brown butter corn cake
with pink peppercorn whipped cream and peaches
hey hi helloooo!
Welcome back to recipe riffin’- a little series where I remind you that you have free will and you can use it when you bake :)
Last week at Specialty Produce I picked up some peaches from Reiger Farms aka possibly the best peaches on earth <333 But, me being me, I went a little overboard and bought more than I could “casually” eat in a week. mmm not true, i’ve been known to put down an insane amount of peaches in a week, probably less. OKAY YEAH, I’ve eaten an entire flat in 4 days. SUE ME. But, I thought- let’s switch up how we’re consuming these baddies. I thought about the brown butter cake from a few weeks ago and that is the perfect vessel to eat more peaches!
Now, I didn’t want to call it the cake of the summer, you know me and recipe superlatives, but I can’t stop y’all from calling it that. And that you have. But, I think this version might actually take the cake for, well, cake of the summer. With a few swaps I turned the cake from brown butter cake with sweet woodruff cream and strawberries into brown butter corn cake with pink peppercorn whip and peaches. I think the corn + peach combo fully emobodies a summer time vibe. Which, if you’ll remember this recipe started off as my bergamot olive oil cake, and who know’s what it’ll become next!
Let’s get into it :) xx
*This post has a few affiliate links, which if you click and purchase from I receive compensation at no additional cost to you.*
When it comes to riffin’ on a recipe, it’s important to be able to discern what in the recipe is fixed and what’s variable. I mean.. technically it can all be variable. But, if you’re still coming into your own with your creativity and are unsure about swapping ingredients in the base of a recipe you can still switch up the experience by playing around with things that are variable.
Yeah, I do switch up the base of this cake to include corn flour and corn meal because corn + peach = summer time heaven. But, you can truly leave the brown butter cake as is, or the og olive oil cake as it. They’re just the vessel for the cream and the peaches.
Like, I mentioned in the brown butter sweet woodruff cake post- you can really top this cake with any summer fruit, not just strawberries. Because, that’s the bit that’s variable. If you swap the fruit on the cake, that isn’t going to change the structure of the recipe, just the flavor experience. A few weeks ago, while testing a shortcake recipe (still in development) I shared a picture to my IG story of a version that I topped with bruleed bananas. So so so so many of you asked for the recipe-but, the thing is it’s just a strawberry shortcake but the strawberries are subbed out for bananas. If you already have a banger strawberry shortcake recipe, then you kinda already have the recipe for a banger banana shortcake recipe, ya know what I’m saying. There isn’t a “new” recipe for it, the shortcake is fixed, the fillings are variable.
As I lean more and more into online recipe development, there seems to be a pressure to churn recipes out at a crazy rate. I look at creators who pump out multiple recipes out PER WEEK. That’s nuts, and I don’t think we need that many recipes, from anyone. It’s insane to expect this many recipes from a developer/creator, when the reality is, you yourself can only make so much of what the internet has to offer. But, to be able to keep up with this “demand”, so many of these recipes are just riffs and curations of pre-existing recipes. We’ve (not me, not all of us, just like the collective idea of “we”) tricked people into thinking they need a “new” recipe from us for everything we make- when in reality it’s the same recipe every few months with one or two changes. A different filling, a different fruit, etc etc.
The thing that really pushed me into developing recipes in the online space was the “bean soup” crowd. MMm maybe not to that level of severity- but, there was just this gap where people would ask “Can I use the component from (recipe a) as a filling for (recipe b)?” And it’s like, yeah you can. Recipe components are not intrinsically tied to one and other. THAT’S what I’m pushing to teach. I want you to be able to look at a dish or baked good as a whole and dissect it into it’s parts. Then, like a tik tok tarot card reading, you can take what resonates with you and leave behind what doesn’t. The pink peppercorn whipped cream under the peaches not your vibe? Leave it behind. I just like, don’t think you need my recipes to be a more creative baker. If you have base recipes you already love the same flavor swaps can (99% of the time) be applied to those too.
