Savarin

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is for Savarin, which is a yeast cake, filled with fruit and whipped cream. We don’t have a host for this recipe, but you can easily find this recipe online and don’t forget to check out the links on the Tuesdays with Dorie site from this week’s bakers.  Probably the most characteristic component of the Savarin is that it is baked in a rounded tube pan. Sort of like a Bundt pan, but smooth. You can certainly make it in a Bundt pan, but I wanted to see if I could find a Savarin pan at a thrift shop. I really lucked out and found one (well, they had two actually) at the second shop I went to for $1.99! 

For yeast baking, this recipe doesn’t take too long to make. The first rise is just 15 minutes and the second is only 30 minutes. The dough is very unusual. It’s more like batter, quite runny. The recipe only uses ¾ cup of flour, which is so little. It seemed to rise fine, and I was absolutely shocked when I checked it after the 30 minute rising time and it had risen to fill the pan! Amazing for such a small amount of dough. 

I served this with raspberries and strawberries, mainly because that’s what they had at the store. I used some pineapple passionfruit preserves in the place of the raspberry puree. Using the strawberries really make this look like strawberry shortcake, and it sort of tastes like that. The cake is unusual, you can absolutely taste the yeast, but it’s light in texture. My cake collapsed a bit while baking, but you couldn’t see that too much once you piled on all the fruit and whipped cream. I thought this dessert was interesting; the strong yeast flavor really was unexpected and I liked the fruit. This was an interesting cake to try!

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, pages 416-417