I spend an insane amount of time falling in love with recipes based on their titles alone and then stopping myself from making them. Take this recipe for Pecan Cornmeal Butter Cake which appears next to a New York Times article about Durham North Carolina where hundreds of acres once used to grow tobacco have been converted to peas strawberries fennel and artichokes and are now home to chickens lambs rabbits and cows. The warehouses once used to cure tobacco are being repurposed as art studios biolabs and radio stations. You know because I didn’t have enough reasons to love North Carolina.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 smitten kitchen | 2021-06-30 12:00:05 |  102,789 Views |
The 'I Want Chocolate Cake' Cake | Smitten Kitchen with Deb Perelman
I fell in love with it immediately. Delicious-sounding title? Check. Great story? Check. Does it play into my Southern crush that flares up when the sun comes up? Check. A recipe that isn't tied to a season we're not in? Check. The word "butter" anywhere? Oh check. So why didn't I make this a month ago? It uses eight egg whites. (Boo to the better part of a dozen leftover egg yolks.) It calls for white cornmeal which despite my searching I couldn't find in New York City or frankly anywhere above the Mason-Dixon line. (I know I can order it by mail but I've dug in my heels; I can buy eight different kinds of mozzarella at my local bodega but not white cornmeal? I'm spoiled.) It calls for 10 4-inch pie pans which I have because I'm crazy (even my son agrees) but I know the vast majority of home cooks don't because they're not.
And so I decided not to. Then I decided to. Then I decided not to. And then Monday morning it was raining and dirty and I was looking for excuses not to go to the grocery store and I started messing with the recipe. If I halved it I would only need four egg whites and I have enough yellow cornmeal to try a different cornbread recipe every week this summer. (Guys I just had the best idea!) And what if I could keep the pretty-prettyness of a fluted pie pan but bake it in the more popular 9-inch size?
If you ignore the fact that my cake stuck to the pan (don’t worry I encourage you to line it with parchment paper) and forgive me for completely burying the lid here damn it people this cake is something else something spectacular. Oh it’s not much to look at—especially since both the crumb and the yellow cornmeal really do make it look like cornbread—but when you taste it you know something great has happened. The butter has browned. The pecans have toasted until dark and caramelized. The vanilla makes the browned butter more bourbon-y and the pecans more brown sugar-y. The egg whites keep it from being heavy in your mouth and the flavor impact is so great that it has to be the thin cake attacked with barely sweetened whipped cream and sliced strawberries. This cake has a lot in common with another cake I rave about the Hazelnut Brown Butter Cake but follow me here I think brown butter goes even better with pecans and berries than I ever thought it did with hazelnuts and chocolate. Or maybe it’s just summer and berry season distracting me. I’m not complaining.
