This year has been unusual that I baked up so many seasonal treats for Valentine’s Day, a day which chocolate reigns supreme. In fact, all the anticipation leaves me feeling un-Valentine now that the day has finally arrived. To not celebrate, I decided to make something homey and non-chocolaty, something that I would love to eat any other day of the year.
Although a multi-component master piece of dessert is technically challenging and intellectually stimulating, I am often drawn to simpler baking recipes that makes me think “I want to bake and eat that”. Unfortunately, being an avid recipe and cookbook consumer, recipes that do not bring something new or intriguing rarely make their way to my to-cook list. Chocolate chip cookies? Pass. Fruit crumble? I can make that in my sleep. Loaf cakes? I’m close to running out of fresh ideas for styling a loaf. True creativity is a rare thing and when I see it, it makes me want to stop everything I’m doing and get to my kitchen right away. Flo Braker’s Baking For All Occasions provides me with many of such moments. I love to play recipe roulette with this book. I simply open a random page of the book and I’ll most likely land on a recipe that makes me appreciate Braker’s creativity. I perked up as soon as I opened the page with the heading Peanut Butter Pound Cake with Coconut Date Topping.
The peanut butter pound cake has a tight crumb and sturdy texture. It is unusual that peanut butter is paired with coconut and dates but this combination is fantastic. The sweet topping was kissed by the kitchen torch to create a chewy, caramelized flavour to complement the earthiness of peanut butter cake. It is such a simple dessert that can be made without advanced planning but the result is amazing. These cupcakes remind me of the days before cupcakes made it big in our culture in all their fancy ruffly buttercream guise. These are diminutive and the topping seems more like a pair of comfortable sweat pants instead of an attention-catching evening dress. Quite appropriate for the occasion actually because I’ll be sporting a pair of sweat pants tonight when I Skype instead of getting dolled up for fancy dinner. Such is the joy of long distance relationship.
I fashioned her 9x5 loaf into 20 cupcakes while doubling the topping. I used 4 jumbo eggs topped with a bit of whole milk to make up for lost volume of 5 large eggs. Otherwise, I made the recipe as written. The six ingredient pound cake consists of butter, sugar, peanut butter, eggs, milk, and flour. The leavening entirely depends on creaming of butter and sugar so do take good care to aerate the batter properly. The topping was cooked over stovetop using butter, brown sugar, cream, unsweetened shredded coconut, and chopped medjool dates. Here’s a tip: don’t use paper cupcake liners for this one. Either go without or use foil ones because topping each cake with a little dollop of caramel, I ran the flame of a kitchen torch over to make it bubbly and charred. You don’t want to set the paper on fire.
Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate! I’m ready to elbow anyone out of my way tomorrow for half price chocolate.
