What? Cauliflower Cake?

I discovered this while I was catching up on some posts from the Guardian food section one night. I should have been sleeping but it seemed such a shame to let all that peace and quiet and perfectly good reading time go to waste. I wound up reading it and thought I would file it away, by file I mean forget about in my ‘spirited’ daughter addled brain, for supper some day.

Turns out, some day came sooner than I thought. It came in the form of our say-goodbye-to-my-beautiful-bamboo-counterscape dinner rolled into a last-big-gong-show-before-we-leave-all-of-our-friends-for-six-months dinner. It also came because I needed something to sop up the beef and chestnut and the spicy butternut and lentil stew juices.

Because I am trying to empty the cupboards before we go seasonless in CA, and I will be countertopless for the rest of the week, I didn’t want to wind up with any leftovers. I wanted something a little different though and I remembered, miraculously enough, that I had seen this cauliflower cake thingy somewhere. After a mildly frenzied interweb look around, I found it or remembered where it was. 

I was alarmed that it asked for 10 eggs. I needed to make two and I had exactly four eggs in the house. I had decided that this was what we were having for supper though and continued some by-now-not-so-mildly frenzied (Little Daughter was underfoot and Big Daughter’s return from a friend’s house was imminent) interweb search until I found something the contents of my cupboards and fridge could cope with.

I was not skeptical, Big Daughter was when she got wind of what was going on. The recipe struck me as a little bland but I had remedied that, I hoped, with the addition of more cheese than it called for, a lot of grainy mustard and some finely sliced onion.

Turns out, Big Daughter changed her tune. It is pretty delicious. It has a really great texture like a cross between cake and fritatta but the ground almonds keep it from getting gummy.

I used some 2 year old cheddar because let’s face it, cauliflower and cheddar cheese were pretty much made for each other. I used Kozlik’s Double C mustard but any good grainy mustard would be fine.

I doubled the original recipe, which was lucky, because breakfast was ready for the next day. I even cooked bacon to go with it - big brownie points with Big Daughter. She was putty in my hands for all of about forty-two seconds.

Which leads me to what I may do next time, not that this isn’t really delicious as it is. I keep thinking about roasting the cauliflower with caraway seeds and adding sauteed onion to the batter. I also think that some lardons, that’s bacon bits in English, as Croque-Camille forgets in the recipe I started from, would also make it kind of perfectly meal-like.

Cauliflower Cake adapted from Chou-Fleur de Bretagne by Croque-Camille

1 head cauliflower

2 cups grated old cheddar cheese

4 eggs

1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon olive oil (plus some for roasting the cauliflower)

2 tablespoons grainy mustard 

1 cup flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 1/4 cup almond meal

1/2 teaspoon salt (plus a little for roasting the cauliflower)

Freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup milk

Thinly sliced onion rings

Preheat oven to 350º.

Break the cauliflower into florets and put it on a baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss. Put it in the oven and roast, tossing once or twice, for about twenty minutes or until cauliflower is tender and starting to brown.

Oil two 8-inch round cake tins.

Whisk the eggs, olive oil and mustard together in a large bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, almond meal, salt and some pepper.

Add half the milk to the eggs, then half the flour mixture, half the milk and the remaining flour, thoroughly mixing between each addition.

Fold in the cauliflower and cheese. 

Pour into the baking pans and top with the onion slices.

Bake for 35 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack for a few minutes. Loosen edges from pan and carefully remove the cake from the pan and serve in wedges.