THEN, add flour with spatula or wooden spoon. In a large bowl, whisk together the sugars, spices and salt into melted butter until smooth. Slice the rhubarb into 1/2″ thick pieces, then toss with sugar, ginger and cornstarch. 6 tablespoons softened butter, cut into 8 pieces.This is courtesy of Smitten Kitchen, which she apparently adapted from the New York Times. Apparently, it’s all about the order in which you mix the crumb ingredients… (Instructions below the recipe will outline the correct way.) Yay! Now I’m ready to try this again and hope for much better results. Update: I just went back to Smitten Kitchen’s recipe and found that I’m not the only one who had problems with the crumb topping.

Even if the crumb topping was kind of crummy, it was still going to be fantastic. Normally, I’d meditate more on the failures of this attempt, but, let’s face it, it was cake, with rhubarb, topped in a mixture of sugar and butter. A nice layer of sweetened rhubarb slices through the middle was a good contrast to the cake and sweetened crumble topping. In fact, I had to kind of manipulate the crumb topping into actual “crumbs” (I suspect I needed a little more butter), but it was still delicious. Sadly, my crumb topping didn’t turn out quite as nicely. So, really, there was no debate on whether or not I’d be giving this recipe a shot. This is bad for several reasons.ġ) Rhubarb season is slipping away quickly.Ģ) Now I am craving a piece of this cake and there is none to be had. Sadly, though, procrastination got the better of me and I’m only posting it now. I have, like, eight recipes for rhubarb stuff on my delicious (warning: about 80 lemon-related recipes ahead) and rhubarb season is already starting to slip away. Holy crap, how is summer halfway over already?

Smitten kitchen big apple crumb cake