PEACH MELBA CAKE (forgotten cakes and bakes of 2015)

This cake was inspired by a visit to Waitrose in early December.  On this occasion we got there late in the day and found punnets of beautiful raspberries knocked down in price.  I couldn’t resist buying two of them.

I used some of them to make a raspberry trifle, one of Nick’s favourites.  All the time I was making it I was planning a cake with the rest of the fruit and at the back of my mind I had a vague recollection of a cake in a book by Lisa Faulkner.  The cake was called Fantasy Cake, in a book called “Recipes from my mother to my daughter”.  With me back in the UK and the book in France I resorted to the internet and found the recipe on the Waitrose website here.  Now there’s a coincidence. 

It was the following day that I made the cake and by then some of the remaining bargain raspberries were decidedly too far gone, so to make up the weight of fruit, I added some sliced tinned peaches, thinking of how well the two fruits go together in a peach melba dessert.  The recipe suggests you can use any fruit you are fond of, but I think soft fruit probably work best and you can't go wrong with a little bit of summer in the middle of winter.
Instead of using the creaming method, I employed a tip from Delia Smith and used spreadable butter and the all-in-one method to make the cake.

The cake was delicious.  Moist, fruity and almondy. lovely by itself, with a dash of cream and, later, warmed and served for dessert with custard.  Definitely a recipe I shall be making again.

Just in the nick of time and being ever so slightly cheeky (I think the challenge was meant to use up Christmas leftovers but I never got around to making my parsnip and mincemeat cake – yet) I am linking this post to this month’s Love Cake Challenge organised by Ness of Jibber Jabber UK, which is, as hinted at, “waste not”.  You can see the details here.

PEACH MELBA CAKE (FANTASY CAKE)

Ingredients
175g spreadable butter
150g caster sugar
150g self-raising flour, sifted
2 eggs
3 tablespoons milk
100g ground almonds
1 teaspoon almond essence
200g raspberries
200g tinned sliced peaches, drained and cut into chunks


Method
Preheat the oven to 160°C / 140° fan and grease and line a 23cm loose-bottomed cake tin, or spray a Bundt tin liberally with cake release spray. 


Put all the ingredients except for the fruit into a large mixing bowl and mix with a hand mixer until well combined.  Fold in the fruit.


Spoon the mixture into the cake tin and level the top.


Bake for about ¾-1¼ hours.  Check after 45 minutes – mine was done in 50 minutes.


Turn the cake out of the tin onto a wire rack to cool and dust with icing sugar.




Cuts into 8-10 good slices.