Rhubarb Cornmeal Shortcakes
A sweet little baking project for your weekend
I love baking anything in the scone/shortcake/biscuit family. I find them to be the exact level of baking project I desire most of the time: They’re challenging enough to be novel and stimulating, but can be made in the course of an afternoon without dirtying too many bowls. They are also much more forgiving and less of a production than other butter-flour creations, like pie dough. I also like that they’re amenable to endless tinkering—small changes in the ratio of butter to flour, or whether you use cream or buttermilk as your liquid, can yield greatly different results in the texture, crumb, loft, or flavor of the finished product.
These sweet, pretty cakes came about from some tinkering of my own, after I came home last week with an armful of hot-pink rhubarb (finally!!!). I had designs on gently oven-poaching the rhubarb—for what, I wasn’t quite sure yet—and as I was putting groceries away in the fridge I spotted a few cans of Ghia’s Le Spritz (which I wrote about the other week). I realized the spritzes were flavored with all kinds of things that could perfume a pan of oven-poached rhubarb (lots of botanicals and herbs and fruit juices), and Ghia-poached rhubarb was born. (By the way, this post is not sponsored by Ghia—I am simply celebrating a moment of kitchen ingenuity.) But don’t fret if you don’t have Ghia—white or rosé wine, rosé cider, verjus, or any other floral, fruity liquid—and a lot of sugar—will take your spring rhubarb far, softening and sweetening its vegetal earthiness. And if the word “poaching” makes you think of mangled attempts at poached eggs, this is a much different, simpler proposition: Combine the rhubarb and poaching liquid in a baking dish, cover with a square of parchment, and roast in the oven, hands-off, until just barely-cooked.
To accompany the poached rhubarb are the most tender shortcakes flavored with a touch of cornmeal for Yankee-style cornbread vibes (I will never understand a cornbread without sugar and that is my truth) and made with an unusual ingredient: two hard-boiled egg yolks. The cooked egg yolks get interspersed through the shortcake dough, interrupting gluten formation and yielding barely-holding-it-together tenderness in cakes, shortbread-type cookies, biscuits, and scones. I remember reading about this trick when we published the recipe for BA’s Best Strawberry Shortcake at Bon Appétit almost a decade ago, and then recently came across it again in the pastry chef Claudia Fleming’s cookbook, Delectable. It’s really worth trying—these are some of the most delicate shortcakes I’ve ever made.
And because this is the newsletter that rhubarb built (which is just to say I love and write about rhubarb A LOT), here are some other ‘barb-y moments from the archives, for a sewet-meets-sour rhubarb shrub that makes the prettiest drinks and a quick, jewel-like compote scented with orange:
