It´s Rhubarb season! It doesn´t look much like spring and the weather has been crazy from bitter cold to moist and warm but I want it to be spring now. So I felt like I should make something rhubarb-y. But I have never made anything from or with rhubarb ever before. I did, however, always like a good rhubarb cake, something that suddenly strikes me as incredibly german. 

Because I felt it would be fun and to keep them busy (because two kids each isn´t enough?) I challenged two friends to make something with rhubarb as well. How are you girls doing? :D 

Here´s what I made: 

Ingredients: 

100g Rhubarb

75g Flour

50g shredded Coconut

2 Eggs

100g Sugar

40g Butter (room temperature)

Vanilla Essence if you like

Butter for the pan

This was enough for me to make a small cake, if you want a bigger one, please ajust the measurements accordingly. The original recipe I altered here used 4 times as much as I did so I guess that should make one big cake.

How to: 

First: Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Rhubarb!

Like I said this was my first time working with rhubarb. Google told me not to peel it when it was young and "tender", like it would be early in the season but to absolutely peel it when it was "stronger" later on. Well, you funny internet-people, I have no clue how to tell those two conditions apart if I have never seen either so I peeled the thingies anyway. Can`t hurt, right? 

The peeling proved to be fairly easy but stringy, just like peeling asparagus.

So: peel and cut Rhubarb.

Peeled and cut.

Put flour and shredded coconut in a bowl, mix well, add the cut rhubarb. 

I for my part like my coconut powdery and not stuck between my teeth so I shredded it even finer in the blender beforehand. Not as fine as flour but... well, finer than what the store sells. I just think that this makes coconut things easier to eat. 

Next seperate the eggs and beat the eggwhites. When it starts to get stiff, add half the sugar. 

Now mix the eggyolks with the butter and the other half of the sugar. It should be all foamy and looking very yummy (but really it´s just very buttery... and I really don´t like butter.>_<).

If you would like to, add a touch of vanilla essence here.

 Butter, sugar, eggyolks...

...all foamy.

Carefully fold in the eggwhite-sugar into the butter-sugar stuff. Sounds easier than it is because butter will be butter and hence not very cooperative. Be careful not to lose all the eggwhite fluffiness. 

Almost batter.

Now fold in the rhubarb-flour mix. Again. Carefully, please. Because there is no baking powder or soda in this recipe the fluffiness from the eggwhites is all the fluffiness this cake will have.  (Fluffiness is a funny word. I like it, did you notice? Fluffy, fluffy, fluffiness!)

I tend to get impatient and angry at batters not combining as I would like them to and then just beat the crap out of everything... Not very wise. I did an okay job this time, though.

Batter that made the cake.

That was pretty much it already. Now put the batter in a well buttered cake pan and put in the oven. 

Almost cake now.

For quite some time! Since the original four-times-as-much-recipe said to leave it in for almost two hours I figured I´d start with 50 minutes. After this time I checked the cake, found it still partially liquid inside so then I covered the cake with aluminium foil and gave it another 20 minutes. 

I left it in for 1 hour 10 minutes

Maybe a bit much, the sides were a bit burnt. Maybe try 10 mins less? 

 The cake! 

I liked this cake. A lot. The coconut came out nicely but without taking away any attention from our leading man, the rhubarb. I wish I had used a bit more of that, though. 

It did turn out moist and fluffy and makes a great spring cake. Not too light and summery but not a heavy winter food, either. I´m betting it`s super yummy with some whipped cream...

Cake!

I liked it. Go try it yourself. Or: try something else with rhubarb. I´d be glad to hear about everyone elses experiments. ^^

Thanks for reading. 

Love,

a*

PS: Fun fact: Rhubarb is officially a vegetable in Germany while in the US it has been classifed as a fruit in 1947.