GOOSEBERRY AND ORANGE DRIZZLE CAKE*

Our gooseberry bush in France is doing well but was a bit slow to get going this year owing to the peculiar weather.  When I braved the thorns to pick the first gooseberries there were not quite enough to make into a crumble.  

With little more than a handful of gooseberries to use my thoughts turned to cake and I remembered seeing a recipe for gooseberry and orange cake somewhere.  Having looked it up I decided that it was really a lemon drizzle cake, made with orange not lemon, and with a few gooseberries added.  So that's what I did.

I used a BBC Good Food recipe which you can see here. It was simple to make using the "all in one" method for cakes, just stirring in the gooseberries at the end of the beating.  It was lovely and we ate it for dessert outdoors on a disappointingly dull summer's day.  The weather in France this year has been rather English (although I hear that the actual English weather has been even worse than usual).  It seemed fitting that with the English weather we should have a traditional cheese and bacon quiche (my mum would have called it a flan) served with what I call English salad - lettuce, tomato and cucumber (with a small tin of sweetcorn sprinkled over for added crunch and interest) followed by a gooseberry cake.

There seemed to be a lot of mixture so rather than overfill the tin I made a few little buns.

They were done in about 20 minutes.

Ingredients

For the cake

225g each of :

    self raising flour 

    caster sugar 

    softened butter or baking spread (I used something called Le Fleurier which is a spread   containing  butter and various oils but no palm oil)

4 eggs

3/4 tsp baking powder (this is not in the GF recipe but when using French self raising flour I usually add a little baking powder as without it the rise is sometimes disappointing.)

zest of 1 large orange

a handful or two of gooseberries, rinsed, topped and tailed

For the topping/drizzle

most of the juice of the orange

2 tblsp granulated sugar

Method

Put a long strip of baking paper along the inside of a 2lb, 900g loaf tin then put a paper liner on top.  (The strip helps to lift the cake out of the tin before it has completely cooled and is still quite fragile.)  Preheat the oven to 180C / 160 fan / gas mk 4.  

Put all the cake ingredients except for the fruit into a large mixing bowl and beat until smooth with a hand held electric whisk.  (Or use a wooden spoon and keep beating until smooth.)

Stir in the gooseberries and spoon into the tin.  Bake for 40-45 minutes until golden brown and done.

(This recipe produced a lot of mixture so rather than overfill the tin I used it for a few buns.  They went into the oven when the cake came out and were done in 20 minutes.)

Poke a few holes in the top with a skewer, toothpick or cake tester.

To make the drizzle, mix the sugar with the orange juice and pour over the cake while it is still warm.

After 10 minutes lift the cake out of the tin using the paper strips (still in its liner) and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.

Cuts into 10-12 slices.

*Eagle eyed readers may realise that this is different from the first time I posted this recipe.  The essential difference is that the new version uses a larger quantity of all the ingredients but the end results would be the same.