A Fig Cake for Fall

I'm only a day late this week but I am determined to keep up with the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers as we are in the home stretch of baking through Dorie Greenspan's Baking from my home to Yours.  


This week's pick was A Fig Cake for Fall chosen by Ursala of Cookie Rookie.

I've never baked with figs.  Actually, I've never eaten figs before (unless you count Fig Newtons which I'm sure does not count!)  The recipe calls for softening the figs in a mixture of Ruby Port and honey.  So I sent my husband off to buy the port and realized that we now have quite a collection of bottles of various alcoholic beverages used only for baking, thanks to Dorie!

The batter is a very small amount of sugar, lots of butter and 3 eggs which you beat for a long time.  It looks curdled, but as she promises, it eventually improves.  The dry ingredients include cornmeal and flour, and I feared that the cake would be a bit gritty.

The cake actually turned out to be quite pretty and, as I've come to expect from Dorie's recipes, very tasty.  A good first try with figs.

Curdles galore

Keep beating--it will turn out all right!

Stirring in the dry incredients

The beautiful Fig Cake for Fall

With the rubyport/honey sauce.