Peach and rosemary cake
Something you are unlikely to know about me is that in a prior life I considered myself more of a sweet than savoury kind of cook. Granted I was younger, and I think baking can often be a bit of a gateway to cooking in those earlier years, but I once had dreams of going to chef school to study patisserie, I made wedding cakes for friends, and I even almost started my own confectionary company (handmade caramels, if you must know). It’s actually wild to me to type that all out all of these years later, I think I had forgotten how much I adored it.
But as I grew as a cook, I fell more and more into savoury cooking, every day cooking, the kind that feeds family, that works with the seasons and what’s in the pantry. When I started no regretti spaghetti, shifting my focus onto pasta steered me even further away from sweets. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy making desserts or baking anymore, it’s just that I didn’t really have much capacity for it.
Fast forward to mid-2025, when my then 18 month old was old enough to get involved (messily, chaotically) in the kitchen, and the call of flour, butter, sugar and eggs beckoned once more. Baking with my toddler is one of my favourite activities that we do together at home, and it quickly became a weekly ritual. We started choosing our weekly baking project – thumbing through cookbooks and agreeing on our chosen recipe which more often than not contained chocolate in the title – before going to get all of the ingredients, an adventure in itself. And while she would be having her lunchtime snooze, I would be busy getting our mise en place in order (essential for successful cooking with a little one).
The more we baked, the more I felt compelled to start playing around with my own recipes again, and I guess this cake is a result of that. It’s my idea of the perfect afternoon tea cake – it’s moist, not too sweet and very easy to eat a slice (or two) of without it feeling sickly. The star of this really is the peach and rosemary topping, which is an idea I took from a recipe in the amazing book SIFT from Nicola Lamb, where she shares a polenta cake with an apricot and rosemary topping. In it she creates a sort of caramel and cooks the apricots in that for several minutes before pouring over the top of the unbaked cake just before it goes into the oven. I don’t take the caramel (or cooking time) as far, just due to the softer nature of peaches in general – the resulting topping is more like a juicy, sweet sauce that inserts an extra sweet note and moisture in the cake.
Peach and rosemary cake
Ingredients
Cake
- 120 g unsalted butter room temperature
- 200 g sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
- 2 large eggs
- 165 g almond meal
- 145 g flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 100 ml whole milk
Peach and rosemary topping
- 2 large peaches cut into 1/8 slices
- 25 g unsalted butter
- 25 g caster sugar
- 2-3 sprigs of rosemary leaves removed from the stems (discard the stems)
Instructions
Cake
- Preheat oven to 170c fan-forced (190c conventional).
- Line a 20cm springform cake tin with parchment paper and set aside.
- Combine the butter, sugar and vanilla in a stand mixer fitted with a beater (or using a hand-mixer) and beat until light in colour and fluffy – a good couple of minutes.
- Add the eggs and mix again to combine.
- Add the almond meal, flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt and once again, mix to combine.
- Finally, add the milk to loosen the mixture – making sure it’s incorporated with the batter.
- Pour the cake mixture into your prepared tin and set aside briefly while you make the topping.
Peach and rosemary topping
- Add the peach slices, butter, sugar and rosemary to a small pan and cook over a medium heat, moving the peaches around in the pan frequently. The butter and sugar will melt together and it will all smell a bit lovely – you really just want the peach to start to soften slightly, and break down a little so their juices sort of emulsify with the butter.
- Pour the topping over the cake batter, making sure to try and get even coverage, though it doesn’t need to be perfect.
- Bake in the oven for 40-45 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
- Allow the cake to cool in its tin for 10 minutes before removing the sides of the tin and letting it cool completely on a wire rack.
