Raspberry & Lemon Sponge Cake

I got my baking on this past Easter Sunday.  Honestly, baking is my favourite kitchen pastime!  There is something about the measuring, mixing and pouring that I find completely soothing and relaxing.

Plus, once everything is tidied up, I get to sample some sweet stuff and satisfy my voracious sweet tooth.  I know, I know, sugar is bad for you.  But I've given up many vices in my life, I'm hanging onto this one for dear life!

I received a request for an upside down raspberry sponge cake for Easter dessert.  I had never made one and after scouring the internet and perusing my cookbooks, the best one I found was this recipe from Food and Wine.  I say best one, as it didn't require any softened butter (which I forgot to take out the night before).  And I was working on some hand quilting and didn't want to stray from that for too long (priorities right?!).

 

The beauty of this recipe is that it comes together really quickly!

After gathering all my ingredients, preheating my oven and greasing and flouring my cake pan, it was really just a matter of combining the ingredients in 3 different steps.

The first was to combine all the dry ingredients.  My best tip here is to mix everything with a wire whisk – works just a great as sifting everything together.

Next up was combining all the liquids.  I deviated from the original recipe a little at this stage.  I was happily squeezing my lemon away, thinking the recipe called for the juice of 1 lemon, when I realized it only called for 2 tablespoons. So I probably added about 3 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice rather than the required 2 tablespoons. No harm done to the final outcome!

Once I had those two steps complete, I moved onto the main event of mixing the sugar, lemon zest and eggs (one at a time) with a hand mixer.

Once all 4 eggs were incorporated, I kept mixing everything for a few minutes until the mixture was a nice pale yellow and slightly thickened.

Then it was just a matter of adding a third of the dry ingredients, alternating with the wet, mixing until just combined.

Once everything was smooth, I poured the batter into my prepared cake pan and sprinkled the top with fresh raspberries. The original recipe called for individually frozen raspberries, but I had fresh on hand.  I figured fresh couldn't hurt ;)

The largest cake pan I have is 9", so the cake rose a little over the top of the sides and needed an additional 10 minutes of baking to ensure the centre was set.

I also opted to add a lemon glaze, which consisted of mixing the juice of 1 lemon with 1 cup of icing sugar. I heated it on low heat so that it would sink into the warm cake and add a little more moisture and provide an extra hit of lemon zing.

Since most of the members of my family are not big on sweets, I always take it as a great sign when I get a “ohhh that’s really good, Shanny” kind of response!

The long weekend was awesome for catching up on my quilting projects, including the Charity quilt that I just need to finish binding, and spending time with family.

I hope you had a wonderful Easter celebration with your loved ones!  And please share any go-to Easter dessert recipes you love – I'm always on the hunt for more ;)

xo

Shannon

_________________________________________________________________________

Never miss a post - sign up for the weekly newsletter.