Oatmeal Cake, redux & redone

So, remember that oatmeal cake? You know, the one that tasted pretty good, but was enough to feed an army of dock workers? And it had that disappointing topping. Well, I revisited it yesterday. Scaled it down, changed the topping, and OH MAH GAW, I loved it. The new cakes are simple, unfussy. The kind of cakes you eat after a bowl of something sturdy and frugal, like a stew with potatoes. They might also make a good Sunday breakfast, with a cup of strong coffee.

Bakers are so weird about scaling back recipes. Have you noticed? They’re always like, “Now, now, you can’t just go scaling back a recipe!” But that’s pretty much exactly what I did here, and it worked just fine. I cut it all back by 1/4, thinking it would be just the right size to fill two ramekins. (It seems the years I’ve spent teaching 6th and 7th grade math have finally come in handy. Not to toot my horn, but I can multiply fractions really well. I should enter a fraction-multiplying contest.) Shrinking the recipe by a fourth was perfect. The batter was exactly the right size for two ramekins (I used one round and one oblong. Robert made off with my second oblong ramekin. I haven’t seen it for a week, at least. What on earth could he be doing with it?). The cakes rose nicely, so the ratios of leaveners is correct. They were moist, so the recipe still had the right amount of oatmeal and butter. And the flavor was great, too. Perfect amount of cinnamon.

Tiny Angel Food Cakes

 

My friend Sheila is the queen of estate sales. She doesn’t just happen upon them whilst driving through the countryside like the rest of us, she seeks them out weekly. She finds ads for them in the paper, and then comes up with a route and a schedule to make sure she gets to all of them. I go with her every so often, but frankly, I’m a little afraid of her. Not only does she attend them with military-like precision (she actually uses a GPS unit to make her way around the city), but I think she would literally fight me for a good find. I went with her last week, and I thought she was going to throw down with me over a set of vintage Pyrex bowls ($5.00 for the set – unbelievable!). She even carries a loupe to examine jewelry. It has its own special leather case. This woman is serious.

On our outing last week, a couple sales after hitting the Pyrex bowl jackpot, we went to one that had an astonishing amount of kitchen supplies. Those are my favorites. I’m always on the lookout for fun vintage cookery. This was my favorite find:

It’s a tiny angel food cake pan! About three or four inches across, I knew it was the perfect addition to my baking tins collection. I only wish there had been two of them. 

I wasn’t sure when I’d use it, but today’s freakish drop in temperature inspired me to pull out the toaster oven and fire it up. It’s dreary today, which never really happens in the summer in Colorado. A perfect day to read a British mystery while drinking coffee and eating a tiny angel food cake.

Tiny Blueberry Cheesecakes

The very last thing we need in this house is an entire cheesecake. Or two dozen cookies. Or a year’s worth of US Weekly magazines (OMG the stars, they’re JUST LIKE US!). I have terrible self-control when I’m around temptation like that. I will take a fork and go at an entire pie as the dogs stare on in horror and R. whimpers in the background. But I love dessert, so what to do, what to do?

TINY DESSERTS!

Tiny, single (or double, since there are two of us) servings. Just enough for one meal with no leftovers for me to eat all night and into the next day (gah, peanut butter pie for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, arrghgh!). I have Debbie Maugans Nakos’s Small Batch Baking, which has become a near-bible for me. It’s got piles and piles of great recipes, but sometimes we crave things that aren’t included in her kit and caboodle. Like blueberry cheesecake, for instance. All those blue, blue berries at the market. They just keep coming home with me, and I need to do something fine with them. So I searched around and found this. But of course it was for 12 tiny cheesecakes, and that, my friends, would be very very bad. Oh god, me and 12 tiny cheesecakes. Hold the phone Doris, Christie’s goin’ at those cheesecakes like a skeeter on aunt Esther. Anyway, I tinkered a little, and here’s what I came up with. It makes 2 individual cheesecakes that I baked in ramekins.