Peach Kuchen

1 c all-purpose flour

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ c butter, softened

¼ c sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond extract

sliced fresh peaches (or other fruit)

Topping:

sliced or slivered almonds, 3 Tbsp turbinado sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon

Grease a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Heat the oven to 350 Fahrenheit.

In a small bowl, mix the topping and set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt. In another medium bowl cream together the butter and sugar, then add egg and almond extract and blend well. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix well. Batter will be thick. Spread the batter into the pie plate or cake pan, smoothing the top with a spatula, thinly across the bottom and about one inch up the sides of the pan. Arrange the peach slices in a pretty spiral in the bottom, add any other fruit desired, and sprinkle with the topping.

Bake for 25 minutes for a ceramic pie plate, 35 to 40 minutes for a cake pan.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Peach Kuchen, which is basically a very thin cake with a lot of fruit on top.

It’s an easy cake to make. The hardest part is peeling and slicing all those peaches. Actually, no, the hardest part is finding decent peaches. I lucked out and found three small but perfectly ripe and juicy peaches, so I decided to make peach kuchen with them. I also had about half a cup of raspberries and blackberries I picked yesterday that needed to be used up, so this recipe is perfect.

You’ll need almond extract and sliced or slivered almonds, although if you don’t have almond extract or don’t like it, you can substitute vanilla. You can also substitute pecans for the almonds. But the almonds and almond extract give this recipe a sophisticated, delicate flavor that’s a little unusual. If you liked the raspberry almond coffee cake recipe from last month, you’ll like this recipe.

You can make this in a 9” round cake pan or a pie plate. Whichever you use, grease it well. Then you’ll need a couple of mixing bowls, but not big ones. Medium-sized ones will do, because there’s not actually a lot of batter for this cake. You also need a small mixing bowl for the topping, but there’s not a lot of it so you can use a big cereal bowl if you need to.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl and set it aside. Then mix the topping and set it aside. I’ve always made the topping with slivered almonds until this time, when all I had was sliced almonds, and I like the sliced almonds just as much.

Next, make sure the butter is softened enough to work with easily but not melted, and cream it together with the sugar until it’s fluffy. Add the egg and almond extract and mix well. Then add about half the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, stir until it’s smooth, and add the rest of the flour mixture and mix until all the flour is incorporated and there are no lumps.

It’s a very simple standard recipe for cake batter, with the main difference being there’s not much batter. It’s also very thick. Spoon it into your greased pan and use a rubber spatula or the back of a big spoon to spread the batter around, right up to the edges of the pan and up the edges. Basically what you’re doing is making a shallow batter receptacle for the fruit.

Once you’ve got the batter spread, turn the oven on. Then you need to cut up the peaches. If you listened to the raspberry pie episode last month you may remember how to halve cherries, which is the same way you halve peaches before cutting them up. Take a paring knife, cut around the entire peach top to bottom, cutting down to the pit, then twist both halves in different directions. This will pull the peach in two, with one half retaining the pit. Unless the pit is rotten,