French Peach Cake

It is peach season! That means our stand is filled with the sweet smell of peaches, a delightful summer scent! This week we started picking Red Havens (which is a classic peach variety). Red Havens are our first "free-stone" variety, meaning their flesh comes cleanly off of the pit in the middle. Earlier varieties of peaches have a tendency to cling to the stone. Once free-stone peaches arrive, it is prime time for peach cake, cobbler, pie, and jam!

I decided to modify a french peach cake recipe from "The Joy of Cooking" by Irma Rombauer. The cake came out a bit more like cobbler than I would have liked, and was a tad sweet, but still very delicious (which was evidenced by its hasty consumption)!

Peach Cake

Peaches:
2-3 cups of peeled and sliced peaches (or enough to cover the bottom of an 8 inch pie pan)
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tbsp flour (for dredging peaches)
A pinch of nutmeg

Cake:
4 Tbsp melted butter
2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
4 egg yolks
1/2 cup milk

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Combine ingredients in the "peaches" section of the recipe and place in an 8 inch pie pan, set aside. In a large mixing bowl combine the sugar, flour and salt in a large bowl and whisk. Beat together the butter, egg yolks, and milk and add to the dry ingredients in the large bowl, mix together and pour the cake batter over the peaches in the pie pan. Bake the cake for about 30 minutes, the cake will turn golden brown. The cake can be served warm for dessert or cold for breakfast in the morning.