Holiday Weekend

I hope the US peeps all enjoyed their holiday weekend. My lack of a functional 1/4" foot meant no piecing this weekend, sadly. We also spent part of the 4th of July without power in half of the house, so a functional sewing machine wouldn't have helped too much. I did, however, use some of the time to select 20 squares from my Kate Spain Fandango layer cake for a planned Carnival (Jaybird Quilts pattern) quilt. And I cut a bunch of the pieces for my Halloween Taffy quilt (also a Jaybird Quilts pattern).



Thankfully the power didn't go out in the kitchen, so I was able to try out a recipe I'd seen on Heidi Swanson's blog, 101 Cookbooks: Salt-Kissed Buttermilk Cake.


Mmmm! Surely berries are one of the best things about summer!


Salt-kissed Buttermilk Cake



A cake that you can feel a lot less guilty about! It uses whole wheat pastry flour (Bob's Red Mill to the rescue), 1/2 cup of sugar (+3 tbsp on top) and 1/4 cup of butter. As anyone who does any baking knows, that's not a lot at all.

I baked mine in a 10" tin, rather than an 11", which meant a few more minutes in the oven.

It's a very subtle cake, which I enjoyed a lot. A lot of cakes get drowned out by excessive use of sugar, and with only a little of it used, it really allowed the lemon zest in the batter to shine too.

Certainly this is a recipe to add to the rotation. My only future tweaks would be to use a little less of the salt on the top, as 1 teaspoon ended up being a little much for us. With the buttermilk making the cake a little saltier anyway, and there not being a huge amount of sugar used, too much of the topping salt can be a touch overpowering. However, your mileage may vary and all that.

The kids enjoyed the cake too, though it was difficult to get Miss Matilda to stop digging out and consuming only the berries. Cheeky miss monkey!