Buttermilk Rhubarb Cake

I have this problem. I hate to admit it, but sometimes when I buy rhubarb, it goes soft in my fridge before I get around to cooking it. The true problem is that when I go to the farmers market, everything looks so good that I sometimes get a little over zealous and buy more food than we actually need. Luckily we have weekends to catch up on cooking.

For the past few weeks though, our weekends have been occupied by SIFF and by trips to Joule for their Urban BBQ series. If you haven’t been yet, get there as soon as you can. They use many local ingredients and their flavors and dishes are wonderful.

So rhubarb has been going soft in my fridge a little more often than usual. So the other day, when faced

Buttermilk-Rhubarb Cake

with about 4 hours that didn’t require work, cleaning, or running, I went on a little rhubarb cooking spree. Three rhubarb recipes in just a couple of hours. Today I bring you: buttermilk rhubarb cake.

I’ve been hearing a lot about buttermilk cake lately. There’s this one rhubarb blueberry cake that really tempted me. But would it work with rhubarb? After all, rhubarb is really tart and blueberries are pretty sweet. Well, the only way to find out was to make the cake.

A few words about today’s ingredients. Sea Breeze Farm has some of the best raw milk I’ve ever had. In fact, they have the only milk I’ve ever actually liked the taste of. Well, sometimes they have buttermilk as well. I bought a pint last week because I wanted to make salad dressing. Buttermilk from Sea Breeze will last about 2-3 weeks in the fridge.

Buttermilk Rhubarb Cake, adapted from The Baking Bird

• 2.5 cups of flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup superfine sugar (more in that in a minute)
• 2 eggs
• 4 Tbsp melted butter
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup chopped rhubarb
• 3 Tbsp sugar

1. You can find superfine sugar at most grocery stores, but if you don’t have any on hand, just take half a cup of regular sugar plus a couple of teaspoons and process it in a food processor for 30-60 seconds.

2. Grease and flour a cake pan. I don’t actually own a cake pan, so I used a springform pan.

3. Preheat the oven to 400.

4. Combine the flour, baking powder, and sugar in a bowl and set aside.

5. In the bowl of your mixer, beat the eggs until combined. Add the buttermilk and butter and mix well.

6. Next mix in the dry ingredients and stir until just barely mixed in. Use a low speed on your mixer and don’t overmix.

7. Add the batter to the cake pan.

8. Spread the rhubarb over the top of the cake and sprinkle the rhubarb with sugar.

9. Bake the cake for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes clean. My cake needed about 35 minutes in my oven.

Chef’s Notes: I don’t bake a lot of cakes. In part, most of them are too sweet. Sure, this is good in small amounts, but I can rarely have more than one or two pieces before I’m done. This cake was not overly sweet. The cake itself was on the dense side, but not as dense as a pound cake.