Grapefruit and Earl Grey-Infused Brown Butter Pound Cake…

It’s a mouthful to say, but these are the ingredients.

It’s a pound cake with grapefruit zest and brown butter infused with earl grey tea leaves. It doesn’t need any icing, none of that please. (There’s quite a bit of sugar in the cake anyway.) I wanted to call it a Russian Earl Grey Pound Cake, because Russian Earl Grey teas will usually have citrus peels alongside bergamot, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone. So, Grapefruit and Earl Grey-Infused Brown Butter Pound Cake it is.

Brown butter gives the cake a nutty flavour, but the earl grey is almost imperceptible after baking (it is there if you strain your palette hard enough, think of it as finely layered addition), while the grapefruit zest brightens up the cake quite a bit. Depending on how sweet you like your treats to be, unsweetened tea or coffee is the way to go.

If you’re not sure how to infuse tea into butter, read all about it here. Do note that because you’re browning the butter, it’s safest to add your tea leaves towards the end of the process. Additionally, the tea will tint your butter, so don’t panic when your butter gets considerably darker.

Brown Butter Pound Cake

slighty adapted from Poire et Chocolat. 

200g unsalted butter if infused with tea / 185g unsalted butter if plain
200g caster sugar
pinch of fine sea salt
3 eggs, cold from the fridge
200g plain flour
1 and 1/4 tsp baking powder
165ml whole milk
1 tsp vanilla paste (or extract)

Optional
2 tbsp loose leaf earl grey tea
Zest of 1 grapefruit

Place the butter into a big pan and set over medium heat. Keep heating as the butter crackles and foams. Stir occasionally until the butter starts to darken. Be careful not to heat it for too long, burnt butter will have a bitter taste. Pull the pan off the heat once the butter achieves a desirable tan colour. Pour into a bowl and leave to cool – it needs to be room temperature.

If you’re infusing the butter with earl grey or any other teas, you will always need more butter than what the original recipe calls for. In this case, I added 15g extra. I opted to add my tea leaves about 1 minute before pulling the pan off the heat and let it infuse for 5 minutes before straining it into a bowl. The brown butter will be quite fragrant.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Either line a loaf tin (around 9″/23cm long) or carefully grease a round/decorated tin. Scrape the cooled butter into a stand mixer bowl and add the sugar and salt. Beat together until creamy, then add the eggs one by one, beating in between. If it curdles, don’t worry – that’s normal. Beat on medium-high for 5 minutes until pale and thick.

Sieve the flour and baking powder together. Tip a third into the mix and stir together on low. Slowly add half of the milk and briefly beat. Add the rest of the flour and milk, combining in between. Add the vanilla and beat together one last time. Scoop into the tin and spread out.

Bake for 45-50 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean and the cake is a deep brown. Leave to cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a rack.

Enjoy!

For more Earl Grey goodness:

• Earl Grey Chocolate Tea Cakes with Earl Grey Icing
• Earl Grey Milk Jam

2011 Top Posts

After Facebook, the WordPress statistics page is the second most addictive webpage I check on a near constant and almost hourly basis. It’s been a source of many disappointments and excitement this year, and after some thought, I’ve decided to just stop letting it dictate how I feel about the posts I make. There was a period when I was obsessively refreshing to see how many views I got and would find myself  feeling dejected when the posts I liked the most didn’t receive as many hits as I thought they would – but I’m okay with that now…kinda.

It’s always surprising and quite a lot of fun to not only see which posts are popular, but the search engine terms people use that bring them to my blog. Someone out there really wants to know where they can buy Somersby Cider…I feel like it’s my duty to now find out. If you know the answer, let us know!

So, rounding up the last post of 2011 for us here at Babyhedgehogs (BHH), here is the Top Five most popular posts of all time:

1. Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Bread
   A super easy and sweet snack to go with your tea or coffee. They’re especially delicious if made with sliced apples nestled between each puffy layer of dough. The apples turn crisp from the caramelized sugar dripping down…droool. As always, when baking with cinnamon always use more than what the recipe calls for – it’s a helpful advice I received from a baker friend that’s made a huge difference…in my life.
2. Earl Grey Chocolate Tea Cakes with Earl Grey Icing
   A friend and I were dying to bake with earl grey for ages and we finally found time one Sunday afternoon to try out a recipe she found on food network. The chocolate tea cakes only called for earl grey in the icing, but we decided to infuse the cake with earl grey as well. While we could taste the delicious flavour of the bergamot and lemon in the icing, it was too delicate for the heavy chocolate batter of the cake.
3. W Burger Bar: Bison Meat vs. Beef
   Bison meat – dry, but flavourful! I’m not too sure why this particular post is third on the stats list, but I guess Toronto really loves burgers.  We’ve been there many times, but it’s always been after work when I didn’t have my DSLR on me. I have plenty of iphone pictures of me eating their fries though.
4. Mini Dutch Babies
   They were too cute to eat, but definitely filling. These German pancakes are easy to whip up at any moments notice – provided you have eggs, milk and flour – and they’re fun to watch rise and puff out of their pans. They’re plain enough that you can throw whatever you want in and on them.
5. Easy Pork Belly Crackling
   This one is quite obvious and we can see why it’s up there. For one, it’s pork, and second, it’s pork crackling. Our love of porchetta drove Leo to make pork belly roasts himself back in September, and he’s been making it at least once a month ever since (three times this December alone). While you need to prep the pork one day ahead, it doesn’t take more than one or two hours to roast it depending on the size.

Earl Grey Chocolate Tea Cakes with Earl Grey Icing

Is it possible to have too much Earl Grey? My friend Aubrey and I did not think so. These incredibly rich chocolate cupcakes (or tea cakes, what’s the difference?) were infused with three bags of loose Earl Grey Tazo tea leaves and then topped with even more aromatic icing that smelled and tasted as smooth as a real cup of tea. The icing by itself is just amazing, it’s like eating a puffy, sticky cloud of bergamot almost-meringuey goodness.

It’s the second time I’ve ever made cake batter from scratch before, the first being a disastrously flat almond cake that I whipped like a dead horse years ago, and my first time using melted chocolate instead of cocoa powder (what a difference!).

They were so good they got the pink wall treatment.

In order to get the tea into the cake, we ‘brewed’ the Earl Grey into unsalted butter before incorporating it into the chocolate. We did this as per Cupcake Project’s instructions for baking with tea and infused butter. We thought we could get away without having to strain the butter by keeping the loose teas in their bags, but after a couple of minutes of waiting by the stove and stirring it without anything happening, we finally decided to just release them. Immediate effect! The butter went from golden to a more darker honey colouring and it smelled strongly of tea. It was pretty tempting to drink.  Instead of waiting for it to cool down to room temperature, we mixed it in with the chocolate. Mmmmm. It tasted amazing.

Unfortunately, it seems as if we either didn’t use enough tea leaves (or they weren’t strong enough) or, most likely, the Earl Grey got overpowered by the chocolate. When you bite through the cake, without the icing, there’s just subtle and delicate hint of the Earl Grey. I suspect if we didn’t know they were infused with tea, we would have thought it was just some really fantastic chocolate. Now imagine Orange Pekoe tea……..

Recipe from the Food Network’s Tea Cake with Earl Grey Icing + The Cupcake Project’s tea infused butter technique. The instructions in bold are our additions and changes.

baking with tea

Will post about it soon. It was a delicious first attempt.