FOOD: Raspberry Cake

With a freezer full of raspberries, it was high time I took to doing something wit them and with the need to find a recipe for a birthday cake for myself, what better an opportunity to use some of them up. You'd think raspberry cakes recipes would be easy to find, but apparently such cakes are a modern invention. While I love using my vintage cookbooks, none had any such recipe, for once pinterest came to the rescue. 

The recipe I came across from Food Loverr which is actually adapted from one on food.com is pretty straight forward, and like most of the recipes I come to share here, there's no out of the ordinary ingredients required. I found the bake time was very underestimated and after baking with frozen raspberries, i'd suggest using fresh ones. The icing was also meant to be decorated with raspberries, but I misjudged and didn't have enough - oops. 

Raspberry Cake

Cake

1/3 cup of butter

1 cup of sugar

1 egg

3 teaspoons of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

2 cups of sifted all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 cup of milk

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 cups of fresh raspberries 

Glaze

1 1/2 cups powdered/confectionery sugar

1 teaspoon of melted butter 

6 tablespoons of heavy cream

Mix the butter and sugar together, adding in the egg and mix well. Combine all the dry ingredients. Separately add the vanilla extract to the milk and add, alternating with the dry ingredients into the butter/sugar mixture and mix well, until smooth. Pour batter into a lined loaf pan and sprinkle raspberries over the batter. Place into a preheated oven at 375F for 45 minutes (original recipe states 30 - but the batter was far too wet). After the cake has baked, make the glaze by mixing all the ingredients - sugar, melted butter and cream and frost while still slightly warm.

Have you baked anything tasty lately?

FOOD: Simple and Sweet, Raspberry Jam

The smell of raspberry jam bubbling away takes me back to my childhood with my mam and my gran standing over a pressure cooker filled with fruit every summer holiday. It's a tradition I try to continue. While we only managed to freeze about six cups of raspberries - far too many were enjoyed with ice cream I confess, I knew I at least wanted to try and turn some of it into jam. 

Jam making, at least using the more traditional recipes is a lot easier than you might think plus this recipe doesn't even call for any setting agent. It's a recipe taken from Martha Stewart - one I skipped on a couple of steps because I could never drain seeds out of raspberry jam - for me that's a no no. I like my seeds damn it. This recipe will make you one jar - handy if you want to make a small batch quickly - plus it's easy enough to double, triple up the quantities if needs be.

So to the recipe we go. You'll need;

2 1/4 cups of raspberries
1 cup and 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar
Zest of one large orange divided
1 1/8 of a teaspoon of lemon juice
Pinch of salt

Before you start jam making, take a saucer and place it into your freezer - you'll need it for testing your jam in a sec. Add your raspberries, sugar, salt, lemon juice and half of the orange zest into a pan and boil away. Once it reaches a roaring boil (when it really starts going for it) set a timer for 8 to 10 minutes. Make sure to keep stirring and you can even do some mashing at this point, although be careful because with such a boil it lets to spit out every so often.


Once it starts to thicken, take out your saucer from the freezer and stick a blob onto it, hold it to an angle and it should hold most of it's shape and look firm. When it reaches that point, throw in the remaining orange zest, give it a quick stir and pour into your jar. Cool it off before sticking it into the fridge. 

While we're talking about raspberries - if you want a great way to freeze berries of all kinds that won't make them all squishy - lay them on a freezeable tray and pop into your freezer for a couple of hours or over night. Then bag them up. They'll keep their shape and won't be all stuck together!


Now I just have issues of eating the jam straight from the jar!

How do you like your jam?