Raspberry Ripple - A Cake for Special Occasions

I love making cakes for special occasions. With a bit of planning, producing something homemade and serving it up for those special people in your life, nothing really compares!

My first step is deciding on flavour, followed by size (one large sponge or two sponges with a middle filling) and shape (round, square or special).

I'm personally not a cake decorator in any shape or form so any decoration tends to be the last thing I focus on, and it always tends to be simple with as little buttercream as possible (unless it's salted caramel!).

Here's my delicious Raspberry Ripple cake recipe, which is pretty simple to make.

For this cake you will need two 20cm round cake tins, lined.

Pre-heat your oven to 170ºC Fan.

Ingredients:

For the Raspberry Ripple Jam:

360g Fresh Raspberries

150g White Caster Sugar

Juice of 1/2 Lemon

For the Sponge:

250g Self-Raising Flour

250g Golden Caster Sugar

1/2 Tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

250g Butter (softened)

4 Large Eggs

3 Tbsp Whole Milk

1/2 Tsp Vanilla

3 Tbsp Raspberry Ripple Jam

For the Buttercream:

165g Butter (softened)

195g Icing Sugar

1 Tbsp Whole Milk

5 Tbsp Raspberry Ripple Jam

For Decorating:

150ml Double Cream (whipped)

2 Tbsp Raspberry Ripple Jam

Extra Raspberries

How I make my Raspberry Ripple Cake:

1. First, make the Raspberry Ripple Jam by combining the raspberries, caster sugar and lemon in a small pan and slowly bringing to the boil over a low heat. Mash the raspberries while this happens. Once the mixture reaches boiling, take off the heat and sieve into a bowl. This removes the seeds, which you can discard. I placed my bowl of jam in the fridge to thicken while cooling.

2. Then, make the sponge. Mix together the flour, sugar, bicarbonate and butter into a batter. Add the eggs and mix until fully incorporated.

3. Mix together the milk and vanilla, then add to the batter slowly and until just incorporated. Then add the raspberry jam and simply ripple this through the mixture - no need to fully incorporate.

4. Divide the mixture equally into two 20cm cake tins (which you should have already lined) and bake at 170ºC Fan for c.25-28 minutes, depending on your oven.

5. Remove from the oven and leave in the tins to cool for 15 minutes, then turn out carefully onto a cooling rack if you have one.

6. Then it's time to make the filling - buttercream and cream. For the buttercream, first get your butter to a soft, silky texture with your hand mixture before adding half the icing sugar. Then add the rest of the icing sugar, followed by the milk. Stir in the raspberry jam by hand so it ripples the buttercream. Set aside.

7. Then whip your double cream with the raspberry jam until it has a thick consistency.

8. It's now time to ice and decorate. For me, there are no hard rules for this - I simply go with what I like. For this cake I covered the bottom cake sponge with a layer of buttercream and then piped the cream along the edge of the sponge (creating a dam) and then spooned some of the jam in the middle of the cake, adding raspberries. You need to get this layer even so that you can place the second sponge on top.

I then covered the cake in the rest of the buttercream, and used a scraper to create a 'naked' design (mainly because I don't like a huge amount of buttercream. I then piped the rest of the cream on top and added more raspberries to finish off the cake.

9. Goes really well with Prosecco and tea!