a culinary mistaken identity

I bake a lot. (If we haven’t established this already, it’s probably worth mentioning it again. I. Bake. A. Lot.)

Saturday morning I sat down with my cookbooks and plotted the best way to make some stuff I had never attempted before. I selected an orange and rhubarb coffee cake (not knowing the first thing about rhubarb), banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting (because I knew my friend would like them), and peanut cookies (because a tub of peanut butter is a dangerous thing to leave me alone with). I headed out to the grocery store with my list, and procured everything I needed. As I headed to the produce section, I followed the sign to rhubarb, and saw a picture of a red-stemmed leafy vegetable, so I picked it up, put it in my cart, bought it and went home.
Now, I don’t know rhubarb’s ass from its elbow. How do you clean it? Cook it? Trim it? I consulted a number of resources online about what to do with the leaves (theirs didn’t seem to have any, but mine did, so I just cut them off and chucked them -- they smelled really bitter anyway). I chopped up the red, veiny stalks, tossed them in with the rest of the ingredients, baked it and gave the cake a try when it was done. Delicious!

The cupcakes, too, were terrific, and the peanut butter cookies (with rice krispies in them) were a great hit.

Then today, while on a stroll down a major street in my neighborhood, I passed an organic food market, that had rhubarb in it (that matched the pictures I had seen online). They also had the vegetable I had chopped up and put into my cake, which was decidedly NOT rhubarb.

So tomorrow at work, I will be serving Orange and Swiss Chard Coffee Cake.

(I’m thinking of calling it Torte a L’orange et Chard. Hey, if it’s Fronch, who are they to question it?)

In my defense:
Rhubarb:

Swiss chard: