A piece of rhubarb buckle
At the farmer’s market I bought a few pounds of rhubarb. Normally, I would make a crisp, but since I had so much rhubarb, I thought I’d try something else first. Enter the buckle.
A buckle is a dessert from the colonial times. It is related to the crisps, cobblers, and brown bettys. A cake-like batter is made with fresh fruit folded into it, and then a lovely crumble topping it added to the top of the batter just before baking. It is essentially the marriage of a cake and a crisp.
The buckle turned out very well: a delicious large crumbed cake filled with bits of tart rhubarb and topped with a buttery crumble. For my recipe I used sucanat for the crumble topping and as half of the sugar in the cake. Sucanat retains more of the nutrition found in sugar cane, so it isn’t all empty calories like refined white sugar. It also has a richer flavor, similar to molasses. It works really well for this type of recipe. Don’t be fooled though, sugar is still sugar and this is just a treat!
Here is my recipe, inspired by The Washington Post.
Crumble Topping
1/3 cup sucanat or rapadura
¼ cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
Cake
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon powdered ginger
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
scant 1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup sucanat or rapadura
2 eggs
¾ cup soured milk, at room temperature (can substitute kefir, yogurt, buttermilk, or fresh milk + lemon juice or vinegar if you do not have raw sour milk)
1 pound rhubarb, trimmed and thinly sliced (about 2 ½ cups, or 5 stalks)
Make the topping first. Mix all the ingredients together, then put it in the freezer so it won’t melt into the batter when you bake it.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. To make the cake, sift the flour, baking powder, ginger, baking soda and salt together in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the sugars and butter together. I did this by hand, but a mixer will obviously make it easier. Add the egg and mix each one in before adding the other. Then add the soured milk. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, mix and then fold in the rhubarb in. Pour into a greased 9×9 baking dish, sprinkle the frozen crumb topping over the top, and bake for 45-50 minutes.