This week's recipe for Tuesdays with Dorie is Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake, found on pages 6-7 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi book.
Ingredient list: flour, butter, baking powder, salt, sugar, vanilla, eggs, cream, and rum.
One of my favorite things about this book of Dorie's is that each recipe comes with a little story, some little tidbit about the recipe, some fun little bits of information to make the recipe more interesting, more approachable, and giving it a sense of history. In France, a "Weekend Cake," according to Dorie, is a cake that can stay tasty for four days so that over the weekend friends and family can help themselves to a slice whenever they like. I also found interesting that she says that "cake" in France tends to be in this loaf form and the gateaux "cake" is our idea of round fancier cake.
As you can probably tell from the ingredient list, this is not a fancy cake that takes hours of preparation and assembly, it's just a nice simple plain delicious cake made with ingredients you probably already have on hand. The optional additon of rum guaranteed that my not-too-fond-of-cake husband would be willing to "eat up" on this one, that rum flavor giving it an extra punch of sassiness. Definitely worthy of a repeat. We think it would be delightful with fruit and whipped cream as well...although truly it's just great on its own.
Check around with the other bakers and see how they did with the recipe this week. The blogroll can be found here.
Come and bake with us from Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi cookbook: the next assignment is: Marquise au Chocolat, found on page 357 for February 10. We will be making the Pink Grapefruit Tart on page 138 for February 24th. The Tuesdays with Dorie group information for joining the group, recipe selection, and general information can be found here.