I love having co-workers who have gardens. Why? Because occasionally one of them will hand me a bag of something like this:
That’s a bunch of rhubarb, and I honestly had never seen rhubarb in real life before that moment. My only real knowledge of it was references of pies and cakes from the Redwall books- usually during the numerous feasting scenes.
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| Ignore the cover. Half of these books were scenes of them eating |
But having never looked at a vegetable (fruit?) before isn’t enough to keep me from trying to cook with it so I hit up the marvelous series of tubes for an easy recipe that, since I’m a tad broke until the start of next month, was made up only of ingredients I had in my house. I found this one:
Oma’s Rhubarb Cake
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cups white sugar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup sour cream
- 3 cups diced rhubarb
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- ground cinnamon, for dusting
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9×13 inch baking dish.
- In a large bowl, stir together 1 1/4 cups sugar, baking soda, salt and 2 cups flour. Stir in the eggs and sour cream until smooth, then fold in the rhubarb. Pour into the prepared dish and spread evenly. In a smaller bowl, stir together the remaining 1 cup sugar and butter until smooth. Stir in 1/4 cup flour until the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle the mixture on top of the cake then dust lightly with cinnamon.
- Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes.
So when I got home I thought I was set. I cleaned all my rhubarb…
Got out my handy dandy food processor…
And then…
Oh my god… it looks like I killed something. Seriously, it’s like hamburger meat. But I carried on and moved on to making the batter.
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Which really didn’t look any better. It’s as if I was trying to make meat bread. The only thing that kept me going at this point was that it smelled delicious.
I went ahead and covered it with the crumb crust, noting that it was more like a muffin batter than a cake batter, and stuck it in the oven. At the very least I knew that the crust was going to be delicious, since there’s really not much you can do to butter, flour, sugar, and cinnamon to screw it up.
But when I opened up the oven, this is what awaited me:
Huh. It actually didn’t look that bad. Once I let it cool for a bit I realized that, beside for a bit of the coloration around the edges, it actually looked like a proper cake.
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| Voila! |
The food processor had cut the rhubarb into small enough pieces that stringiness wasn’t much of a problem and the cake was surprisingly moist. All in all, it was easy, tasty, and didn’t cost me any extra money. Exactly what I needed.