Walnut Spice Sticky Cake

It's the season for recipe testing! I'm also testing for Terry Hope Romero's upcoming international vegan cookbook. It's a delicious job, let me tell you. Doing all of this testing for Terry and Sara Beth have really put me on a mission. It's so much fun trying new things. I've been inspired by different techniques and flavor combinations and will definitely carry some of that over into my own recipes.

I totally took a bite out of this before I took the picture. I couldn't resist.

Today I made Terry's Walnut Spice Sticky Cake. I don't normally make cakes because it's just the two of us here and it's sometimes hard to eat a whole one. The sacrifices you make sometimes! This cake is not one that's likely to sit around going bad, that's for sure. I literally just finished eating a piece of this and I'm holding myself back from having a second piece. I will definitely have another one after dinner tonight.

Fresh from the oven!

This walnut cake is made with spelt flour, which I love and has just the right amount of spice to give it flavor without being hot or too overpowering. There's a bit of orange zest in it and an orange syrup poured on top after it comes out of the oven. I much prefer cakes like this to the kind with frosting. I'm not a frosting hater, but normally I scrape most of it off because it's too much sugar for me. I feel like I could eat a piece of this for breakfast and not start the day off on a sugar high.

Okay, maybe I will have another piece. Just a small one.

Spelt Johnny Cakes

I'm really enjoying trying all of the recipes in the Babycakes cookbook. It's kind of fun to get a bit more practice at gluten-free cooking. I always enjoy varying the textures and flours in the things I bake anyway and now when I need to make something for an event that includes some gluten-free people, I'm quite a bit more capable of doing so. Well, some of the recipes in Babycakes are made with spelt flour, so I know those don't exactly qualify as gluten-free, just lower in gluten than wheat flour. I do really enjoy the flavor of spelt in a lot of baked goods, though. I think muffins are especially great for it.

As a good Southern girl transplanted into Canada, I often miss some of the foods I was used to growing up. I mean, seriously. How has no one here ever tried grits or okra or collards?! When I saw the Johnnycakes recipe in this book, I knew I had to try it. Just looking at the ingredient list I could pretty much tell right away that these weren't going to be very authentic. Healthier, yes, but authentic, not so much.

The Johnnycakes are made with a base of spelt flour and cornmeal and drizzled with agave nectar after baking. I think that frying these in a little bit of oil in a cast iron pan would probably give them a bit more oomph, though you'd definitely be removing some of the healthy from them by doing that.

I don't know. I didn't hate these, but I didn't love them, either. I don't really like to write about things I don't totally love, but I was in the middle on these Johnnycakes. I think they ended up being a bit too dry for my taste. They really needed something else to make them shine. Maybe the addition of some fresh corn kernels would have given them a bit more moisture. If I try making these again, I'll probably bake them for just a few minutes and then fry them for the rest of the time. I just expect Johnnycakes to be a bit greasy, you know? It's like eating grits with no Earth Balance. It's just not done in polite society. I'm sure there is a way to still bake these and keep the calories down and improve the flavor, I just have this particular expectation in my head, you know?

If you decide to make these Johnnycakes, make sure to eat them right away when they're warm. If you end up needing to reheat them, toss a few sprinkles of water on them before you do. They're even drier when they've cooled down so you need to add a bit of that fresh from the oven steam back in.