A while ago recipes for something called a hedgerow cake seemed to be turning up everywhere I looked. There were numerous variations of the cake around but most had blackberries in there somewhere and also on the top as decoration.
With friends coming round for a birthday tea and a few of my hedgerow blackberries going spare I decided to make my own version. It's another adaptation of Mary Berry's apple and lemon sandwich cake which you can see here.
When I made this cake before, I filled and topped it with lemon buttercream. This time I filled it with a layer of bramble jelly and whipped cream and decorated it with cream and blackberries just like the hedgerow cakes I saw on Facebook. I later added a light dusting of icing sugar to the top before serving.
This really is a nice sponge cake recipe, very moist with the grated apple in it and hugely adaptable. I love recipes that I can change easily to use what I have in the fridge and can imagine an elderflower and gooseberry version, or apple and raspberry. Lovely.
Ingredients
For the cake
225g each of baking spread, caster sugar and self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 large eggs, beaten
2 eating apples, peeled, cored and grated*
For the filling and decoration
a few tblsp bramble (blackberry) jelly
150ml double cream
a few blackberries
Method
Butter two 20cm sandwich tins and line the bases with baking paper. Preheat the oven to 180C / 160 fan / gas mk 4.
Put all the cake ingredients into a large bowl and beat with an electric hand whisk until well combined. Fold in the grated apple and divide the mixture evenly between the two tins.
Bake for 25-30 minutes until done. Cool in the tins. Turn out and fill with the jam and whipped cream, reserving a little of the cream for piping rosettes on the top of the cake. Place a blackberry onto each rosette. Dust lightly with icing sugar if you like before serving.
Cuts into 8 -10 slices.
*Mary's tip for grating the apple is a good one: Cut the unpeeled apples in half and remove the cores. (I find it easy to do this with a melon baller.) Hold each apple half by the skin to grate it and as you do so you will be left with the skin only in your hand to discard.
I'm a big fan of cakes with apples and, of course, blackberries are always welcome. Lovely. There's been a very good crop of blackberries (well, brambles) around here this year but I seem to have used all of them making crème de mûre (much the same as most years).
ReplyDeleteThis sounds lovely. I love any sort of cake with apples, and as Phil has said, there's been a great crop of blackberries around this year.
ReplyDelete