Peaches

In addition to feeling adventurous at the Farmers Market, my friend insisted that I buy some good old peaches while I was there. So I bought a nice big bucket of them and decided to have some fun with desserts. I found a nice recipe for Whole Wheat Peach Kuchen in my Simply in Season cookbook (p. 156). While in the middle of making it, my work-wife stopped over and asked what I was making. I said, "I think it's called koo-CHEN...?" Then she looked at my recipe and said, "Oh, you mean KOO-ken? It means 'cake' in German." So... apparently it's cake (but honestly, it's more like a cross between a pie and a cheesecake, but whatever).

Crust
1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 Tbs sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup butter

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Cut in butter until crumbly. Pat mixture over bottom and sides of a pie pan. (Note: I really think this may have been slightly too much crust for my pie pan; however, this pan was a little shallower than my glass Pyrex pan, so maybe I just need to use a deeper pan. Beats me, but you may want to consider adding slightly less flour.)

Filling 1
4 cups peeled peach halves
3 Tbs sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon

Arrange peaches cut-side-down on top of crust. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon over peaches and bake at 400°F for 15 minutes.

Filling 2
1 cup yogurt or sour cream
1 egg
2 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

Combine and pour over peaches and continue baking for 30 minutes or until set.

Who doesn't love a good kuchen?

So the kuchen was pretty good. It was a nice way to mix things up. The creamy topping was superb (I ate quite a bit of it before I dumped it on top of the peaches!). One issue I had was that when I decided to make it, I probably didn't have quite enough peaches yet and they were very small on top of it. So next time I'll definitely need some more!

After I ate all the kuchen up, I decided I wanted more peaches, so I bought another bucket the next week. This time, I wanted to take an old favorite at my house and make it from scratch.

My mom made this really yummy and easy dump cake. Basically you grease a cake pan with a stick of butter. Then you add two cans of pie filling (same flavor or you can do a different flavor on each end) and then pour a box of yellow cake mix on top. Finely slice up the rest of the butter stick and lay it evenly across the top of the cake mix. Bake at 350°F for about an hour.

So even though my mom's recipe is super delicious, I wanted to try to make it from scratch. One thing that really got me when I read Kitchen Counter Cooking School was the part where her husband came to the realization that boxed cake mix is nothing more than flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt (and a bunch of preservatives to keep it 'fresh'. Bottom line is that it's really not any more difficult to make a cake from scratch, but there's this stigma that it's actually really hard and that's why you make the boxed stuff. So I decided to try out their recipe for cake mix (p. 207) and I substituted fresh fruit and honey for the pie filling.

1 stick butter

Peaches

Strawberries

Honey

2 1/2 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 3/4 cups sugar

1/2 tsp salt

Cut up and peel fruit into medium chunks. Cover with honey in a bowl and let sit for a few hours or overnight. Grease 9x13 cake pan with butter stick. Spread fruit/honey mixture over bottom of the pan. Mix flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt, and then pour on top of fruit. Sprinkle little butter slices over the top of the cake mix so that the pan is well-covered. Bake at 350°F for about 1 hour. Cool and serve with cream or ice cream.

Yums.

Again, I think the cake mix recipe may have been a bit too much for what I was doing, so I will probably cut back a little bit next time, maybe to 2 cups flour, 1 1/4 cups sugar (it was a little too sweet), and maybe 2 tsp baking powder. It was still very delicious and what I really love about dump cake is that it is just as good when it's leftovers the next day. And the next day too... if it lasts that long. So I'd say it was a pretty successful transformation that will need some minor adjustments to reach perfection.