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 9: Key Lime Cake

I was so excited to bake this cake, especially after seeing this picture. A green cake! How cool and interesting! What a talking point! I was sure my kids would love to eat a green cake, too. It seemed so Dr Seussian.

Anyway, yes. The recipe comes from this site, which apparently originally appeared on All Recipes. (verily, it is the Mecca of recipes everywhere) The recipe is reproduced from the Yum Sugar site, not All Recipes.

The Recipe

Ingredients

Here’s the recipe:

1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
1 1/3 cups vegetable oil
4 eggs
1 (3 ounce) package lime flavored gelatin mix
3/4 cup orange juice

1/2 cup butter
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
4 cups confectioners’ sugar

Directions

Combine cake mix, gelatin mix, oil, eggs and orange juice. Pour into three 8-inch cake pans. Bake according to instructions on box. Allow to cool, then frost.
To make the frosting: In a large bowl, beat the butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy. Add lime juice and confectioners sugar. Mix well.

My Alterations

I ran into a snag from the very beginning. On the surface, the recipe seems very simple and easy. It’s basically just a tarted up boxed cake, so it shouldn’t go wrong. Sadly, being in England and all, things went wrong early on. The lemon cake mix was four ounces lighter than what the recipe called for, but I was hopeful. Four ounces isn’t all that much, after all.

I also found it difficult to find powdered lime jell-o. What I ended up with to replace it was this:

A box of brick-like, already gelatin-ized jell-o/jelly:

The only way I could mix that stuff into a cake was by melting it:

I thought I had a genius plan! It was bound to succeed! Alas, no. the jelly didn’t colour the cake batter much at all. I was left with a slightly greenish tinted cake mix, and nothing more. In desperation, I zested a lime into the batter (and we all know how much I hate grating things, right?), which didn’t actually give it a green glow, but made the cake taste more limey. So it wasn’t a total loss, I guess.

Also, in my rush through the grocery store this morning to buy ingredients, I grabbed a box of orange juice drink rather than pure orange juice. Dangit! The cake would have been much more tangy if I had used the real stuff, but by the time I noticed my mistake it was too late.

The Results

Although these set backs were a disappointment, I really regret trying to make the icing. Firstly, the recipe amounts were ridiculously huge given the size of the cake. I ended up with a coffee cup full of left over icing. Also, FOUR CUPS of confectioner’s sugar? Really? I used about two cups and started gagging at the sweetness of it. I couldn’t bring myself to use any more sugar, and that meant that the icing was more of a thick glaze than a creamy icing. If you want to make icing for this cake, I highly recommend halving the recipe amounts and going for a glaze. The appeal of this cake is it’s limey tartness, and too much sugar just saps that right out of it.

The cake itself was very moist and a bit chewy. It was very easy to whip up, given the right ingredients!

The Verdict

This recipe was difficult to make correctly because of my problems with finding the right ingredients over here. I used my usual method of ‘make do and see what happens’, but when aiming to make such a dramatic cake, a sub-par version is a disappointment. It has a good taste, but I would have preferred a stronger lime flavour. Perhaps the recipe could be improved by using actual lime juice in the mix and reducing the amount of orange juice.

I would probably forgo the icing altogether, or just make a simple glaze from confectioners sugar and lime juice, with none of the butter or cream cheese. I don’t like my cakes to be overpowered by the icing, and this icing tasted too strong to me.

If I had the correct ingredients, I would definitely attempt this cake again. I wanted a green cake, dern it!

The Rating

3/5

I admit, my rating is slightly biased because of the lack of greenness in my cake. Simple pleasures, simple disappointments, I guess! The cake didn’t taste limey enough to me, but I think that the recipe could be very easily altered to improve that.

Not bad, but not the best.

Point of Interest: I gave half this cake to a friend, and her kids demolished it. My kids enjoyed it as well, so that is a point in its favour!