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Ingredients:
Cake
150ml light beer or lager
175g dark muscovado sugar
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
200g self-raising flour
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 large eggs
100g golden caster sugar
125ml sunflower oil
icing sugar and red/pink food colouring to decorate
Rhubarb fool
500g young rhubarb, trimmed and sliced
1 tablespoon elderflower syrup
60g golden caster sugar
225ml whipping cream
Makes 6 squares
Place the beer and 125g of the muscovado sugar in a small saucepan and slowly bring to the boil, working out any lumps in the sugar with the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and stir in the bicarbonate of soda. Leave to cool for about 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 160C fan /180C/gas mark 4, and butter and line a
23 x 30 x 4cm traybake tin. Sift the flour and ginger into a bowl. Whisk together the eggs, remaining muscovado
sugar, caster sugar and oil, then slowly add this to the flour, stirring. Add the beer mixture in two goes, gently mixing it in. Tip into the prepared tin and bake for 25-30 minutes or until just firm to touch. Run a knife around the edge of the cake and cool in the tin for 30 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool,
top surface uppermost. Peel off the paper when cold.
To make the fool, place the rhubarb in a pan with the elderflower syrup and sugar and bring slowly to the boil, then cover and cook over a low
heat for 8-10 minutes until just tender, stirring halfway through. Drain the rhubarb into a sieve and leave to cool over the pan. Whip the cream until stiff, then fold in the cooled
rhubarb.
If the cake has risen unevenly, trim the bottom a little to even it. Slit the cake half widthways, spread the fool over one half, then sandwich with the other. Cut into 6 squares, each about 7cm. The filled squares are best eaten the day they are made, but the cake itself can be made several days in advance and will stand in as a stock recipe without the fool.
To decorate cut out a heart shape from a 7cm square of card. Whizz 1
tablespoon of icing sugar with a few drops of pink or red food
colouring in a coffee grinder and use a tea strainer to sift the
sugar through the heart template.
Taken from Gorgeous Cakes by Annie Bell, published by Kyle Cathie Ltd., £14.99 ISBN 1-85626-614-1
www.kylecathie.co.uk
Picture by Chris Alack.
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