Recipes

BACK TO NATURE: PICKING BLACKBERRIES AND THEN BAKING A CAKE

by Marion Pauw

Baking has a calming effect on me. When I'm really stressed, there's nothing I enjoy more than kneading dough, separating eggs, and weighing ingredients. I've often wondered where this strange tic came from, until I returned to Tasmania after many years, the island where I was born and raised. And there it was immediately clear: everyone bakes there. Everyone. As a woman, you are not considered fully grown if you don't bake yourself into a frenzy. Wherever I went, there was always something in the oven, or something just out of the oven, or something about to go into the oven. Mystery solved. My baking fixation simply originated in the phallic stage! (according to Freud). One of my favorite Tasmanian classics is blackberry sponge pudding. You eat this blackberry cake warm from the oven with ice cream and whipped cream. After we moved back to the Netherlands, my mother made this dessert for my birthday (in August) for many years, using blackberries picked by the whole family.

And picking blackberries is also very zen. Now, this year is not the most wonderful year for blackberries due to the many rains and lack of sun, but you can still find them here and there. Good spots are along forest edges, but also in parks, along ditches, and in the roadside. I would just avoid eating low-hanging blackberries from areas where many dogs are walked, duh, and blackberries along busy roads are also not a good idea. Other tips: place them at home in a large bowl of water so that twigs, leaves, and any bugs (it's still a natural product, you know) are removed. And if you can't use them right away, freeze them, as they are only good for a maximum of two days.

Are you ready? Here we go!

For the blackberry compote:

300 grams of blackberries

2 apples

50 grams of sugar

For the cake batter:

125 g butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

100 grams of white caster sugar

2 eggs

125 grams of self-raising flour

2 tbsp milk

Serve with:

200 ml cream

2 tbsp sugar

bowl of vanilla ice cream

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees. Peel the apples, remove the cores, and cut them into wedges. Place them in a saucepan along with the blackberries and sugar. Bring to a boil and let simmer over medium heat until the apples are soft. Meanwhile, make the cake batter. First, beat the butter, vanilla sugar, and sugar until a pale mixture forms. Beat in the eggs one by one. Then add the milk.

Grease a shallow baking dish. First pour in the hot blackberry compote and then top it with the cake batter. Place it in the oven and bake for 40 minutes or until the cake batter is cooked and feels spongy.

Serve directly from the oven with ice cream and whipped cream.