Walnut butter cake

For today's post I have three people and two blogs to thank!

In this time of the year, food blogs get crowded with recipes of Cinnamon rolls. And they look great! If it wasn't for on little problem... I hate cinnamon!Seriously, I don't like the smell, the taste, not even the cinnamon bubble gum that are so famous here!

So I was wondering what to do next for my holidays eating. And I found myself looking for cinnamon roll cakes. Don't know why, but there were so many beautiful recipes that I wanted to give a different twist on one of them.

The two recipes I found and wanted to try out together were a recipe from cinnamon roll cake from scratch, baked by Anna from Crunchy, Creamy and Sweet and a recipe for walnut butter that I got from Shauna and the Chef at Gluten Free Girl. Thank you girls (and Daniel, cause chef is a guy). I really apreciate the recipes and the cake turned out great!

Walnut Butter cake

Materials

Walnut butter

• 2 cups walnuts, shelled
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 2 teaspoons walnut oil (or grapeseed or canola oil, if you don’t have walnut oil)

Cake batter

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teasponn salt
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 stick unsalted butter, melted

Methods

• Put the walnuts in the food processor. Run the processor until they are broken down and starting to turn sticky. Add the salt and honey. 
• Pulse. Taste the walnut paste to see if you want more salt or honey. Keep the food processor running and add the oil, drizzling it in slowly. I wanted to fix it with more honey. 

• Grease a cake pan (or line it with parchment paper or aluminum foil and grease the sides and bottom). Preheat the oven to 180 ºC.
• In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, salt, sugar and baking powder.
• Add milk, eggs and vanilla and whisk until smooth.
• Slowly add the melted butter and whisk until everything is smooth.
• Spread the batter in the prepared pan.
• Add the walnut butter in dollops along the batter
• Spread it along in zig zag with a knife. 
• Bake until the top start turning golden brown and you an stick a fork in it and it comes off dry. 

Experimental observations

The original recipe of walnut butter asked for soaking it for a night to remove the bitterness, but I liked it a little bitter. I also asked to roast the walnuts before the butter, but since I was gonna bake the cake, I didn't roasted.

The original cake batter asked for only one cup of sugar, and I was very tempted to using just one, but... The cinnamon roll cake, has a sugar drizzle to top over, and this one doesn't. So I added two. Turned out great!

You may see that my cake is a bit darker than it probably should... Brown sugar! I'll try do it again with refined sugar, the different color from the cake and butter should look great!

Shauna, I'm so gonna do this butter again to eat it like nutella! Tasted amazing!

I sprinkled with some chocolate chip, but you don't have to do this if you don't want to.