Lemon and raspberry occasion cake

Cherry and hawthorn blossom adorn the cake

Sometimes you make an occasion cake, that has to look good, as well as taste good. I think I hit the mark with this one.

The cake is a basic sponge with equal weight of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, in this case four eggs set the weight. You can average an egg as 60g, so work that out if you like. The cooked cakes are cut in half and there are three layers of filling, each one had lemon curd, overlaid with cream and the cake above had raspberry jam. Someone said it was too tall, and it did have four layers, but then it was for an occasion.To stop the cream squirting out the side I laid raspberries to hold it in. Really, when all the layers were stacked up the whole looked a bit wobbly. A good ganache coating covers a lot of sins and that's what this cake got, white chocolate ganache.

I used a palate knife dipped into boiling water and dried, which makes it easy to move the ganache around, spread it where it needs to go. I can do piping but I don't enjoy it, and I think you end up with too much icing. So I go for a nice slather, and then in this case I draped spring flowers across it, bird cherry and pink hawthorn, both of which are edible if you wanted to eat them. The main thing is that they aren't toxic, and they look lovely.

Around the top of the cake I sprinkled lemon zest and freeze dried raspberry and added fresh raspberries around the base and dusted the lot with icing sugar.

 

red fruit coulis - no sugar added

Coulis, is a jewel coloured fruit tang that adds a lot to desserts. Fancy chefs scribble on the plate with it, and sit chocolate mousses, cakes and more on top. It's a lovely supplement to a fruit salad, it's the ripple in the raspberry ripple, and it's a way to keep the flavour of red soft fruit without having the depressing sight of it turning into mush: it's mush with attitude.

On Sunday it worked brilliantly alongside Kitty's creme brulee (NB the creme brulee that was pronounced by a grateful cousin as the best he'd ever tasted). The coulis was made of thawed frozen fruit (500g bag of raspberries, redcurrants, blackberries and ... more). Instead of sugar I used 12 dates, soaked for a few hours in water (straight from the kettle, boiling water). The fruit was blended with the dates, along with the water and and the mixture was passed through a sieve to get rid of all those little pips that get stuck in your teeth, and in between your teeth. The result was a rich red, full bodied, flavoursome coulis, that will go very well with the meringues being made at the moment, from all the leftover egg whites. Sugar is used in the meringue, not dates. If your coulis is too thick, go mad, and add some more water.

Left over coulis can be frozen in ice cube trays and decanted into plastic bags. Unthickened coulis would top a cheesecake, a merveille.