[Elise] Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumb Cake and the Perfect Chai

What a great way to spend a warm spring afternoon, but sitting in the sun on the porch, eating an almost pie-like strawberry-rhubarb crumb cake and drinking a nice cup of chai. My roommate Shianne and I have been making copious amounts of chai ever since I found the perfect recipe.

Chai for Two

Either boil or microwave to just below boiling:
1 1/2 c water
2/3 c milk

Pour over 12 sugar cubes (6 tsp) into a teapot (or six cubes per mug)
Steep two chai teabags, or equivalent loose tea for directed length of time.

Enjoy!

This is the shortcut way, modified from a recipe found at 2B A Snob, which has the individual spices if you wish to make chai completely from scratch.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumb Cake

This recipe is from Sugar Plum. I only made two small tweaks: The first, a teaspoon of cinnamon in the cake batter, and the second I used maybe 10 drops of yellow food coloring instead of just one (qualifying this post, ever so subtly, for food coloring month). Another note, for anyone else needing to know how much rhubarb to harvest or buy (sadly, still no garden of my own) the 2/3 of a cup is slightly less than one stalk, though if you ask me, you should use a whole cup, or rather, the whole stalk, why waste!?

Step one: Mix the batter and spread it in a 9 inch round pan. The batter was so light and fluffy... heavenly really.

Step two, top with chopped strawberries and rhubarb and bake.

Halfway through baking (or should I say, when the cake is half-baked ;-) remove the cake from the oven and add the crumb topping.

When the cake finishes baking, make sure to leave the springform on for at least a half hour, as the cake essentially comes out topped with molten sugar. After a half hour, it is perfectly warm and delicious.

While it is called a crumb cake, and made like a crumb cake, because the cake itself is so light and delicate, it deflates when you take it out of the oven and ends up almost more like a pie (an incredibly delicious pie) so pie-like that my friend Mike refuses to believe that it is a cake. If they were square, I think us Minnesotans would have to call them bars (read with heavy accent).