A Farmers Market opening day and a homely, delicious Lunar Cake

Lunar Cake

It's Memorial Day weekend, and the Oak Park Farmers Market opened its 40th season on one of the few perfect-weather days Chicago gets each year: sunny but not humid, too early for mosquitoes, warm enough for the pool and breezy enough to be cool in the shade. Just two weeks ago the trees were pale green with buds and immature leaves, but now our village's municipal arboretum's avenues are canopied in heavy deep green. 

So all of the world came out to the market on Saturday for plants and flowers and the earliest of the produce (and cheese, and honey, and jams, and organic meat, and flavored vinegar, and my favorite Three Queens maple syrup, just in time as we ran out of our winter supply.)

The Oak Park Farmers' Market was founded as a "growers" market, of local farmers, which means that a farmer or vendor has to make or grow what they sell. The market's rules don't allow vendors to resell from wholesalers, which is why you won't find corn until a few weeks into the season (or oranges, ever). 

In May at the Market, you will find a lot of rhubarb:

and asparagus:

I wasn't sure I'd find early Michigan strawberries at the first market so I looked for rhubarb-only recipes to test. A friend recommended Lunar Cake. Brown sugar and butter "craters" that appear on top after baking? Powerless to resist.

I tested the recipe for a pre-Memorial-Day get-together and it was a hit with both kids and adults. The linked article describes it as a coffee cake, and it does have a quickbread sort of texture but I think it's too sweet for first thing in the morning. Perfect for post-BBQ dessert.

I served it with vanilla ice cream and rhubarb sauce (recipe follows) but it would have been fine alone. It's a keeper of a simple recipe that's unusual enough to stand out in a potluck crowd but unfussy and easy to make. 

Credit to Canadian Living (please do click the link, What's Canada's National Fruit, to read the origin story), but I'm going to go ahead and include the text, with a few tweaks, since it has already been widely copied on major recipe sites.

Lunar Cake

1/2 cup (125 mL) butter, softened

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp (5 mL) vanilla

2 cups (500 mL) all-purpose flour

 1 tsp (5 mL) baking soda

1/2 tsp (2 mL) salt

1 cup (250 mL) buttermilk (room temperature)

2 cups (500 mL) chopped rhubarb (1/2-inch/1.25 cm pieces)

Topping Ingredients

1 cup (250 mL) firmly packed light brown sugar

2 tsp (10 mL)  ground cinnamon

1/4 cup (50 mL) butter, softened

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 13- x-9-inch metal cake pan with parchment paper, or butter/grease the pan. 

In a large bowl or stand mixer beat the butter and sugar until well mixed and fairly smooth. Add the egg and vanilla; beat until smooth. 

Set aside 1 tbsp (15 mL) of the flour. In a separate large bowl, whisk together remaining flour, baking soda and salt. Add to butter mixture alternately with buttermilk.

Toss rhubarb with remaining flour. Spoon over the batter and fold in with spoon. Pour/scrape batter into the prepared pan.

Topping: Mix together sugar and cinnamon. With a fork or pastry blender, blend butter into the sugar mixture until crumbly. Sprinkle/spread evenly over the raw batter.

Bake until the lunar topping is pitted and crusty and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Let cool on rack. 

Makes about 16 servings.

Rhubarb Spoon Fruit

I intended this to be an ice cream sauce, and it was great on ice cream but more like a jam than a sauce. Great on toast. 

Adapted from Taste of Home

1/3 c. sugar
1/4 c. water
2 1/2 c. fresh rhubarb, chopped into small dice
Don't slice long-way; you want to chop up those stringy bits.

1/2 - 1 tsp. lemon zest
I was surprised by how pronounced the lemon and nutmeg flavors are in this recipe. If you want more rhubarb taste, try a little less lemon.

1/8 tsp. ground nutmeg

In a small saucepan, bring sugar and water to a boil. Add rhubarb.  Lower the heat and cook, stirring constantly, for 5-10 minutes or until rhubarb is tender and mixture is slightly thickened. Remove from the heat and stir in lemon zest and nutmeg. Serve warm or chilled. Store in refrigerator.