If you read this blog with any regularity, you might already know that I am a huge fan of the Los Angeles Times Culinary SOS column, where they print reader-requested recipes from area restaurants. I've had a very good track record with recipes from the column, and a few weeks ago, I saw one that instantly grabbed my interest. On October 29, 2008, Culinary SOS printed the recipe for a Cranberry Orange Cornmeal Cake from Rustic Canyon Winebar in Santa Monica. I thought the flavors (cornmeal, fresh cranberries, orange zest, maple syrup, ricotta cheese) looked like they would be fantastic together, and besides, I'm always looking for something a little different than the usual assortment of cookie and brownie desserts.The cake was very easy to assemble, although there was only one catch. The recipe calls for a 9-inch round by 3-inch tall cake pan. This is a non-standard pan size. A regular layer cake pan is only 2 inches high, and a springform is 2 1/2 inches high. I used a springform, since that was the tallest pan I own (short of a bundt or tube pan), and I figured it would probably work. It didn't really. About 15 minutes into the dictated 75 minutes of baking time, I started to smell something burning. It was batter overflowing onto the bottom of my oven. I put a baking pan covered with foil on a lower rack to catch further drips, although batter continued to overflow and burn through the remainder of the baking time (this is a nasty little problem; in my old apartment I actually once started a fire in my oven from burning overflow batter). It took an hour and 45 minutes for the middle of the cake to bake through, at which point, there were definitely a bunch of burned cranberries and carbonized overflowing cake mess around the top of the cake (even though I did tent the cake with foil about midway through baking to try and prevent excessive browning).
Remarkably, the cake looked somewhat okay after I trimmed off most of the burnt edges and cut individual slices to serve. The texture was dense and granular, very much like cornbread. It was also not very sweet, resembling a breakfast bread more than a dessert. (The Culinary SOS column mentioned that at Rustic Canyon restaurant, the cake is served with a scoop of ice cream, which I think would definitely make it more dessert-like.) The top of the cake, which is sprinkled with cranberries and sugar before baking, was a sweet crunchy treat. I'm going to try making this cake again later this week for my office, and I'm going to either split the batter between two shorter cake pans, or maybe use a 9 x 13 pan instead. Baking a shorter cake will help with the cooking time, avoid the batter overflow problem, and increase the ratio of crunchy top to cake interior. I'm optimistic!
Recipe: "Rustic Canyon's Cranberry Orange Cornmeal Cake," Los Angeles Times Culinary SOS Column, October 29, 2008.
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