Week 30: Peach Cake

Are you familiar with America’s Test Kitchen? I haven’t watched the show in years, but I do enjoy following it on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I recently saw a photo for their version of Summer Peach Cake and it piqued my interest. I’ve been eating a lot of peaches this summer. Why note bake some into a cake?

I followed the recipe to the letter, except for substituting Grand Marnier for peach schnapps. I wasn’t about to buy a whole bottle of the stuff when I don’t drink it and only needed 5 tablespoons.

Here’s my mise en place. You can see how many ingredients were involved in this cake. This should have been the first sign. I HATE fussy cakes with lots of ingredients.

Slicing all those peaches was a chore.

As you may see explained in the video that accompanies this recipe on America’s Test Kitchen, baking the peaches that would be placed inside the cake was crucial to extracting some of the liquid. So I chunked all those peaches and spread them on a foil-lined baking sheet and tossed it with Grand Marnier, sugar, and lemon juice. They sure looked pretty.

After the peach chunks baked, I left them to cool while I prepared the cake batter.

I combined the brown sugar, white sugar, and eggs in a not-big-enough-bowl.

I eventually switched to a larger bowl before adding the butter, sour cream, and extracts. Finally, I sifted in the flour and baking soda, leaving out the salt since I was using salted butter. And I whisked it all together until it was smooth.

I poured about half the cake batter (it was pretty tasty, by the way) in the bottom of my greased 10″ springform pan. Yes, I know the original recipe calls for a 9″ springform, but I was working with what I had.

Next I tossed the baked peach chunks with the panko breadcrumbs. A lot of the chunks were sticking to the foil that I used to line the baking sheet, leading me to believe I baked the peach chunks a tad too long.

I spread the breaded peach chunks on top of the batter in the pan.

On top of the peaches, I poured and spread the remaining half of the batter, topping the batter with the peach slices. The finishing touch was the vanilla sugar.

The cake baked in about 50 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

After 5 minutes, I ran a knife around the edges and removed the sides of the pan, letting the cake cool an additional hour on the wire rack.

I actually ate two slices of this cake, but not because it tasted so great. I think I had a second piece because I didn’t get much satisfaction out of the first. I could still taste the strong liquor on the peaches and the cake was dry and bland. It was just so “blah”. The other irksome thing was the cake was sticking to the bottom of the pan, even though I thoroughly prepped it with cooking spray.

In the end, this cake found it’s final resting place in the trash faster than it took for me to bake the darn thing. I’ll stick to eating raw peaches.