Baking with peaches!
My girlfriend and I went peach-picking recently, and came home with 28 pounds of gorgeous peaches. Then, of course, it was time for the mad rush to put them all to use before they went bad. Many of them were canned, frozen, or just plain eaten, but a few made their way into baked goods.
These peach muffins made a lovely breakfast, and went very well with a cup of tea.
1 cup chopped peaches
3/4 cup plus 1 tbs AP flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup plain yogurt
1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
a little bit of brown sugar to sprinkle on top (optional)
Toss chopped peaches with 1 tbs flour. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Whisk together the yogurt, butter, egg, and vanilla, then add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Fold in the peaches. Spoon into muffin cups, then sprinkle a little bit of brown sugar over the tops of the muffins (if you choose). Bake at 400 for about 20 minutes.
This is a French peach cake with meringue. A quirky little recipe found in The Joy of Cooking, it is basically a peach upside-down cake smothered under a cloud of egg white. I found it very sticky and QUITE hard to remove from the pan--it looked like a mess at first, but that meringue layer hides a multitude of sins, and the cake itself is rich and delicious!
Preheat oven to 425
Carefully grease an 8-inch pie pan (you can see that I used a square cake pan--perhaps part of my problem in getting the cake out of the pan!), and cover the bottom with approximately 2 cups sliced peaches.
Sprinkle the fruit with:
2/3 cup sugar
Cinnamon or nutmeg (I used a bit of both)
Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
Dredge with:
1 tbs flour
Pour over fruit:
2 to 4 tbs melted butter
Prepare the following batter:
Sift 1 cup AP flour
Re-sift flour with 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt
Beat and add:
2 egg yolks, 1 tbs melted butter, 1/4 milk
Beat these ingredients until blended. Cover the fruit with the batter. Bake for about 30 minutes. Turn cake out onto a platter (if you want to brown your meringue, be sure to use an oven-safe plate).
Use the whites from the two eggs you separated earlier to make a meringue, spread over cake, and briefly brown before serving.