Oatbake with Rhubarb

This summer dessert is based on this recipe from The Nordic Bakery Cookbook, a collection of the favourite recipes from the Nordic Bakery in London. The original recipe used blueberries and raspberries, which aren't quite in season yet, but I used rhubarb chopped into small pieces plus a little extra sugar with the fruit. Not only did this enable me to use fruit from my own garden, but it also meant I could enter the dessert into this month's AlphaBakes challenge, which uses the letter R.

The cake is made by the unusual method of soaking oats in hot milk before mixing them into a cake batter. This is something I've only seen before in Dan Lepard's recipes, but perhaps Scandinavia is where he got his inspiration. The result is a dense, moist, not too sweet loaf which is definitely more suitable as a dessert than as a tea-time cake. We ate it with vanilla pouring yogurt, which is the nearest my husband will come to eating custard, but cream would be a good choice too.

This dessert was quick and easy to make, economical and reasonably healthy, as the oats and milk lowered the sugar and fat ratio of the batter - I can see this being made frequently using different seasonal fruit.

AlphaBakes is a monthly baking challenge co-hosted by Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes. The name is self explanatory - to bake something using a randomly chosen letter as part of the name or a main ingredient - but more information, and the rules for entry, can be found here. Ros, as this month's host, will be posting a roundup for the letter R at the end of the month.