Snowy Sundays




This morning, I had my first taste of winter. Big, soft dreamy flakes of snow falling from a dove-grey sky, onto cobblestones in the quiet stillness of a Sunday morning; a place of winter calm amidst the buzz of the city.

Perhaps it’s the cold that’s been steadily descending into my apartment, but I have craving comfort food for the past few weeks. Deep dishes of soup, rich curries and of course, my mom’s kichri, a one-pot dish full of lentils, rice and vegetables. And cakes – warm cakes with rivers of caramel and fudge, moist cakes  studded with nuts, crumbly coffee cakes with pecans and fruit. Christmas eating can start before Christmas, right?

My friend N had a potluck last night and I took the opportunity to make a cake that I’d been eyeing for a while, from a cookbook authored by the owners of a fantastic restaurant in Victoria, BC, called Rebar. The food there is mostly vegetarian or vegan, but they do incorporate some seasonal fish into their dishes, which are divine; I have no hesitation in saying that it is one of my favorite restaurants. This cake is unabashedly rich; butter, cream, cashews and coconut are featured prominently, and the result is a gooey, sweet, crunchy masterpiece (which should be enjoyed in small quantities, if you can manage it).

Oat spice cake with coconut-cashew crown
From the ‘Rebar Cookbook’ by Audrey Alsterberg and Wanda Urbanowicz

Ingredients

Cake
-       2 cups of rolled oats
-       2/3 cups unsalted butter, softened
-       1 cup brown sugar
-       1 ½ cups boiling water
-       ½ cup unbleached flour
-       1 tsp baking soda
-       1 tsp cinnamon
-       1 tsp allspice
-       ½ tsp salt

Topping
-       1 cup brown sugar
-       ½ cup unsalted butter
-       ½ cup whipping cream
-       2 cups coconut, toasted
-       1 ½ cups cashews, roasted

1.     Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a 9” springform pan and set aside.

2.     Combine the oats, butter, sugar and boiling water and blend together thoroughly. Set aside.

3.     In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and spices. Add the dry mix to the wet mix and fold them gently together.

4.     Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes, or until a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean.

5.     To make the topping, toast the coconut until lightly browned and fragrant. Combine all of the ingredients into a medium saucepan and heat the mixture until the butter melts and all is well blended.

6.     Pour the mixture on top of the baked cake while it’s still in the springform pan.

7.     Carefully place the cake until the broiler for about 2 minutes, until the topping turns golden brown. (I looked away for a second, and caught the cake just in time!!). Cool for about 30 minutes and serve.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scone Witch

Image
There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a b...
Read more

Birthday torte

Image
M loves chocolate, adores it in fact. He will always make a beeline for the chocolatiest dessert on the menu at dinner, and we always have some iteration of dark chocolate stashed away somewhere in the apartment. So, it seemed appropriate that his birthday cake request was as chocolately as birthday cakes get, in the best way of course. Home for the weekend, we spent a lovely, relaxed evening together, starting with a fantastic dinner at Brooklyn Warehouse, a low-key bistro in Halifax's North End; definitely a culinary gem in the city. Dessert was, of course, M's cake of choice; a luxuriously rich torte made with a sinful amount of dark chocolate and butter, bourbon syrup and just a touch of flour to hold the whole thing together. We paired it with a sweet-tart mixed berry-orange compote, scotch, and 'Blade Runner'. Bayou chocolate torte with bourbon and dark chocolate, with mixed berry-orange compote (recipe to follow) From 'Rebar Modern Food Cookbook...
Read more

Decadence

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe...
Read more