Day 24: Georgia’s Tennessee Jam Cake

I belong to a local operatic society, and they have little raffles on rehearsal nights, during tea breaks. I decided to make this cake, and make it into little fairy cakes to sell at the raffle. I really should have halved the recipe (will I ever learn?) because I ended up with a LOT of cakes. Again.

Recipe from Allrecipes.com.

The Recipe

225 g butter, softened

400 g white sugar

8 eggs

9 g baking soda

30 ml water

680 g seedless blackberry jam

440 g all-purpose flour

3 g ground cloves

6 g ground nutmeg

7 g ground cinnamon

6 g salt

235 ml buttermilk

125 g chopped black walnuts

(optional)

80 g golden raisins (optional)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease three 8 or 9 inch round cake pans and set aside.

In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing until each one is blended in. Dissolve the baking soda in the water; stir into the batter along with the blackberry jam. Combine the flour, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt; stir into the batter by hand, alternating with the buttermilk. Fold in the black walnuts and raisins if using. Divide the batter equally between the three pans, and spread in an even layer.

Bake in the preheated oven until the top of the cakes spring back when lightly touched, about 35 minutes. Cool in the pans until cool enough to handle, then invert the cakes over a wire rack and remove pans to cool completely.

My Alterations

I tried to follow this recipe as closely as possible, but I couldn’t find blackberry jam. What I ended up buying was a 454g jar of bramble jelly. Which, as it turns out, is the same thing. Who knew!

I didn’t measure out the jam; I just emptied the entire jar into the cake mix, hoping it would be enough.

I didn’t add the optional walnuts or raisins, but I did throw in about 1/4 cup of sliced almonds and added a few on the top of the cakes for decoration.

The Result

The jam was quite difficult to mix into the batter by hand, so I ended up using my electric mixer. Even then, the batter was really thin and I was worried about over-mixing it, because the little chunks of jelly weren’t mixing into the batter very easily.

I’ve really grown to like using grease-proof paper (baking parchment) with my cakes. The cakes are very easy to pop out of the pan, and the paper always peels off with no problems. I also have a problem of having excess flour on the cake when I butter and flour the pan. It’s not very attractive, and who wants to bite into burnt flour? Baking parchment doesn’t give you that problem.

It also makes it easier for me to over-fill a cake tin and not worry about the batter overflowing in the oven. I did that with this cake:

The batter was level with the top of the pan, but the batter didn’t spill in the oven. Fab! I ended up with a gloriously tall cake, with a fancy almond pattern on top.

The Verdict

The fairy cakes turned out better than the big cake, I thought. This cake is very rich and dense, and is a bit too much as a large slice. The small cakes were just enough to be enjoyable, but the large slice is hard to finish.

Overall, this cake has a great flavour and was easy enough to bake aside from jam mixing issues.

The Rating

3/5

I definitely prefer this cake as little fairy cakes rather than one big cake. It doesn’t need any frosting, which is always a plus in my book. It has a deep, rich brown colour when baked, which is very attractive.

Not bad, but not my favourite.

Day 21: Triple Ginger Cake with Lemon Glaze

My husband is a big fan of ginger, so I made this cake with him in mind. Recipe from iVillage.com, and is copyrighted, so cannot be reproduced here unfortunately!

The Recipe

The key points of this recipe is that it contains a lot of ginger. A lot. Ground ginger, fresh ginger, crystallised ginger and ginger liqueur. I was dubious.

My Alterations

I ran into a few problems with this recipe, firstly because I couldn’t get molasses. Actually, I could get treacle, which is the same as molasses, but I forgot about it until it was too late. I ended up using extra dark brown sugar (instead of the light brown sugar I was going to use) and substituted the molasses/treacle for golden syrup. Corn syrup is a good substitute for golden syrup, if you can’t get it.

Crystallised ginger isn’t readily available in my local grocery store, or if it is, I don’t know where, so I replaced it with a jar of Chinese stem ginger in syrup. The advantage of this was that I could use the ginger syrup in place of the ginger liqueur in the glaze.

The Result

The cake was relatively easy to put together, but there was a lot of prep work. I had to grate the fresh ginger myself, and chop up quite a lot of syrupy ginger pieces for the cake. Otherwise, it was fine.

The cake came out a lovely dark golden/brown colour. It smelled great while baking, and even though I was afraid that there would be a ginger explosion in my mouth when I tasted it, I looked forward to trying it out.

I decided to make the glaze for the cake this time, because I figured the lemon juice in the recipe would cut the ginger a bit.

The Verdict

Surprisingly, the ginger taste wasn’t as strong as I expected. It was a very gingery cake, but pleasantly so and not burningly so! This is a really good cake, and aside from the prep work, is very easy to put together. I was pleased with the results.

The glaze is worth making, because the lemon flavouring really compliments the ginger.

The Rating

5/5

If you are a fan of ginger, this is definitely a cake you should try. Even if you aren’t a big fan, it’s worth giving it a try, because you might be surprised. I can take or leave ginger biscuits or cake, but I really liked this. The cake was moist and rich; it would make a great winter cake, I think.