I used to be a cookbook junkie. I must have had 100 of them. I especially loved vintage cookbooks and those community fundraiser type cookbooks. I found the vintage ones to be pretty and the fundraiser ones to be full of food that real people actully cooked and ate. But I never really cooked anything out of the vintage ones, and the fundraiser ones also had a lot of recipes that started with a can of cream of something soup. Cream of something soup usually equals ick to me. As part of my simplifying, I've pared my cookbooks down to about 8 that I use pretty regularly. I love the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks and New Classics is my favorite adult one.
See how real I'm keeping things? Fruit smears on the plate, bad lighting, flashback off the fruit. Food photography is definitely not my thing!
I've made this cake every week for the last month. It's sweet enough to be yummy for desert, but not so sweet you feel bad eating leftovers for breakfast. Lately I've been making it with black raspberries and peaches/nectarines, but I've also made it with blueberries and peaches, plums and peaches and all blueberries. In the fall I'm going to try it with apples and cranberries.
1/2 c butter (at room temp)
1 c brown sugar
pitted and sliced fruit (enough to arrange in the bottom of your skillet)
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 c oat flour (easy to make yourself)
1/2 c cornmeal
1 c whole wheat or spelt flour
1 Tbs baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg (optional)
1/4 tsp salt
2/3 c milk
The oat flour can be made by putting 1/2 cup of rolled oats into a blender or food processor. If you don't feel like dealing with it, I've made the cake without it before, and it still tasted good. I did up the flour content by 1/2 cup.
Melt 1/4 c butter in 10 inch skillet. (I use an 8 inch skillet cause that's what I have and it works out fine). Stir in 1/2 c of the brown sugar and mix it up. Take it off the heat and arrange your cut fruit in the skillet and set it aside.
Preheat oven to 350. Cream together remaining 1/4 c of butter and 1/2 c of brown sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well. If I've forgotten to leave out the butter and it is still hard and cold, I've melted it and mixed everything together, and the cake still came out fine, although it was a little better with the butter creamed.
In another bowl, mix together the cornmeal, oat flour, whole wheat flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. I've also used pumpkin pie spice and Chinese 5 spice, both which are tasty. Mix alternately the dry flour mix and the milk into the egg mixture. Stir until just combined and then spread gently over top of the fruit in the skillet.
Bake for about 40 minutes, using a knife to be sure the center of the cake it baked. Cool in the skillet for about 5 minutes, and then flip onto a serving plate. If any fruit sticks to the bottom of the pan, just pick it out and press back into the cake.
The cake is great on its own, but also good with a little cream poured over top. I don't bother whipping mine, but might if we had guests.
