I bought some frozen raspberries on Thursday, delighted that the ‘boil notices’ were no longer in evidence. Then I got home and the Irish Examiner informed me that we still need to boil frozen berries prior to consumption in order to avoid contraction of Hepatitis A.
I moaned on Twitter about it (as I’m wont to do!) and @wholesomeIE made the valid point that if you cook or bake with them, the process kills any bacteria. So, rather than smoothies, I decided to make a cake.
“Let them eat cake,” I laughed to my girls – prompting a conversation about the French Revolution and the tricoteuse (not least because the idea came to me as I sat knitting).
I still had some apples from the bag I got from Susie the other day, so decided to pop them in the cake as well.
The picture below is of the uncooked cake. I haven’t uploaded a picture of the finished product yet, but will rectify that omission later!
Raspberry & Apple Sponge Cake
300g Frozen Berries
3 Small Cooking Apples
5 Small Eggs
200g of Sugar
200g of Butter
200g of Flour
2 Tablespoons of Dessicated Coconut
Line an ovenproof dish – I used a 29cm x 20cm Pyrex dish and had just enough cake batter to fill it.
Preheat a fan oven to 180 degrees.
Peel and core the apples.
Cream together the sugar and butter.
Add the eggs, one at a time, adding a tablespoon of Flour after each egg, to avoid curdling.
Add the rest of the flour and mix until you have a thick batter.
Pour half of the batter into the prepared dish.
Scatter the raspberries evenly over the batter.
Spread the rest of batter over the top of the raspberries.
Slice the apples and arrange them evenly on the top of the batter.
Scatter the coconut over the top of the apples.
Top with a sprinkling of sugar (I used grated jaggery, just because I had some and Ishthara, my eldest daughter, loves it).
Pop the dish in the preheated oven and bake for 50 minutes.
The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean.
