Brown Butter Cake with Sweet Woodruff Cream
and whatever fruit ya want- recipe riffin'
hey hi hello!
Welcome back to recipe riffin’ FKA “free will baking”, a series that highlights how I bake (taking a page from Ben Lippett’s book). Because the way I bake in a profesh kitchen vs how I bake for myself at home are wildly different- sorta. A show of how free and expressive baking can be if you have just 2 things: a solid base recipe to riff on and a *fairly* basic understand of your ingredients and the role they play in a baked good. Ex: sugar ≠ just sweet. Sugar = big texture agent, think: tender, moist, soft.
Today we’re taking the bergamot olive oil cake recipe we developed together and turning it into a brown butter cake with a sweet woodruff cream- the perfect vessel for all your summer produce. Strawberries, peaches, cherries, mulberries and boysenberries. Really anything you want works here.
Let’s get to it ♡
*This post has a few affiliate links, which if you click and purchase from I receive compensation at no additional cost to you. Sometimes the link also includes a few bucks off for you, a real win/win, if you ask me. I’m not here to aggressively peddle crap unto you, I still only link products I actually use, test with and enjoy*
BROWNING THE BUTTER: Well, first subbing the oil for butter, then browning it. The thing about browned butter, is that it’s more aligned with oil than it is with butter. When you properly brown butter, you’re cooking off all the water content. You know, all that steam giving you a facial while you’re browning, that’s all the water in the butter boiling off. In the end you’re left with a liquid fat. So, because of this, you’re in a better position to swap brown butter for oil gram for gram than you are swapping it for butter. When you swap for regular butter, you need to be conscious of that water loss. This can looking like upping the amount of liquid in the recipe, either by adding a little more of a pre-existing liquid in the recipe or straight up adding a bit of water.
This is how we’re able to swap the oil in the olive oil cake recipe with brown butter. But, not just any brown butter— extra browned butter. Which is achieved by adding in some non-fat milk powder during the browning process, like we did for the brown butter pecan cookies. The brown bits are where all the flavor is at. But, a stick of butter only has so many milk solids, we gotta bulk it up. Milk powder is notoriously thirsty, so when you add it to a recipe it soaks up any available liquid, and if you add too much you can dry out the batter. BUT, in browning the milk solids deeply, you eviscerate it’s ability to soak up that extra liquid.
INFUSING THE CREAM: Now, I love a good infusion for flavor. It’s one of those “quick” and easy techniques that can really change the flavor of what you’re baking with out altering the texture. But, heavy cream can be a bit more fickle when it comes to infusing, so treat it with care.
Cream needs to be cold when you whip it for proper aeration. Whipping warm cream leads to a curdly mess, and there’s no coming back from that. I prefer a cold infusion into water/milk when I time my life right. But, I find cold infusions into heavy cream to be, mmm not tricky per say but they tend to take either more time or a lot more of what you’re trying to infuse to get that flavor pay off. Fat carries flavor, for sure, but, in some cases it can also impede flavor and mute it.
So, for cream infusions I typically opt for a hybrid infusion, gently heating the cream just warm enough to take the chill off and loosen up the fat molecules, add the dried herb, spice, tea of choice, then to the fridge overnight to let everyone get to know each other. *Bronwen Wyatt did a heavy cream deep dive over on Kitchen Projects recently that I highly recommend you check out for more heavy cream infusion info!*
I prefer this method for heavy cream, especially since, once again, you have to whip your cream cold. But, also, if you hyper heat cream and bring it to a boil, your cream becomes more susceptible to breaking/curdling, even if you cool it back down in the fridge overnight.
Of course, you can choose to keep the whipped cream “plain”, with only the addition of mascarpone to add body and flavor. I infuse my cream with Sweet Woodruff, which gives the cream a subtle hay flavor. Which, when I put it like that maybe doesn’t sound the most appetizing.
EDIT: A little bit on sweet woodruff. It’s an herb native to Europe and western Asia. It has delicate hay like, vanilla leaning notes. You can use fresh- if you can find it. But, since it’s not native to where I’m at- it doesn’t thrive here when I’ve tried to grow it soooo I just buy dried sweet woodruff tea leaves online.
FRUIT PROCESSING: Now, the fruit you choose and how you treat it is all up to you. With some diced and macerated strawberries? Hell yeah. Toss ‘em in some herby sugar to macerate? double hell ya. With fresh berries and apricot slices? I mean.. perfect. No fruit at all.. okay I mean your life, you live it how you want but like, why would you not top this baddie with fruit?
I mean, yeah, “all” I did to change the base olive oil cake recipe was swap the olive oil for exxxtra browned butter. Oh, but I start with more butter than oil by 20% to account for the fact that I need 120 grams of pure fat in the end. By starting with 155 grams I’ll cook off enough water to hit the original oil weight in the recipe. I also swap the granulated sugar gram for gram for brown sugar (an equal swap) because well those molasses notes? with the brown butter?
ooof that’s a no brainer.
Oh, and instead of adding the little bit of Sonora flour the original recipe calls for, I use all AP flour instead. Minus about 10 grams—mostly, because I ran out of flour mid mise.