Walnut Butter Cake

Walnut Butter Cake

You do not see the walnuts in the photos, but they are somewhere inside. I have decided to bake a Walnut Butter Cake for our lunch picnic tomorrow. It'll take us minimum 4 hours to drive to Sestriere, and we would like to ski at least the whole afternoon - so we figured that we wouldn't be able to stop for lunch in a restaurant. We'll have baguette ham sandwiches, potato chips, cheese, fruit and cake. I was thinking of making noodles too - but then Club Med = buffets, snacks and free-flow cocktails, so it wouldn't hurt to not overeat before we arrive.

I still remember how I used to bake butter cakes when I was a teenager because they are so easy to bake, with their equal portions of butter, sugar, eggs and flour. And they keep quite well. Though I did have some doubt this afternoon about how many eggs I should use, so I resorted to weighing them. With my lousy kitchen scale. I'll have to get a good digital one soon. Hub said that I'm such a baking disaster because to start with I do not have a proper kitchen scale.

Walnut Butter Cake :

250g Butter

250g Sugar

4 Eggs (room temperature)

220g Cake flour

2 Tbsp Cocoa powder

1 Tsp Baking powder

1 Tsp Vanilla extract

A handful of chopped walnuts

Cream softened butter and sugar together till really creamy. The idea is to introduce air into the batter so as to obtain a fluffy cake. When I want a moist cake, I mix the dry and wet ingredients together and just bake everything like that.

Beat in the eggs one by one. Add the vanilla extract.

Sift the cake flour, baking powder and cocoa powder together. Gently fold the flour into the batter, but do not over do it or you'll get too much gluten formation. However, I am not sure I do it right, truth be told, I get the impression that I still have pockets of flour in my batter because of that. Wish I had paid more attention to the scientific explanations during Home Economics.

Stir in the choppped walnuts and scrap batter into a greased baking tin. Bake in a hot 180°C oven for 40-60 minutes depending on how tall your cake tin is.