Summer Peach Almond Cake

As some of you know I have been on the prowl for a good and classic cake recipe. As I got to looking for cake recipes, all I generally found were sugary, heavy decadent cakes. Which is fine, if you want it for a special occasion, wedding, birthday etc or if you’re generally into sugar.

I am not on the processed sugar train these days as I find it makes me restless and emotional. Anyways I came across this recipe from a fellow blogger and I just knew this was it. It was love at first sight. However it had one thing about it that I needed to adjust, as we know all things aren’t perfect so I was on board.

The recipe I found came from My New Roots is a blog by a lovely girl Sarah and I really admire her style and taste buds. The cake she’s got going on was a good fall/winter cake with warm spices and toasty squash and nuts. It’s summer right now and I could barely imagine turning on the oven let alone adding spice and heavy roots, so I did what I do most of the time; I played. I love to tweak, alter, experiment, and play. These are 4 things that I am generally good at and mostly they end with success. (I have my moments where they flop) however this time wasn’t one of them. 

Since it’s summer, I thought two things, local and fresh. Peaches are in season and I happened to have a couple lying around; check. What goes good with peaches? Almonds of course. Folks, I’m not gonna lie, I kind of went all out for this cake. It was a two day process and I even purchased a wire cake display, which long story short, I didn’t end up using. This is my passion and why I have persevered through this whole cooking journey so far, I really really really love food and I find that I am willing to do most things for it. Food is is in my trajectory and I have in fact picked photos of cake over photos of friends. It’s true, the cake trumps and that’s just where I am at. 

So I spent the day mixing, writing and guessing while I altered the recipe just so. As you can see it came out pretty well. There is always room for improvements and so I plan on making several, but all around I was pleased as well as the people I shared it with. I was lucky to be able to bring it to a local CSA’s farm dinner party and I showed up just in time for dessert, lucky them!  Eventually that wire cake display will be used I promise you that. 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and oh, if you are wondering where I got this beautiful vintage flour canister? I can thank the lovely woman down the street who sold if for $5 to me and even let me make installments. Here’s the recipe and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 

Enjoy and bon appetit! 

Recipe for Summer Peach Almond Cake

1 cups whole spelt flour

2 cups white spelt flour

2 tablespoons corriander

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon flax seeds

1/2 cup soaked almonds

1 cup coconut sugar ( this is a great alternative to processed sugar and is a whole food sugar)

1/2 cup fresh peaches

1/2 cup organic pineapple juice

3 eggs

1 cup honey

3 tablespoons coconut oil

3 tablespoons olive oil (one could replace the other if you have one more than the other around your kitchen)

Pre Heat Oven to 350 

In a bowl combine all dry ingredients and mix well. In a food processor combine almonds, peaches and blend to a smooth paste than add eggs, juice, sugar, honey and oil and blend till combined. Add liquid into the dry ingredients and mix together using a wooden spoon. Grease (with oil) and flour two 9-inch cake pans and pour in mixture, evenly splitting the batter between the two pans. Bake for 20-30 minutes. You can check with a tooth pick in the middle of cake. When your toothpick is clean your cake is ready. 

For the icing and topping: 

2 cans of coconut milk

1/2 cup creamed honey

1 teaspoon arrowroot powder

3 fresh, ripe organic peaches (make sure peaches are organic as peaches are one of the most heavily sprayed fruits, they also soak the pesticides up with their fabric like skins)

So this was an interesting process that I really enjoyed playing with. You need to cool the cans of coconut milk for a couple hours to let the cream and liquid separate. Then scrap out the cream and combine with the honey with a whisk. I found the mixture still to be too thin so I added arrowroot to thicken it up. Another option would be to add nuts to the mixture. Adding the arrowroot (really you don’t need much for it to work) really helped in making it a spreadable consistency without altering the taste too much. 

The peaches just need to be sliced and added to in-between the two cakes and for the top for decoration. 

For the peaches, I sliced and lightly sautéed them with a teaspoon of honey until they were soft and a little wilted.

Place a quarter of the icing in the middle of the two cakes and stack upon one another. Then add the rest of the icing to the top and spread out. Make sure to cup the tops off the cakes to make an even surface for you to stack them on.