Summer's Peach Cake

Well, hello again! Hope you are all doing great and enjoying the wonderful summer's bounties with your family and friends. This is my first summer as a Mom and it has been a blast so far - Sun Gods have been unusually good bestowing us with sunny but relatively mild perfect weekend picnic days; farmer's markets are overflowing with sweet peaches and plums and nectarines and my own tomato plant (which I had planted two summers ago and thus far thought to be dead) somehow miraculously propped up again start of the summer making my day.. So much for the life's little pleasures :)

Needless to say we are treating ourselves to a whole array of delicious and super-sweet stone fruits from farmer's market this summer. In all the midst of the summer, one of our best friends are relocating across the country and I thought what better way to treat them than some home-made stone fruit cake. I rarely bake cakes. The last one I baked was six years ago - yes, that long! Not that I don't like cakes or don't like baking but the trouble is if I bake cake then I eat it all :) and thus one year I made plans to treat myself occasionally to coffee and a slice of cake in nearby bakeries in an effort to keep me away from baking and then munching the whole thing.

But some occasions deserve breaking of the rules! And what's a better occasion than to enjoy a piece of home-made cake reminiscing over our happy times together with old friends - and thus came a Google search which got me to this absolutely delicious peach winner recipe from food52.

I pretty much followed the original recipe to a delightful end-result; a few things I changed from the original recipe and a few things I would change the next time (yes, this is coming back my kitchen next year for sure!) are:
Original: food52

My modifications:
  • Being a non-cake baker, I rarely have almond extract at home. So I added 1tsp vanilla extract and instead increased almond flour to 3/4C for that almondy taste.
  • I made my own almond flour by grinding roasted chopped almonds from Trader Joe's. It was surprisingly easy!
Next time I bake this cake I would:
  • Reduce sugar to 3/4C. May be because I don't like sweet things as much but the cake was a tad too sweet for me.
  • Instead of 3/4tsp nutmeg, will try half-half nutmeg and cardamom powder.
  • Add one more peach. Before baking it looked like peaches were just about right in quantity (a tad more may be) but the cake rose very well and think it can take one more peach perhaps

This was a summer of picnics and good books for me! My project at work got over just about the right time in late July and I have been using my low-load work time since then to plan a lot of weekend picnics over vada-paav and pasts and catching up with my books and movies quota.

I don't think I have posted a picture of my daughter here and this is going against the rule, but I just love the summer-y feel this pic my husband took of us during one of our vada-paav picnics.

Enjoy the rest of the summer everyone.. see you soon!

Comments

Hamaree Rasoi said…
Lovely and colorful peach cake.
Deepa
Priya Suresh said…
Cake with summer fruits are always welcome at our place, beautiful cake.
sangeeta said…
Oh wow..such a cute angel. Seems I missed out a lot on your blog PJ.
God bless the lil baby...
indosungod said…
Nice to see you and of course your cutie daughter.

The cake is delicious looking by the way and I am going to hand this off to DD to try.
PJ said…
Thanks Deepa!
PJ said…
Thanks Priya - specially great while the summer fruit season lasts.
PJ said…
Thank you Sangeeta! Life has changed so much with her around now :) I had her late last year
PJ said…
Wow, your DD is already in the stage of tries cakes! When did time fly by? :) Thanks for stopping by Indo - always good to have you here.,