Friday 6 July 2012

Blackberry and Apple Loaf Cake

For my second recipe challenge from Jo's book "A Passion for Baking" I picked at random the Blackberry and Apple Loaf Cake from page 60.

This was not something that I would usually choose to bake, I'm not overly keen on Apples in recipes but I wanted to give it a try. The recipe is basically a sponge cake with apples and blackberries stirred in with a crumble topping. I used braeburn apples as this is what the local supermarket had. I also used low fat spread instead of butter again to try and reduce some of the negative effects of all this cooking.. not sure I'm going to be successful with that. My husband has suggested that we have a graph of his weight on the side of the blog but I'm just enjoying baking! We need to find some willing eating and maybe marking volunteers... any offers??

So like the last recipe, I found this very easy to bake it to prepare the mixture took around 20 mins. Firstly you make the crumble topping, now I followed the quantities exactly on this but mine didn't come out like a crumble at all. It was much too moist and too much spread. Maybe the low fat spread weighs less than butter and we need to reduce the quantities... I'll have to look into that. Anyway, I left it as it was to see what happened. 

The crumble topping, not really crumbley but the basics were there!!
Next step I prepared the apples by peeling and dicing them and weighed out the blackberries. Before making the cake mixture. It was an easy all in one recipe where you add it all together and then just whisk it up. It came out lovely and light and airy, I was very pleased with this and tasted good raw too. My husband thinks I'm crazy eating the cake mixture before it's cooked but I love the taste, almost more than the cooked cake its self!! 

Once everything was prepared you fold the apples and blackberries into the mixture and place the whole thing in a loaf tin and top it with the crumble mixture. 

Everything's ready to be mixture together

Placed in the loaf tin but not much room for rising!!

I was worried that the mixture was going to come out the loaf tin as this is what it looked like after around 20mins. 

The cake trying to escape from the tin

The loaf took around 2 hours to cook which is much longer than the recipe states and also we would say that it's still undercooked even after all this time.  

The cake is cooked
The finished cake turned out






















The book states the cake is "always going to be a winner" for Jo. I'm not sure this is the case for me. The cake was very moist inside and probably could have done with cooking even longer. The crumble topping didn't really add anything from what I could gather and my cake didn't really look like the photo in the book. My husband also adds that the ratio of blackberries seemed very low and we'd probably want to add at least double the number. So far we haven't found any in the cake.

So for marks.. I give the cake 5/10, I felt that it tasted quite plain and also didn't really work with the instructions. Gary gives the cake 5/10 but this is partly due to the cooking and it not quite coming out to plan. So in total we only gave the Blackberry and Apple Loaf Cake 10/20.. quite a low score. Not our favourite... but we have a long way to go.

For next time I picked out the tart on p203 as my recipe. Antipasti and Goats' Cheese Tart, something a bit more savoury and a bit different. Bring on the next challenge.

1 comment:

  1. If you need someone to taste things for you, I'm very happy to offer my services. :)

    ReplyDelete