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I have been doing some baking and cooking in the last two months (not as much as I would like, but not none). I spent a couple days making four different croissant recipes to explore whether the recipe I'd been using (from Tartine) was really the one I should keep using (spoiler alert: no, the Tartine croissant was the recipe the most people were divided over, and the only one that leaked butter like a faulty sieve - it's not my error!).
I even signed up for Christina Tosi's excessively intense class on Monthly with a friend, and have been madly trying on catch up on all the recipe development steps. First cookies, now pies, soon cakes. Hopefully I'll be caught up for cakes, as that's really where I'm not excited. Turns out I'm not a creative genius when it comes to connecting flavors with a time, place, etc.
In any case, this post isn't about croissants, pies, cookies, or Tosi-like cake. This nutmeg love cake from Love, Bake, Nourish falls under the category of snacking cakes (the title of another cookbook I recently bought, and need to spend some time with, but haven't yet made any time for yet). Amber Rose's nutmeg cake is a genius little cake that makes use of a big batch of what's essentially a nutty crumb cake "topping", split in half and used as A) the pressed in crumb cake bottom plus B) the moist sour cream cake-y batter on top.
If you aren't a nutmeg lover, let me start by explaining that you won't like this nutmeg cake. Hopefully, that's pretty obvious. You could absolutely substitute the 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg with other spices, but you might want to tinker with the amounts a little. A full teaspoon cinnamon will probably be pretty great, but a full teaspoon freshly ground cardamom will be too strong.
You'll start by toasting a mix of nuts (or all one kind), chop those nuts coarsely, then you'll make the crumb base, split that in half; pressing the first half into your cake pan, then stirring the yogurt/sour cream+egg+baking soda together into the second half and pouring that over the base already in the pan. Voila! A fancy cake with two layers ready to bake in under 30 minutes.
This nutmeg cake makes an excellent mid-afternoon slice with some decaf tea, and also pairs really well with berries or stone fruit and some whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
Original source: Love, Bake, Nourish
Ingredients
- ⅔ cup mixed pecans, pistachios, and almonds
- 16 tablespoons (2 sticks; 8 ounces) unsalted butter softened
- 1 tablespoon maple syrup
- 2½ cups (250 grams) barley or white spelt flour sifted
- 1 cup (220 grams) brown sugar packed
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 1 cup (227 grams) icelandic vanilla yogurt or full-fat sour cream
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 large free-range egg
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour an 8-inch springform cake pan.
- Pour the mixure of nuts into a dry frying pan and toast them in the pan over medium heat for 8-10 minutes, stirring frequently, until the nuts take on a deeper color and start to smell nutty. Remove the nuts from the pan and set aside in a small bowl.
- Melt the butter and maple syrup together in a medium (4 quart or larger) saucepan (or in your microwave), then stir in the flour, sugar, salt, and nutmeg to create a crumbly mixture. Divide this mixture in half, and carefully press one-half of the mixture into the base of the prepared springform pan.
- Stir together the sour cream, baking soda, and egg, then stir this into the remaining half of the flour-butter mixture. Spoon this liquidy batter over the pressed in base.
- Roughly chop the toasted nuts and sprinkle them over the batter.
- Transfer the cake to the oven and bake for 40 minutes, or until the center of the cake springs back to a gentle touch and a tester comes out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool completely before carefully extracting it from the springform pan.
