Peach Breakfast Cake

Years ago a nearby town held a Peach Festival every year.  It was the highlight of the summer for a lot of people and featured a lot of fun activities, parades, shows and a pie contest.  Although it no longer exists, seeing peaches in the summer will always remind me of the fun times we had there.  We don’t buy peaches at the market because they are sort of like buying strawberries at the market…lacking juice and flavor.  Instead we wait.  And wait.  And wait….until they start showing up at farm stands.  And then watch out.  It is peach time at our house.  We all love them.  Even our dog loves them (a tiny cut of the fruit sans the toxic pit of course…).  When we found a recipe that allowed us to use them for breakfast in a CAKE we thought YES! Cake for breakfast.  Can it get any better?

This peach cake is really good.  We made it two ways – one for breakfast with diced peaches on top.  The other for a snack with cream on top.  To be honest I think we all preferred the peaches on top.  The cake itself is pretty sweet so adding the extra cream was almost too much.  Because of the fresh peaches it should be eaten right away or put in the refrigerator  if you are not eating it within a couple hours of baking time.  It does spoil quickly.  Truth be told…it won’t last that long!

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour

2/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 pound ripe peaches

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 egg

2 teaspoons orange zest

the juice from one orange

Directions:

Begin by preheating your oven to 350 f.  Oil a 9″ square baking pan and set aside.

Sift together the dry ingredients and set aside

Peel and pit the peaches.  Cut them up directly into a medium sized bowl.  Add the oil, egg, orange zest and orange juice.

Add the dry ingredients and gently stir with a large spoon just until blended.  Spread the batter in the pan.

Bake until the batter is firm on top and the cake pulls away from the sides of the pan- about 50 minutes.  Cool and serve the cake warm or at room temperature.

*Note…we followed the directions for this cake and ultimately wished we had put parchment in the bottom of our pan and or greased and floured the pan.  While it did pull away and come out of the pan it could have (perhaps) been easier if we had listened to our instincts.