REDCURRANT, ROSE AND RASPBERRY BUNDT CAKE

Bundt cakes, or rather, the tins you make them in, fascinate me.  You can get Bundt tins in such an enormous variety of shapes and designs that virtually anything is possible when it comes to fancy cakes.  If you want to make a cake shaped like a steam train, or a Christmas tree, there is a Bundt tin for it.  No longer is it necessary to carve up cakes and glue them back together in the shape you want.

The thing that has always puzzled me is what recipe to use.  I wondered if you could bake any recipe in a Bundt tin and it would turn out right.  I suspect not.  Then I stumbled upon a blog called Dolly Bakes written by Rachel, who makes all kinds and flavours of Bundt cakes and gives a basic, completely adaptable recipe that she says works every time.

It certainly worked for me when I was deciding what to do with the few redcurrants I had left over from making jam, jelly and relish.

I use a recipe from Delia online for redcurrant jelly, which is incredibly quick and easy and works really well.  You can see it here.

I had so many redcurrants this year that I decided to branch out and make strawberry and redcurrant jam.  It’s a recipe I had not tried before but the jam is delicious.  You can see the recipe here.

I used just a few redcurrants for this relish which is absolutely gorgeous.  There are still some redcurrants to ripen on the bush and with those I think I will make some more of this.  You can see the recipe here.

So that just left a handful of redcurrants from my harvest so I decided to mix them with strawberries and make a cake.  Then I noticed that I had used all the strawberries so I used a few raspberries instead!

 

I used a traditional Gugelhupf cake silicone mould that I got recently and very reasonably from Sarah at Silicone Moulds.  I still feel slightly nervous about using silicone.  Putting cake mixture into something so wobbly and then into a hot oven just somehow seems wrong!  But it worked perfectly.  I expect that sooner or later I will get used to silicone and learn to trust it!

I greased and floured the mould and the cake turned out fine with hardly a crumb left behind stuck to the mould.  But the shape was not as I expected.  The finished cake was not the dome shape of the mould but flatter.  I suppose logically this makes sense.  If you put that amount of cake mixture into a flexible object the weight of it is bound to make it sag or flatten.  I don’t know if there is a way round this, but the cake looked nice anyway.

In fact, not only did it look nice, it tasted lovely.  Here’s the link to the recipe on Rachel’s blog:

http://www.dollybakes.co.uk/2012/10/BuildaBundt28.html

I followed the recipe exactly except for the following adaptations:

I substituted strawberry yoghurt for the plain yoghurt

I substituted 2tsp rose water for the 1tsp vanilla

I added 100g of mixed raspberries and redcurrants.

The cake was huge, cut easily into thick slices and had a lovely crumb.  It would be great for a party, special event or cake stall as it looks so good and would probably serve 20 people.  It was still perfect three days later when we had the last slice made into a raspberry trifle.  So a great big “thank you” to Rachel for a great recipe that I shall no doubt be using over and over again.

As I used my few remaining redcurrants and a handful of slightly tired raspberries I am entering this cake into Kate of Turquoise Lemons “no waste” food challenge, currently hosted by Elizabeth of Elizabeth’s Kitchen Diary.  You can see the details here.

Also, because it is full of the tastes of summer, I am also linking it to Rachel’s own Calendar Cakes challenge on her blog Dolly Bakes.  You can see the details here.