I always like to have a box of frozen raspberries in the freezer. They keep pretty well and sure, when they're going into cake they'll be mushed up a bit anyway.
For the rasberry drizzle cake, I gave the rasberries a quick stewing, to both defrost and collapse them, and to collect a tasty syrup for drizzling on top. To be honest, I hadn't quite decided what sort of cake I would make before I began stewing them, but when I couldn't find the recipe I wanted in my email archive, I went with adapting the lemon drizzle cake.
- A box of frozen rasberries (mine was about 3/4 full)
- 2 tablespoons of water
- 3 teaspoons of vanilla sugar (or regular sugar)
- 125g butter (softened, leave it out for a few hours at room temperature)
- 175g caster sugar
- 2 large eggs (beaten in a mug)
- 175g self-raising flour (sifted)
Put the rasberries, water and vanilla sugar in a pot. Put on a medium heat and stir it occassionally until all the rasberries are defrosted. Mush them a small bit to get some extra juice out, but not so much you end up with all mushed rasberries. Strain the rasberries through a sieve and set them aside, returning the syrupy juice to the pot. Heat the pot, swirling from time to time, until it has reduced about three times to a thicker syrup and set aside.
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line a cake tin (I used my 16cm square one). Cream together the butter and sugar. Add a little egg, mix well, then a tablespoon of flour and mix that in. Repeat until the egg and flour is gone. This gives a nice smooth cake batter. You could do all this in a food processor if you own one of course.
Mix the rasberries into the cake batter. I mixed it into all the batter, but if you divide the batter you can get a nice marbled cake. Pour into the cake tin, and bake for 25-30 mins (put a knife in, if it comes out clean, it's done).
Turn out onto a wire rack, remove the baking paper and flip it over. Poke loads of holes in the top of it with a cocktail stick or skewer. Pour over your reserved syrup from earlier. It'll probably look like a blood (jam) bath as the red syrup doesnt blend in as well as the lemon syrup. That's ok though, you can always dust it with icing sugar just before you present it to the happy eaters.
If you happen to have a lemon to hand, I think the juice might be a good tangy addition to the rasberry syrup. Rasberries are tart enough, and the sugar added above isnt enough to neutralise this, but extra tart flavour is always welcome in a drizzle cake.
