Brigadoon Cake

by April Paffrath

Chocolate is unnecessary, but still nice.

Have you noticed that when people love to cook, they often don’t like to bake? Vice versa, too. I know some spectacular bakers who would rather not turn on the stove top, and some stellar cooks who don’t want to measure flour—ever.

But I love baking and I love cooking. Cooking dinner is improvisational and baking is meditative. Even if getting dinner ready at a reasonable time was stressful, I’d be likely to return to the kitchen late in the evening to mix up a chocolate cake (hey, chocolate cake makes a great breakfast). In fact, I’m more likely to bake if things that day have stressed me out.

So often dinner is a high-energy, fly-by-the-seat experience where you look at what you have and blend it together with spices, styles, and know-how to come up with something yummy. With rare exceptions, I don’t follow recipes for dinner. I follow ideas and I look for inspiration everywhere. I look at the produce grown by farmers we know and I let the inherent flavors guide us. It can be an enjoyable and energetic experience.

When people talk about baking, though, you’ll hear them say emphatically that you have to be exact, that you have to measure precisely, that baking is really a science. OK, that’s sort of true. If you want to recreate exactly what someone has done before, you follow it precisely. If you go way off message, you’ll get dense scary things—or a goopy mess. People seem to fear that the kitchen may explode if they don’t level off a teaspoon of baking powder. But once upon a time, someone made that recipe up. They were flying by the seat of their pants then, and it worked out. What’s life without a little risk?

With that, I give you Brigadoon Cake. Brigadoon is our family name for something wonderful and elusive. It’s a dessert style I developed years ago and it’s never the same. Ever. There is no recipe, only good ingredients, hope, experience, and love—just like dinner. It’s called Brigadoon because it appears like a perfect wonder once every hundred years in the foggy highlands of Scotland. You love it, you’re moved by it, and then it’s gone (much to Gene Kelly’s dismay). You can’t hang onto it, and when it’s gone you have to let it go. In a way, the ephemeral quality is what’s beautiful, like a spontaneous poem that no one wrote down.

Brigadoon is what we call the successes, because they’re magic and haunting; the experiments that were driven by a vision and a hunger for cake—and they were perfect. The ones that didn’t work out so well? Well, they don’t get a name, they’re just the necessary failures that inform future Brigadoons. (Although, Wikipedia may inspire me to call the failures Germelshausen because they're cursed in that same rare way.)

My prod to myself and everyone else is to not be a slave to the recipe, whether cooking or baking. Experience tells you how to do a stir fry and it can tell you what a cake batter should feel like, too. If you’ve never walked out on that limb, it won’t be long before you know what a batter should feel like and look like. If you are unwilling to jump in blind, seek out Michael Ruhlman’s book Ratio. His sensical approach to recipe-free baking is wonderful (although I’ve made banana bread from his book and it wasn’t as magic as this cake I made the other day.)

I made this Brigadoon cake because we had a banana that was threatening a life of crime if I didn’t make an honest baked good out of it. One banana. I have a few tiny loaf pans and I thought one would hold about a banana and a little extra. Plus, what’s a banana and a tiny loaf cake worth of ingredients and time if it doesn’t turn out? I’ve lost very little if it all goes flat, literally. I mixed and approximated and stirred. Then I added chocolate chips (a great equalizer in case it’s sub-par instead of sublime). Frankly, it turned out they were gilding the lily, but I’ll take them. If I were to do it over again (which I can’t by definition of a Brigadoon cake) I would use Taza chocolate.

Past Brigadoons have been pumpkin cake, rum cake with a rum glaze, lemon poundcake, cheesecake and more. All live on in a part of my brain that reminds me to take risks with things. Dinner is better when you let passion guide you. Baked goods can be stunning, too.

Brigadoon Cake, banana version

Find a banana that is threatening to go bad. Put it in a bowl and mash it while thinking about how good tea time will be if the cake works out. Stir in some sugar (a bit less than a half a cup? Was anyone looking?). I know I added some oil, and I probably didn’t skimp. Crack in an egg. Stir it in and notice how it gels everything together. Suddenly it’s starting to look like it wants to be cake. Pour in some vanilla bean paste. Add in a spoon of baking powder and think light thoughts. When I’m making something up, I tend to go a bit heavy on leavening, just in case the mix is tending toward leaden. I figure that if it’s too much it’s just a little salty. If it’s not enough, it’s inedible. Add flour (less than a cup). I add it slowly as I stir and I look for the consistency that says “cake!”  I don’t stir too much. I stop adding the flour when the batter is sticky but not liquidy. Pour into a well-greased loaf pan (3x6?), top with a small handful of chocolate chips, and bake at 350 or so. The high heat makes the baking powder jump to life. The sugar helps it brown. Take it out when the top is browned, it’s springy to the touch, and a sharp knife comes out clean.

Take it out of the oven and let it cool. As soon as it no longer burns your fingers, take a slice and have it with a cup of tea. All the while, consider that this cake never existed before and you made it without rules. Enjoy every slice, knowing that you can’t replenish your supply, even though the cake is light as air and so tender, the banana flavor is divine, and the chocolate is just enough to make it decadent. In short, this cake is magic.

And, hey, if it turned out a dud, you’re out a banana, very few ingredients, and only about 15 minutes of mixing and prepping time. That’s a good risk for something as wonderful as Brigadoon. Hey, do I hear bagpipes?

Barely cooled and we're slicing it for tea.