LINCOLN SQUARE — I am living the dream, people. Living. The. Dream.
It took me three years of trying, but I finally have the abundant crop of tomatoes that lured me into gardening in the first place.
Patty Wetli says the cake turned out amazing, and it's (fairly) healthy too!
Every day, more and more of the little rubies are ripening on the vine. Yea!
Every day, I'm harvesting more than Dave and I can eat. Yea?
I've put tomatoes in salads and sandwiches and wraps. I've eaten them straight off the vine as a snack. Sliced them up and stirred them into rice, along with freshly harvested onion, carrots and beans.
And still they keep coming.
Roast 'em, can 'em, make salsa, people say. I dunno, that seems like work.
I decided to bake a cake.
"That sounds gross," Andrew, my editor, replied when I told him my plan.
Hear me out: carrot cake, zucchini bread, pumpkin pie.
There isn't a vegetable alive — or fruit, as the case may be — that can't be improved by a little butter, sugar and spice.
Tomato cake is actually a more common confection than you'd think, but the challenge was finding a recipe that employed fresh tomatoes as opposed to canned tomato soup. My cookbooks were no help, so I turned to that renowned baker, Chef Internet, and after rearranging the words of my search term several times — "tomato cake," "fresh tomato cake," "tomato cake with actual, real tomatoes" — I hit upon a winner.
As I set about assembling the ingredients — I am a big fan of "mise en place," which I like to translate as "playing cooking show" — I realized it has been a looooong time since last I baked.
"Where the %$&?! is the molasses?" I asked no one in particular after coming across nothing but half-empty bottles of Caro syrup in my cupboards.
I barely had enough basics like flour, eking out the required 4 cups by supplementing with cake flour. I did unearth a 7-pound bag of powdered sugar, so at least there would be frosting.
After pureeing 2 pound of tomatoes in the food processor, I had to say, it was looking like Andrew's assessment was spot on. Liquid tomato, flecked with bits of skin, looks like pinkish vomit. I couldn't even bring myself to include a photo — trust me, you're welcome.
But after incorporating the tomatoes into the batter, the mixture looked fine, if a bit runny. I popped the pan into the oven and went to towel off, having chosen the swampiest night of the year to heat up the kitchen to a 350-degree sauna.
Thirty-five minutes later, I inserted my cake tester into the center of the cake and added another 10 minutes to the baking time. Then it was done.
I cooled the cake overnight, because by this point it was 11 p.m., and made the frosting the next morning.
I swapped out the glaze included with the cake recipe and substituted a mascarpone frosting from "Baked Explorations," which authors Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito pair with their tomato soup cupcakes. (I worship these two so much, I planned our entire New York vacation around visiting their Brooklyn bakery. Just kidding. Not really.)
The result? An insanely moist, more lightly spiced, less dense version of carrot cake. Even without the can of soup, it was still mmm-mmm good. But don't take my word for it.
I'll let Dave do the talking.
"It's delicious," he said. "But I don't know that I taste any tomato."
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