Cake for Breakfast...or Anytime at All

by Jean Kressy

Relish the American Table is a weekly column that appears in newspapers across the country.

There is a limit to the number of fried green tomatoes we can eat and the number of jars of green tomato relish we can fill, so when faced with a basket of green tomatoes, we decided to do a little culinary improvisation.

As any home gardener knows, green tomatoes are firm, unripened tomatoes, picked in the fall before the first frost. New Englanders, known for their frugality, will do anything to avoid waste. Before tossing green tomatoes onto the compost, they will try to figure out a way to make them ripen.

One of their suggestions, which we tried, was hanging the vines upside-down in the cellar. It sounded reasonable enough until we realized that tomatoes, ripe or not, eventually soften and fall off the vine, which is exactly what happened to us. Next we tried wrapping the tomatoes individually in newspaper and putting them in the refrigerator to ripen. Before we knew it, the refrigerator was so filled with tomatoes, which incidentally never ripened, there was no room for anything else. We were left where we started, with a basket of green tomatoes.

One of our best green tomato recipes is a kuchen-like version of a plum tart. It’s filled with green tomato wedges and is a cross between a dessert cake and a coffee cake. We call it a breakfast cake. If anyone offered us a cup of coffee and a piece of green tomato cake any time of day or night, we wouldn’t hesitate to take it.

Green Tomato Breakfast Cake

Mark Boughton

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When Marion Burros ran this simple recipe in the New York Times, it became the paper’s single most requested recipe. Based on a 40-year-old recipe for plum cake that first appeared in Marion Burros and Lois Levine’s The Elegant but Easy Cookbook, this cake is just as good for dessert as it is for breakfast. We substituted green tomatoes for the plums originally called for.

Ingredients

Nonstick cooking spray
1/3 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 green tomatoes, cored and cut into eighths
2 teaspoons turbinado or granulated sugar
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Spray a 9-inch round cake pan or baking dish with oil.
2. Cream butter and sugar. When slightly fluffy, beat in eggs and vanilla.
3. Combine flour, baking powder and salt and sift into the creamed butter mixture; beat well. Spoon batter into prepared pan. Arrange green tomato pieces in concentric circles over batter. Sprinkle lightly with sugar and cinnamon.
4. Bake 50 minutes to 1 hour or until cake is firm and golden and tests done. Serves 8.

Recipe by Crescent Dragonwaon, "Relish the Season," Sept. 2006.

Nutritional Information

Per serving: 210 calories, 9g fat, 4g prot., 32g carbs., 1g fiber, 115mg sodium.