Starting in the Basement

Camille’s 5 month birthday was yesterday which meant two things.  First, it might finally be time to start reading the news again (who is Michele Bachmann and why do I care?), and second, I needed to come up with the 5 month baked good.   Since it is peach season here in the Northeast I wanted to make something with peaches that wasn’t too heavy.  I considered making a peach pie and molding the top crust into the shape of a 5 and then I pictured the scene when that went horribly wrong.  It involved peach pie being thrown out of our window, or maybe in Frenchie’s face, depending on my mood.  So I tried to simplify my idea which is something I have been doing more of lately and started looking for a peaches and cream cake.  I thought that seemed like a pretty obvious idea but it turns out not to be so popular.  At least not what I was picturing.  I found coffee cakes and non-frosting cakes.  I was picturing something like a tres leches cake but with peaches.  I didn’t have the right ingredients fo ra tres leches cake so I decided to go for a fluffy vanilla cake with a whipped cream frosting and peaches.

I ran into a couple of issues here.  First, I needed to pick a vanilla cake recipe.  My go-to white cake recipe is the White Butter Cake, but it is a little more dense than I was picturing.  I remembered a vanilla cake recipe from Sweetopolita and decided to go with that even though I was nervous about all the eggs.  Sometimes when cakes call for a lot of eggs they end up tasting very eggy.  I know, big surprise.  But the method was so weird I decided to give it a shot.  I mean, these cakes are all about having fun and experimenting while watching Camille grow up so I might as well take a chance, right??

This cake only uses egg whites but you do not whip them and fold them in as expected.  You just add them into the other ingredients in 3 batches and mix after each addition.  When I was pouring it into the pan I thought the batter looked a lot like box cake batter.  Later I actually read Sweetopolita’s post and realized that was what she was looking for.  The cake came out very light and fluffy.  I thought it worked really well for a light summer cake and it would go well with any fruit or berry.

I went with my favorite frosting, whipped cream cream cheese frosting but stupidly I thought I would try a different method at first.  I tried to just cream the cream cheese and sugar and then add in the whipped cream.  That resulted in a very runny frosting.  I then tried to fix it and made it SO much worse and had to dump it.  Unfortunately I was then out of all the ingredients and had to make a sweaty dash to the store (Boston had like 1000% humidity today).  I finally made the frosting the right way by whipping the cream cheese and sugar together, separately whipping the cream and then folding them together, and all was well.  I added the peaches in the shape of a 5 and we were ready to go (except that it kind of looked like an S).

Oh wait, I forgot the peach issue.  I forgot to buy farmer’s market peaches during the week so I asked Frenchie to pick some up from Stop and Shop.  Well, he found some lovely peaches but they were hard as a ROCK!  Since the only Sunday farmer’s market was too inconvenient to go to today I was stuck.  I ended up poaching the peaches so they were soft and slightly sweet but definitely not as good as peaches that actually ripened on the tree.

In the end it turned out pretty well, until Camille decided to stick her foot in the cake!  Silly baby!