Cookbook Club – Baking at Republique

We did a bonus Cookbook Club event in June, using Margarita Manzke’s Baking at Republique. She shares recipes for many of the baked goods available at Republique. I was pretty excited about this, since I have eaten my fair share of baked treats at that LA restaurant and pretty much adore them. You can revel in the whole baking bonanza on my Cookbook Club site – for now, my dish!

I’ll start by saying that I don’t own a stand mixer, so that immediately eliminated a fair portion of the recipes for me (though I was delighted that other Cookbook Clubbers tackled some of those items, including several of the brioche recipes which were incredible!). There were, however, still plenty of yummy-sounding options, and I was happy to try my hand at the Blueberry-Lemon-Coconut Loaf.

I whisked together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

I creamed together butter and sugar, then beat in eggs one at a time.

I added sour cream and mixed until well incorporated.

I added in the flour mixture and mixed until just incorporated.

I added coconut and lemon zest and mixed until just incorporated.

I poured half the batter into a greased loaf pan, added a layer of blueberries, poured in the remainder of the batter, and topped with the rest of the blueberries. I baked at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes, then rotated the pan and baked for another 25 minutes. The loaf wasn’t done so I ended up leaving it in for another 10 minutes.

While the loaf was in the oven, I brought sugar and water to boil, removed it from the heat, and stirred in lemon zest.

As soon as the loaf was done baking, I removed it from the pan and brushed the lemon syrup over it while still warm.

It came out moist and tasty but not too sweet. Blueberry and lemon make a great flavor combo, and the texture added by the coconut was quite nice. I made it again less than a week later, but baked it for 30 minutes before and after the rotation – turned out perfect! Definitely a keeper recipe.

One thing to note… the recipe makes 2 loaves, which I’m guessing is because Manzke took her much larger restaurant recipe and cut it down for the home cook. That resulted in 2 loaves calling for things like 3 eggs, 1 cup plus 3 TBSP sour cream, and 3/4 cup plus 2 TBSP sweetened shredded coconut. One loaf at a time is plenty for me, so I cut the recipe in half, which meant using 1.5 eggs and having to divide some other annoying measurements in half. Not the most convenient, but doable.