Newest Toy

We have been talking a lot about how to keep up our home cooking over the summer. It gets so hot it is impossible to use the oven and even stove cooking is tough. We have an air conditioner in the kitchen so some cooking is manageable. I decided to try getting a toaster oven. My friends who have them swear by and love them. Greg of course rolled his eyes when he saw that I had purchased yet another appliance but I found a space for it and gave it a try on Saturday night. My hope is that I can toast, bake and broil without heating up the entire kitchen. My first test was strawberry cake. We joined a local CSA in our neighborhood. Community Supported Agriculture, in case you are not aware, is when you buy a share in a local farm (ours is an organic farm on the North Fork of Long Island) and then pick up your dividends weekly in your neighborhood. It is kind of cool because the share fluctuates with the weather, farm conditions (like pests) and with what is in season. For instance this is only our 2^nd week and because of the cool spring we had our shares have been small in the beginning. Then this week we got the world’s smallest head of broccoli because of an outbreak of root maggots that killed part of the crop. No worries because we got lots of other things. We were supposed to get rhubarb this week and I was going to make rhubarb cake but instead we got strawberries. I was bummed but just subbed them in for the rhubarb and it turned out really fabulous. Here is the super easy recipe:

Rhubarb Cake

4 cups of Rhubarb cut into ½” pieces
¾ cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
½ cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
¼ tsp almond extract
2 eggs
1/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 375F. Mix the rhubarb and sugar and set aside. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside. Cream the butter, add the wet ingredients, and then add the flour mixture. Grease a 9x9 pan and put the rhubarb/sugar on the bottom, then add the batter on top. Bake for 35 minutes or until golden.

(I subbed strawberries, Earth Balance Margarine, Bob’s Red Mill egg replacer, and soy milk and the cake turned out great and vegan.)

I cut the recipe in half to fit into 2 ramekins and slid them into the toaster oven, set the timer and walked away to enjoy a movie. They baked up perfectly and we enjoyed them with some non-dairy ice cream. I can’t wait until this Thursday when we should finally get some Rhubarb in our CSA so that I can try the cake again as it was meant to be.