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my molli-batali cake

March 11th, 2008 · 16 Comments

i promised a cake and well, this would be the one. it’s a total hybrid, born of two disjointed thoughts. i’d been thinking about the orangette post featuring edna lewis’s ‘busy day’ cake. because i truly love and appreciate cake. it’s is one of my favorite things. and i like a really good plain cake with something interesting going on around it. and since it’s the tail end of winter, instead of the ‘creme fraiche with warm crushed berries’ option, i thought the underlying nutmegy flavor of this cake would go well with a spiced wine sauce of dried fruit, similar to what i’d had last month at ‘otto‘ in nyc, a batali joint.

so i baked up this simple cake and then proceeded to empty a half bottle of red wine into a small pan with some sugar, cloves, cinnamon stick and orange rind – along with dried cherries, black mission figs and raisins. i added salt and black pepper and reduced the liquid until it was a syrup. and then it was plated with the creme fraiche… perfect. i substituted 1% milk because it’s what i had in the house. don’t. get in the car and go. buy. whole. milk. i think it was a detriment to the end result. not dramatic, but a subtle ‘something’ that perhaps took the cake down a small notch. so thanks again to both molly at orangette and of course to my mario for the wonderful elements that inspired my mollie-batali cake.

it’s very much my kind of dessert…

Tags: dessert

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