Rhubarb Oatmeal Cake

The weather changed its mind about every half hour yesterday. Good reason to stay in and spend some time in the kitchen. Cooking, baking, food-styling and foto-sessions... Alex, my fellow cookbook-addict who is a great and passionate cook himself, joined in the fun. I had bought lots of strawberries and a huge bunch of rhubarb on Saturday. It took us some time to make up our minds about a recipe until we stumbled over an old scrap of paper hidden somewhere in my recipe collection. We decided to use the rhubarb for this cake. I turned the strawberries into jam later (post to follow). In our opinion, this rhubarb oatmeal cake is a perfect Sunday teatime cake. Not too heavy, not too sweet and a nice flavour combination.

Recipe
(slightly adapted from an old Coop Magazin)

350g rhubarb (we used 400g)
165g flour, plus 2 extra tablespoons (we used spelt flour)
150g brown sugar
1/2 sachet baking powder
a pinch of salt
1 tablespoon powdered ginger
75g butter
1 tablespoon sunflower oil
3 tablespoons coarse rolled oats
3 tablespoons porridge oats
200ml milk
1 large egg
60g ground almonds (had none, used ground hazelnuts)
icing sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Line a 26cm cake tin with parchment paper, grease it with the oil and scatter the porridge oats onto the base.

Wash the rhubarb, peel and cut it into 2cm pieces. Mix with the two tablespoons flour. Mix the 165g flour with sugar, baking powder, coarse oats, salt and powdered ginger. Slowly melt butter in a small saucepan. Mix the melted butter with the milk, add the egg and mix well. Add to your flour mixture and mix fast with your electric handmixer until well blended. Add ground almonds and rhubarb. Mix well.

Fill your batter into the prepared cake tin, smoothen a bit with your ladle and bake for about 60-70 minutes (60 was fine with my oven). Let cool, dust with icing sugar before serving.