Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake - TWD: Baking Chez Moi

Next installment of Tuesdays with Dorie, Baking Chez Moi.  The recipe is Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake.

Given that we had a snowfall on the way, which always makes once think of stockpiling food, it seemed like a good idea to whip this up on Friday evening in preparation for the weekend.  Thinking that Friday night baking frenzy before a storm makes "perfect sense" is just another symptom of baking obsession, but hopefully fellow bakers get what I mean.

I like Dorie's description in Baking Chez Moi of a "weekend cake" being a cake that you can eat over the course of the weekend - as a late morning pick-me-up, or late afternoon snack.   Also found it interesting that the French refer to "le weekend" - using the English word instead a French one.
I think I'm digressing....

This was easy enough to bake on a Friday night after work, and we were indeed glad to have it in the house on the snowy weekend.   It was easy to make, and came out exactly as expected.  It kind of reminded me of the Lemon Loaf Cake from Baking with Julia, since it has heavy cream in it. You melt, and brown the butter - tricky, since you need to watch like a hawk.  My butter didn't really get all that brown, since I took it off the burner fairly quickly.  The recipe also includes the seeds from an entire vanilla bean, although you can use vanilla extract instead.  Overall, it is a very straightforward recipe - I think I had it in the oven within 30 minutes from starting to prepare it.  The cake is delicious, and I will definitely make it again.  I might try browning the butter a bit more, to see if I can get more of that browned butter flavor.  We ate the last slices while sitting out the beginning of our second snowstorm in a week - the big East Coast blizzard.  Good thing we had cake to get us through the crisis :-)