A light and airy sponge cake baked with a layer of fresh raspberries on top, with a dusting of icing sugar when baked. Easy and simple - it's one of my very favourite summer cakes.
Baking with fresh berries
In summer, berries are my favourite cake material: strawberries, raspberries, red- and blackcurrants and blackberries, the last both cultivated and wild.
Using fresh berries makes eating cake feel slightly healthier, and truth be told it actually is, considering the berry fibre content. Though obviously, cakes are never health food so don’t scoff three slices and blame me for the weight gain!
But are fresh berries the best to bake with, or should we enjoy these cakes all year round using frozen ones out of season? By all means, but there are some points to bear in mind.
Baking with frozen berries
When thawed, frozen berries are impossibly watery and soggy. You can drain the liquid but what will you be left with? A handful of very sad, limpid bits.
For that reason it’s best to use them frozen without thawing, adding directly to batter, but it will greatly extend the baking time. Frozen berries will rapidly lower the batter temperature and thus to bring it back to starting point and then to bake through, it will take about (roughly, on average, depending on the type of cake) 150% of baking time indicated in the recipe. So if the recipe says baking time is an hour, with frozen berries it will take ninety minutes.
That’s why frozen fruit works best added to small bakes like muffins or teacakes. And any recipes for sponge topped with berries need fresh ones, otherwise it will be a soggy mess.
How to prepare raspberries
Raspberries are the nicest berries, the flavour is lovely and they look so pretty on top of a cake, dusted with icing sugar.
But even fresh raspberries are quite a wet kind of fruit. I know what I’ll say will be contentious, but I try to never wash them. Unlike strawberries, raspberries don’t tend to be heavily sprayed with pesticides, and whatever other contamination or dirt they carry will be in this case obliterated by the high baking temperature. By all means wash them for consuming fresh, but I really don’t see the need to wash for baking.
And if you’ve grown them yourself, don’t even think about washing. We live in an overly sterile environment anyway.
Egg separation
You might think that separating the eggs is an unnecessary palaver but in this recipe it makes for a/ lightest, wonderful sponge, and b/ somehow miraculously helps keep the raspberries afloat in the batter, rather than let them sink sadly to the bottom.
But what do I know? You might prefer them lower down in the cake rather than a crown of raspberries on top. In which case, you still need to separate the eggs but fold some or all of the berries through the batter. Trust me on this one – I’ve never knowingly chosen the harder option unless absolutely necessary.
How to make the sponge batter
Once you’ve got your yolks and whites apart, place the whites in a large bowl and beat to stiff-ish peaks (it’s not good to overbeat the whites as they might deflate and split). Continue beating while adding the sugar by a spoonful but not overly slowly – it’s not a meringue after all. Egg yolks, one by one, follow the sugar (I know: at this point you’re totally doubting the point of separation) with the melted, cooled butter right behind.
The dry ingredients, flour with baking powder can now be folded gently with a spatula. You can also sift the flour onto the mixture in the bowl and use a hand whisk to combine it.
And the batter now goes into the tin, with the raspberries scattered generously on top, some very gently pushed in. It will bake for about an hour, until the dry skewer test – though some apparently deem it harmful to the cakes.
The cake is lovely, light and fluffy, with the tang of the berries and the crunch of the pips (those people who mind raspberry pips are just weird). It is the nicest freshly baked, but it will keep two to three days in the fridge.
More raspberry dessert recipes
Raspberry and almond slice, a gorgeous buttery traybake with flaked almond, sugar and butter topping: it’s easier to make and tastier than Bakewell!
No churn raspberry ripple ice cream, based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe: stupidly easy, and amazingly effective. Two ingredients plus raspberry puree equals ice cream made in ten minutes.
Raspberry meringue roulade: the perfect dessert recipe by Ottolenghi, with raspberries and whipped mascarpone cream filling, decorated with rose petals and pistachios. The meringue base can be baked a day ahead.
More cake with soft fruit recipes
Strawberry butter cake is a sponge base with fresh strawberries scattered over the batter, delightfully half-sunk when baked. It's simple and easy to make, with delicious fresh seasonal fruit.
Island Kitchen buttermilk cake recipe, this time with raspberries, is the easiest in the world. This eggless cake is the best buttermilk cake recipe ever, with fresh or frozen berries it makes the nicest and easiest dessert.
Redcurrant cake, light and buttery sponge topped with fresh tart redcurrants. Redcurrants doth not only jelly maketh, but cake in summer too.