Blue Corn Raspberry Coffee Cake

Up here in Northern New Mexico it's raspberry season and a couple weeks ago M and I went raspberry picking at Salman Ranch. It was fun and we ended up with enough raspberries to snack on, freeze, and bake into coffee cake and muffins.

It's hard to bake at an altitude this high, especially if I want to put stuff in the batter. Stuff in the batter, I have learned from my friend Betsy the high altitude baking expert, causes the batter not to rise correctly. Betsy worked in the high altitude test kitchen of General Foods several years ago, so she knows what's up.

Nonetheless, I decided to bake a not too sweet cake with raspberries and blue cornmeal. And what the heck, I tossed in some toasted pinon nuts, too.

And you know what? The cake came out fine with no high altitude changes at all.

Raspberry Blue Corn Coffee Cake

Just a note: This is not a very sweet cake. Most of the sweetness comes from the raspberries.
 

Makes 1 single layer cake, 8 inch square or round pan

Ingredients

1/2 cup piñon nuts

1 cup unbleached white flour

1 cup stone-ground blue cornmeal

1/2  tsp. salt

1 Tbs. baking powder

1 1/4  cups buttermilk

1/2  tsp. baking soda

2 large eggs, or reconstituted egg substitute to equal 2 eggs

1/2  cup granulated sugar

1/3 cup mild vegetable oil such as corn, canola or peanut

1 cup fresh raspberries

Extra sugar for sprinkling on top

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Spray a 8 or 9 inch round or square baking pan with nonstick cooking spray.
2. Toast piñon nuts by heating in a skillet over medium heat, stirring or shaking pan almost constantly, for 3 to 4 minutes. When nuts become aromatic and golden, remove from heat and set aside.
3. Combine flour, cornmeal, salt and baking powder in a large bowl, stirring well. Set aside. In a medium bowl, whisk together buttermilk and baking soda. Whisk in eggs, sugar and oil.
4. Stir combined wet ingredients into dry until mixture is not quite blended. Be gentle when blending. Add piñon nuts and raspberries with a couple of strokes so the mixture is just barely combined. Pour into prepared baking pan. Sprinkle the top with some sugar, about a tablespoon or so.
5. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until edges are golden brown. 

Refrigerate leftovers. 

Salman Raspberry Ranch and Gardens

Yesterday we went for a quick visit to Salman Ranch, near the village of La Cueva, about nine miles away. Salman Ranch, store, gardens, cafe, nursery and raspberry fields are a busy place on a summer weekend, kind of like Tom's Farms in Corona, but with a real farm.

The summer rains have made the gardens riotous with native perennial and annual flowers carefully tended by a couple of guys who really know what works well in this high altitude-variable weather planting zone.

The gardens lay within the adobe and flagstone walled ruins of an 1850's grist mill and mercantile building where the tack and blacksmith shops once stood.

Benches are positioned here and there, making it a good place to just hang out and commune with nature.

Since it's raspberry picking season, the ranch's U Pick It fields were full of people enjoying a Sunday outside doing honest farm labor. Kids and dogs are welcome, and everyone was having a fine old time. After an hour of picking, M and I had four pounds of organic, local raspberries at the peak of ripeness.

I probably ate a pound while I was picking, but thank goodness the guy who assigned us our rows didn't really weigh us before and then after we were done, like he had threatened.

Here's our haul. The photo is significant: a meta moment, if you will.

Some of the raspberries were gobbled as soon as they got home, others were flash frozen and placed in freezer bags, and we made a cornmeal raspberry cake from the rest. More about that cake later.