I know. It’s another cake.

This Strawberry Almond Flour Cake is just too delicious (and interesting) to delay sharing. And, anyway, it is finally strawberry season here in Southern California. 

Interestingly, no wheat flour is involved here. It’s just almond flour and a small amount of coconut flour. 

This is a King Arthur Flour recipe. Here is the link to the original recipe: Strawberry Almond Flour Cake.

Here is how I made the cake in my kitchen. 

Brunch.

It’s a portmanteau– a made up word joining two words and two meanings. You know, a blend. List and article: Listicle. Smoke and fog: Smog. Breakfast and lunch: Brunch. 

Actually, Blue Cayenne’s sweet Chief Quality Officer (CQO)  Juliet is probably a portmanteau, too. Juliet is a little rescue and the bets are that she is a cross between a Yorkie and a Pomeranian. We won’t be telling Juliet, but that makes her a Porkie.

But enough vocabulary wanderings. What about the concept of brunch? 

Nineteenth-century British writer Guy Beringer is generally credited with coining the term brunch. He wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece in a British magazine, The Hunter’s Weekly, in 1895 titled “Brunch: A Plea.” In the piece, Beringer argued the merits of a late Sunday morning meal, one that would better suit those Saturday carousers who, in their hung over state, struggled to face the Sunday feed: “Brunch is a hospitable meal; breakfast is not. Eggs and bacon are adapted to solitude; they are consoling, but not exhilarating. They do not stimulate conversation. Brunch, on the contrary, is cheerful, sociable, and inciting. It puts you in a good temper. It makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings. It sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week.”

This Blueberry Brunch Cake is perfect for any midday celebration. There is lots of flavor with lemon and blueberries and nutmeg. It’s pretty too. And, who couldn’t use a little cobweb cleanse now and then?

This recipe is adapted from a Marian Burros recipe that appeared in The New York Times. You can find the original recipe here.

Here is a belated valentine from Blue Cayenne’s Chief Quality Officer, Juliet, and a delightfully-simple Lemon Cake recipe you should consider adding to your repertoire. (Forgive the lateness of our good wishes. Blue Cayenne’s editorial staff–that would be me–was laid up on Valentine’s Day by a nasty reaction to the second dose of Moderna’s Covid19 vaccine.)

This Lemon Cake is pound cake-ish. It’s texture is dense and moist like a traditional pound cake, but there are interesting variations to the simple one pound of butter, one pound of flour, one pound of eggs, one pound of sugar formula for pound cake that has been kicking around since the 18th Century. 

Making pound cakes used to be a real chore, but this cake is a cinch to whip up, even with its additions.

In the old days, eggs were the only leavening in the traditional pound cake and the cakes tended to be pretty heavy. Commercial baking powder wasn’t invented until 1843.

The mixing of the cake was tough, too. Mechanical mixers didn’t make their appearance until 1856. (The first kitchen mixers with electric motors came on the market in 1885, and the game-changing KitchenAid mixer wasn’t introduced by the Hobart Company until 1919.) This meant that cooks had to struggle to mix the heavy batter. Toni Tipton Martin, in a Southern Living piece, described the process of  laboriously “rubbing the butter to a cream” and then struggling to mix the ingredients with a wooden paddle. (My fifty-year-old KitchenAid mixer is one of the most treasured and most used pieces of equipment in my kitchen.  Like a Le Creuset cast iron pan, a KitchenAid  is a lifetime purchase. (Below is a photo of one of the original KitchenAid mixers and a photo of one similar to the one in my kitchen. Fortunately, the design of the mixer has changed quite a bit over the years.)

Here’s the Lemon Cake recipe. 

This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the Yellow Bliss Road site here.