I’ve mentioned before that I am devoted to frozen raspberries. Unfortunately, and inevitably, this means the rest of the family have gone off them. Yes, I’ve done them to death, in ice cream, Eton messes, jam, jelly, sandwiches. You name it, it’s had a raspberry in it somewhere. Nevertheless, I got a bag out of the freezer on Monday, still expecting them to be greeted with at least mild enthusiasm. Nope. I might as well have been waving a bag of slugs around.
By this time, the berries had more or less defrosted and couldn’t be shoved back in the freezer, so I decided that they should lurk in the fridge for a bit until I decided what to do with them. The great day dawned today – inspired by watching the Great British Bake-Off on catch-up telly last night, I was ready to create my own showstopper. But, instead of agonising over a Genoese sponge, or creating – yikes – swans out of choux pastry, I naturally was going to make things as simple as poss.
So I took 4 eggs, 8 oz each of butter, self-raising flour and caster sugar, mixed them all together and added about 2 oz of (by now rather squishy) ex-frozen raspberries. Oh, and a teaspoonful of vanilla essence. Into the oven at 170 degrees, gas mark 3, for 25 mins, then out onto a wire rack to cool. For the icing, I mixed two-thirds of the remaining raspberries with some butter and icing sugar to make a rather gloopy, runny mix. In fact, it was so runny that I decided to make the best of a bad job and prick the bottom layer of sponge with a fork, so the icing could run down inside the cake. I scattered the remaining raspberries onto the icing. I then plonked the other sponge on top, and made a glace icing with the last bits of raspberry juice and some icing sugar, which you should sieve. Yum.
Oh, and that rather sophisticated-looking white speckled finish? That’s what you get if you’re lazy and don’t sieve the icing sugar. Luckily, I rather like it.