s slightly modified version.
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