Rhubarb seven ways (or so)

It's okay. This isn't a deconstructed fancypants recipe. It's a cake, and a drink. The cake is pretty simple. The drink is complicated, but there are full directions in the Spirits from last Friday. And after failing to find rhubarb in three different supermarkets from Thursday onwards, I finally passed some in a street market on Sunday, so I wanted to get my money's worth. 

 

We're not on forced rhubarb any more, which has prettiness implications. Mostly for the cake, as we shall see. 

The drink is extravagantly complicated to prep if you want it to be - rhubarb-steeped gin, just a few hours for my first drink, overnight for my second. 

 Rhubarb-sugar cordial, cooked out for 10 minutes or...forgotten for about half an hour, but it had a lid
on and plenty of water so it's all fine, fine. 

 

And once strained that leaves me a) cordial and b) gloop. Tasty gloop though. The sort of thing you might pop on the side of a squidgy cake, which will be handy. 

As per the Spirits, fresh rhubarb muddled with the steeped gin, plus the cordial, plus some Campari (which is rhubarb based), plus lime and ice but no egg white because BOAK. A lil rhubarb garnish (everything in the world is rhubarb, go with it), and we have an effortful but pretty and (importantly) delicious cocktail. Ideal for long, slow Easter bank holiday weekends. 

Meanwhile, rhubarb and custard cake from Home Cookery Year. This one gets a big thumbs up from me, despite being slightly tricky at points. (This is only partly related to the spare custard I now have in the fridge, although that is also a comfort.)

It's a wet-and-dry mix: wet is 2 eggs, more sugar than I'm comfortable with beaten in till fluffy, and 175g custard. Dry is self-raising, baking powder, and ground almonds. You get the picture: squidgy gateau rather than fluffy sponge. 

Once mixed and folded, pour into a tin, and then blob ("drizzle", as if) about another 50g custard on top. And then add thinly-sliced rhubarb, and a sprinkle of sugar to glaze. 150degrees fan (170 normal etc), 40-45 minutes.

This all works really well *except* for how difficult it is to judge the cookedness of a cake whose top is covered in pale squidgy stuff. I gave it at least 55 minutes in the end, and I still wasn't sure it was done (this is 5 minutes before I decided it was done, you can see the edges are toasty already). The green rhubarb isn't so pretty. But eh, never mind.

 

It's a dense cake, and it came out fine. If anything, a splodge of rhubarb compote leftovers on the side seems like a plan. How handy.