Rhubarb bread crumb cake
Bread
Spring is the time of year of the great pinkening in my kitchen. When, fed up with a winter of stored apples and fleetingly good citrus shipped in from far away, there’s finally some fresh produce to bake into desserts. Enter: rhubarb. So far, I’ve steeped rhubarb in vodka for an entirely new kind of Cosmopolitan, I’ve made quick sweet-tart sauces, and I’ve adapted the apple cake from my cookbook, Secrets of Great Second Meals, to accommodate the pucker of spring’s stalky crop. <br />This isn’t an architectural cake—it’s tender and moist and almost, but not quite, like a cobbler, so you may even want to eat it in a bowl. But the most signature element of this dessert is the cinnamon-toasty flavor that comes from bread crumbs. <br />This is a great way to use up all those ends of artisanal bread loaves that you may not have gotten around to eating. Here’s how I cultivate my own bread crumb garden. If I notice the end of a loaf has been sitting around longer than a couple of days, I slice it into thick slices and lay it on a sheet pan. Then I forget about it for another day or two. I break the stale slices into shards and pulverize them in a food processor or high-speed blender. Though some recipes are best with milder bread crumbs, this one is great with rye bread or brown levain—it’s all character building. Once the bread is ground, I keep it in an airtight container in the freezer if I’m not going to use it right away.
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