Rhubarb is a gift

and olive oil cake is a treat

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Hello friends, welcome back to A Newsletter. What’s new with me? Thanks for asking. Well, the thorn is I’ve officially stopped br**st f**ding (breast feeding) and retired The Pump, and so I feel both free and a little depressed. It might not be an exaggeration to say I’ve never felt this many high/low conflicting things at once, but I am, how you say “working through it.”

The rose is that this week we started to give Charlie solid foods to taste, and giving a tiny baby food and new flavors for the first time is as wonderful as I had dreamed it would be. So far his favorite is a lemon slice, with masticated blueberry a close second. Mother Boy! If you want to hear me talk about the baby experience some more, you can find this interview I did with Spread The Jelly here.

Today, there’s a recipe for a lovely little rhubarb cake that is really best described as “delightful,” and also the perfect receptacle for all your rhubarb curiosity. Next week, two not-quite-definitive but from-the-heart lists of places to go in both upstate New York and Maine. See you then.

delightful

Rhubarb, an extremely easy on the eyes, hyper-seasonal vegetable that bakes like a fruit, is a true wonder of nature. That color, that texture, that acidity, that versatility! Yesterday, when baking this cake, my friend Kate nibbled on it raw (which I love) and said it tasted like a “Strawberry Celery” if that ever existed (it doesn’t, but wow, what a description). I will always buy it if I see it with ambitions of doing something remarkable with it because I can not and will never get over how something so gorgeous just grows wild and we get to eat it. In my pastry chef days I tried repeatedly to turn it into sorbet or ice cream maintaining the vibrant pink color without relying on something like hibiscus or beets to keep it pink and failed several times, realizing it’s perhaps best baked into cakes or used to fill galettes (here’s the galette from Dining In– it’s from an Australian website, but hey, we love grams. They say marzipan, but it was originally made using almond paste). This is the link to my pie crust (the only one, if you ask me!).

Rhubarb-Almond Galette from Dining In, photo by Michael Graydon and Nikole Herriott (published in 2017 but looks like it could be 2025, no?)

Another thing I love to do with it (which admittedly does feel very “pastry chef” of me), is to slow roast it with lots of vanilla and a good bit of sugar, gently preserving the color and shape of the rhubarb while it becomes as soft as custard, swimming in a self-made syrup that’s tart, vanilla-flecked and peony-pink. Eat the rhubarb and drizzle the syrup over yogurt and granola (safe but good) or a nice scoop of ice cream in a small bowl while getting into bed (sexy?).

slow-roasted rhubarb from Sweet Enough, photo by Chris Bernabeo

For something a bit more practical that can be made with most things you already have, this little olive oil cake below is really nice. A dense crumb, almost pound-cake in texture, exceedingly moist thanks to: 1. Olive oil 2. Yogurt 3. So much rhubarb, it’s a gorgeous little sliceable snackable cake to keep on your counter all week long (or give it as a gift, it travels very well). You can, of course do a few things differently if you want (use melted butter instead of olive oil, use berries or sliced stone fruit instead of rhubarb, bake it in a loaf versus a round), but I think the olive oil keeps it moist the longest, the fleeting rhubarb season should be celebrated while we can, and the thin strips of rhubarb, which do remind me of my 78 striped button-downs, really shine brightest when baked on top of a round cake.