I live in the middle of Oklahoma. We don't have an abundance of fresh figs. Gary and I love love them, though, so when I saw my fellow French Friday with Dorie cook, Andrea at The Kitchen Lioness, had baked a fig walnut cake I wanted figs and I wanted fig cake and I wanted it immediately! Alas, I had to wait until figs made an appearance in my grocery. When I found them at Forward Foods, a wonderful specialty shop in Oklahoma City, I hurried home to make Andrea's fig walnut cake.
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| Fig Walnut Cake |
I pronounce it a huge success! The cake is basic and simple to make. You add ground fresh walnuts and walnut pieces to the batter and Andrea stresses they should be fresh walnuts but I used all my luck finding the figs and had none left to help with fresh walnuts so I had to use packaged grocery store nuts. While I hope to have fresh walnuts and fresh figs together one of these days I was happy with what I produced.
I will say using fig preserves as a topping with a touch of whipped cream makes all the difference. The flavor of the figs in the cake is subtle and the preserves help highlight the figgyness.
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| Homemade Fig Preserves |
My lovely sister-in-law in Memphis has a fig tree and gave me enough figs to make 6 pints of preserves. They are our new favorite jelly!
Lately I'm on a roll with cakes, this one and a nectarine upside down cake, but Andrea has so many great looking cakes on her blog that I want to keep baking. Unfortunately my jeans have requested a cake free week or two. I'm taking it under consideration.....
