Rhubarb Cake With Marzipan Crumble

kitchen composition: rhubarb and vanilla pudding

makes for one 26 cm springform

Rhubarb is really not the easiest candidate when it comes to baking or cooking in our house. Often it is labeled as way to sour and never touched again. But I have always had a soft spot in my heart for this misunderstood plant. You can make me happy with a rhubarb cake like this one or just cook it with a bit of sugar and pour it on top of vanilla pudding. Bene on the other hand needed some convincing the first time we prepared rhubarb together. His memory of it from his childhood was of the too sour version. In the end I managed to get him to try a little bit cooked with sugar on top of his favourite vanilla pudding. He took one spoonfull and then another and in no time I had to be really quick to get some of my own.

Because of this our cake of course has a layer of vanilla pudding on top of the sponge cake. The perfect topping for this are definetly the sweet marzipan crumbles. The are heavenly crunchy but at the same time juicy.

kitchen composition's rhubarb cake with marzipan crumble

Maybe there will be a version of a jelly roll next year. Until than we can comfort ourselves with a slice of this perfect rhubarb cake.

Tips

This cake can be easily turned into a vegan cake by switching milk and butter for a vegan alternative.

You can prepare the crumble and the sponge cake a day before assembling the cake and baking it again with the crumble. Just keep the crumble in the fridge until you need it. (I prefer to bake in one go so I don’t have to heat up the oven again and can save some energy.

To make sure your rhubarb compote thickens nicely test it on a cooled plate. Just put a plate in the fridge and pour a little bit of the rhubarb onto it after cooking it. It should thicken within a short moment.

Ingredients

Sponge Cake

  • 125g baking flour
  • 50g sugar
  • 5g backing powder
  • 30 ml sunflower seed oil
  • 100 ml fizzy water
  • a little bit of lemon peel

Filling

  • 500g rhubarb
  • 8 tbsp water
  • 2-3 tbsp sugar
  • 4g powdered agar
  • 400 ml milk
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 pck vanilla pudding

Marzipan Crumble

  • 100g marzipan
  • 100g cold butter
  • 50g sugar
  • 150g flour

Preparation

Sponge Cake

  1. At first mix the flour, baking soda and sugar.
  2. Than add the lemon peel, oil and water.
  3. Quickly stir it into a batter. Make sure not to overstir since vegan batter has a tendency to be easily overstired.
  4. Pour the batter into a greased springform and bake for 20 minutes at 180°C.
  5. Leave the cake in the form, since you are going to add the rhubarb, pudding and crumble and bake it again.

Filling

  1. Wash the rhubarb and cut it into small pieces. You don’t have to peel but if the peel comes off while cutting you can just pull it off in long stripes.
  2. Cook the rhubarb with very little water. The rhubarb has releases enough liquid while cooking.
  3. Add in sugar as needed depending on how sour your rhubarb is.
  4. Cook it until it starts to become tender but be careful it easily becomes mushy.
  5. Add the powdered agar to the compote and cook it according to the instructions for the agar powder.
  6. Now you can prepare the vanilla pudding according to the instructions. I prefer to use about 100ml less milk than the instructions say, so the pudding is really thick.

Crumble

  1. Cut the butter and marzipan into small pieces and add it into a bowl.
  2. Next add in the flour and sugar and knead it together until it forms small clumbs.
  3. Make sure not to knead for too long since this may result in more of a dough than crumbles.

Now you can layer the warm rhubarb compote and vanilla pudding onto the sponge cake. Top it off with your marzipan crumble and bake it again for 20 minutes at 180°C.

It is really important to let the cake cool down completely before you cut it. Otherwise the compote or the pudding may still be liquid and your cake seeps in all directions. We let our cake cool down for about 3 hours and it was still a tiny bit warm but already solid.

This sweet juicy rhubarb cakes tastes best when it is shard with friends and loved ones with a can of coffee or tea. Or as in our case: we enjoyed it during a livestream concert of our favorite band August Burns Red to celebrate the 10 year aniversay of their record leveler. Rhubarb cake can be metal.

Mirja und Bene

Outtakes

Until I got this amazing cake this year we had to go through a trial and error phase. I really wanted to make a jelly roll inspired version this year. Well, that didn’t go according to plan and it ended up as a delicious but crumbly sticky mess on our plates.

kitchen composition rhubarb jelly roll