Peanut Butter and Jelly...Cake

One of my classmates brought a PB&J sandwich for breakfast every single freakin' day in our first year of medical school. For his birthday that year, I decided to make a PB&J cake in his honor. It was a chocolate cake, with a strawberry jam layer in the middle and peanut butter frosting on top.

Unexpectedly, it was another one of my other classmates, Mark, that took a fancy to this flavor combination in cakes, and he's requested it for his own birthday ever since.

So when he decided to throw a get together for his birthday yesterday, I decided to re-invent the PB&J cake for this year's offering.

After some Internet searching, I found myself linked back to one of my favorite baking blogs, Bake or Break, for a peanut butter pound cake with milk chocolate chunks strewn throughout. Perfect. I decided to throw some strawberry jam into the cake for good measure, and to top things off, I made a strawberry sauce to bring out the strawberry-peanut butter combo.

Mark was pretty happy with the result, needless to say, and it seems that this PB&J cake combo was popular with the rest of the attendees as well.

So here are the recipes for the cake and the strawberry sauce, as I made them.


Peanut Butter and Strawberry Jam Pound Cake (adapted from Bake or Break and Taste of the South)

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar (original recipe had 1 & 1/2 cups)
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter (I had a spill, so I think I ended up putting more like 3/4 cups in)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 large eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour for one of these cups, just for fun)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup skim milk
10 ounces mini peanut butter cups (from Trader Joe's), or milk chocolate or peanut butter chips
1/2 jar of strawberry jam

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a Bundt pan and set aside.

Beat butter, sugars, and peanut butter at medium speed until fluffy. Add vanilla. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl.

In a separate bowl, sift and combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Gradually add to butter/sugar mixture, alternating with milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture.

Pour half of the batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle peanut butter cups and jam all around the surface of the batter. Then pour the rest of the batter on top evenly to fill the pan. Take a chopstick or table knife and swirl the mix and batter together all the way around the pan, using a circular motion in both vertical and horizontal planes. You should see a little bit of the jam and peanut butter cups start to surface in the batter.

Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 25 minutes, until done. If necessary, cover top of cake with aluminum foil to prevent excess browning.

Cool in pan for 10 minutes. Run a knife around the edges of the cake to separate them from the pan. Remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Top with powdered sugar, strawberry sauce, ganache, etc. Eat!


Strawberry Sauce (adapted from here)

Ingredients:

16 oz frozen strawberries
2 tablespoons orange juice
2 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup water

Instructions:

Dice strawberries. Put strawberries, juice, and sugar into a small saucepan and heat until sugar is dissolved. Add water and bring up to a boil. Lower heat until the sauce is at a simmer, and allow to simmer until the mixture thickens and the strawberries have broken down. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Blend a fraction of the sauce (the more you blend, the more smooth the sauce will be, so you decide whether you want totally smooth or totally chunky or somewhere in between). Pour blended strawberries back into the rest of the sauce, mix, and serve.

You can keep the sauce in the fridge for up to a week, or freeze until you need to use it.