Food

A family favourite cake, piled high with the best of berries

Kitchen Cabinet: Use a mixture of berries for Alix Gardener’s sponge cake and cream

Use a mix of berries, and some edible flowers, to decorate your cake. Photograph: Richard Johnston

Alix Gardiner
Tue Jul 7 2020 - 07:00

This is a really easy family favourite for all occasions, with only six ingredients. In summer, when fruit is easily available, you can go to town with the decoration.

I remember my mother making cakes like this after we returned from foraging around Lismore. Back then we would find wild strawberries and raspberries, and a special treat were mulberries from the tree at the Cashel Palace hotel.

I love spending as much of the summer as I can in Wexford, and my family's delight is a cake piled with fruit from Green's Berry Farm in Gorey or Malone's Fruit Farm in Ballon. Sometimes we'd find really delicious loganberries or tayberries.

Alix Gardner runs Alix Gardner's Cookery School in Dublin 4

Alix Gardner’s sponge cake with cream

SPONGE CAKE AND CREAM

Makes one
Ingredients
3 eggs
90g sugar
90g self-raising flour
250ml cream
1 punnet strawberries or raspberries
2 tbsp raspberry or strawberry jam
To decorate: Icing sugar and extra fruit and edible flowers such as nasturtiums, roses, daisies, pansies, but don't use flowers that have been sprayed.

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Method
1 Prepare a 20cm/ 7½ inch tin and pre-heat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

2 Whisk eggs and sugar together until thick, and you can write a W on top with the whisk or electric whisk.

3 Carefully sieve in the flour, and then with a large metal spoon (not a wooden on) fold it in as quickly and lightly as possible.

4 Pout into the greased and lined cake tin and put the cake straight into the oven.

5 Do not be tempted to open the door to check it for at least 20 minutes.

6 Once cooked, when you touch the top of the cake it should spring back. Leave it to cool in the tin.

7 Remove from tin, cut in half horizontally, spread with jam, not too much or it will be too sweet, and top with whipped cream and sliced strawberries. Place the top lid on and dust with sifted icing sugar.

8 The cake can be decorated with fresh berries or rosettes of cream, or for a special occasion cover the top and sides with more whipped cream, and then heap it with fruit and edible flowers.

Kitchen Cabinet is a series of recipes from chefs who are members of Euro-Toques Ireland, who have come together during the coronavirus outbreak to share some of the easy, tasty things that they like to cook and eat at home #ChefsAtHome

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