Maple-Walnut Cake

Currently baking out of Sky High, Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes by Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne

I couldn’t wrap my head around the flavors of this cake. I know what maple syrup tastes like, and I know what walnuts taste like. But I couldn’t quite figure out how they would taste together in cake form. I think that the fact that there was no chocolate in this cake was throwing me off.

This cake intrigued me from the moment I read the title. It has a different method of mixing the cake, plus, it has a cream cheese frosting, and I’m a sucker for cream cheese frostings. You start out by toasting walnuts and then finely chopping them. The nuts get combined with flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Then you add butter and maple syrup and cream the whole thing until it is light and fluffy. In the final step before baking, a couple of eggs and milk are mixed into the batter.

I had to make cakes twice. The first time, I was right to be worried about the amount of leavening; there was too much for the amount of flour used in the batter. The cakes fell badly and were so tender they cracked as I tried to get them out of the pans and take off the parchment paper on the bottoms. The second time I made the cakes, I decreased the baking soda by almost half. I also increased the amount of walnuts and didn’t chop them too finely. These cakes came out just fine.

Next up was the maple cream frosting. Cream cheese and maple syrup? Count me in. Two sticks of butter and melted and boiled with 2/3 cup of maple syrup. Once this syrup has cooled, you add it to cream cheese that has been whipped with powdered sugar. ALOT of powdered sugar. I suspected that this was going to be a very soft frosting, and boy was it. It kept sliding down the cake to puddle at the bottom. After sitting in the fridge overnight, it finally firmed up, but it was a mess to work with. It was also too sweet. Six cups of powdered sugar to 12 ounces of cream cheese? Next time, I’ll increase the cream cheese to 16 ounces, decrease the sugar by at least half and try beating the butter into the cream cheese and adding the maple syrup to that.

In the finished cake, the flavor was very rich and sweet. It really needs the cream cheese frosting to temper that sweetness. The maple syrup and brown sugar give the cake a caramelly flavor that goes really well with the walnuts. The cake reminded me of carrot cake without the carrots. I really liked using the maple syrup as a sweetener and want to experiement with it.