These are the last-of-the-season peaches and you won’t find the sweet white and yellow peaches any longer until next summer. However, this recipe is good for all kinds of stone fruits: plums and apricots in particular. Pears work as well too as long as they are not too ripe, making this a versatile foundational recipe for almost any fruits in season. Overly ripe fruit could make the cake soggy. Putting not-too-ripe fruits in a buttery bed transforms them into something special by bringing out their natural flavor. In addition, I couldn’t wait to write about this buttery cake because of its unusual technique.
It’s called the reverse-creaming method, which makes for a super-tender and crowd-pleasing buttery cake. During the summer, I have baked this cake several times and won’t hesitate to scale it for upward of more than 12 servings.
The reverse-creaming method was popularized by Rose Levy Beranbaum, who included the method in her 1988 cookbook The Cake Bible. This method is “reversing” the basic template of starting with beating or creaming the butter for the majority of cake batters.
“I wanted to make a cake that had the velvety texture of boxed cake but with the flavor of from-scratch cake,” she explains. To make her butter cakes, she beats softened butter into the dry ingredients and a little of the recipe’s liquid, before adding the remaining liquid and eggs to make a batter. In the book, she wrote about how she chose this method because it “virtually eliminates any possibility of toughening the cake by over-beating.”
How does reverse-creaming work? Primarily, by coating the recipe’s flour with butter, this method limits gluten development. Too much gluten development can make cakes tough. Meanwhile, a buttery coating acts as a safeguard or shield to prevent that from happening with too much mixing.
The outcome is a velvety, tender crumb. Doing it this way, the baked cakes tend to be flat, rather than domed, and are slightly more dense than creamed cakes. The sturdiness of the resulting cake makes it possible to deck the cake with loads of peaches. Furthermore, lesser dooming allows me to make a leveled rectangular cake the size of a 9×13-inch pan. I wonder why we don’t approach more cake batters this way.
There you have it: an easy, no-fuss, velvety butter cake with seasonal peaches for a crowd using an unconventional reverse-creaming mixing method.
Butter Cake With Peaches
Ingredients
- 1¼ cups/283 grams butter, at room temperature, cut into pieces, plus more for the pan
- 3 cups/384 grams all-purpose flour, plus more for the pan
- 1 ¾cups/352 grams granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- ¾ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 cup/240 grams plain whole-milk yogurt (not Greek), at room temperature
- 4 medium-ripe peaches, pitted and cut into ¼-inch wedges
Instructions
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9-by-13-inch baking pan.
In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda. Add the butter and beat with an electric mixer on medium until all the dry ingredients are coated in butter and the mixture looks like coarse sand, about 2 minutes.
Add the eggs and beat until well-combined, about 1 minute. Add the yogurt and beat on high until smooth and creamy, about 3 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add half of the peaches and gently mix them into the batter.
Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and spread it out evenly. Top with the remaining peaches and sprinkle the top evenly with sugar.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with moist crumbs attached, 50 to 65 minutes. Transfer the pan to a rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
Notes
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1025679-butter-cake-with-peaches?q=peach%20cake
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