Blackberry-Ginger-Almond-Lemon Cake (or, why I took food to a food festival)

I blooming love blackberries, but I've always known them as a fleeting autumn treat, to be carefully predicted in order to perfectly time a trip down the road to the blackberry bushes. For years these lined an increasingly dark and overgrown cycle path near my house that I was absolutely forbidden to walk along at night in case 'strange men' were about. 
Well, my mother will be delighted to know that from this year, I have no reason to ever again tread the leaf littered walkway between brambles and wild garlic. The bushes have resolutely refused to blossom, and no blossom means no berries. Turns out eight foot high brambles need plenty of sunlight, and these are so dense they've been starving themselves out all summer. 
So it looked like me and blackberrying was destined to take a bit of a break in our annually renewed love affair. Until...
(If you've been reading back, you'll already know the plot twist I'm about to hit you with!)  
...Surprise! A beautiful fat branch from next door invading my garden to snag at my clothes, stain the towel on the washing line with fat drops of juice like blood and, most importantly, provide me with berries all summer. 
Not enough for a crumble, mind (although I did manage that once). Just a dozen or so at a time, too tantalising to freeze for later, but too few for anything I knew and loved from my years of filling plastic bags with the little beggars. So the 'what do I have in my cupboards' cake was born.

Blackberry-Ginger-Almond- Lemon Cake 

(all the quantities here are from the 'magic weight' method I described in all its simplistic glory here. This is a two egg magic cake)

1. Cream butter and sugar until soft, pale and fluffy.
2. Don't eat it with your fingers.
3. Add 2 eggs, beat like the devil between each one. Add a capful of almond essence.
4. Add the magic weight of flour. Don't beat.
5. Grate two pieces of crystallised ginger onto the flour, tossing it slightly to coat every so often so it doesn't stick in a lump. That would negate grating it from the big lump it was in before. 
6. Zest half a lemon, and plonk that on top of the flour. 
7. Mix it up to make it nice. (Pop goes the weasel). 
8. Kick yourself for not preheating the oven, then do it. 190 degrees seems to work nicely for me. 
9.Stir the blackberries into the cake mix. Give it a bit of welly so they break up a little and bits of the mixture goes pretty in purple. 
10. Line a baking tin with greaseproof paper. Here's the tricky bit. You know that rectangular baking tin? We're going to line it so that the paper folds up to make a wall partway across to make a square and a spare strip. 
11. Pour the mix into the square. Fill the spare strip with baking beans, rice, chickpeas, whatever you use. Just make sure it's baking beans, not baked beans. 
12. Bake for 40 mins, see if its done. If not, you know what to do. 


This tastes special to me, and unlike any cake I make on a regular basis. It has a rounded, full flavour from the almond, and a zing from the ginger that you can't quite place. I think any more would make this a proper ginger flavoured cake, and that's not what I was after. The lemon is sly, but lightens the spicy ginger and perks up the almond. The blackberries are a burst of sweetness between the teeth. Ginger and blackberry is a flavour I haven't had before, but it's a real winner.

Delicious yoghurt, shameful (freebie)second helping!

I was so proud of this, I took it to the Bristol Organic Food Festival for my discerning little sister to try. Accompanied by a basketful of strawberries and a mountain of festival free samples, we munched our way through a terrible lecture on sustainable fishing (I can't call it a cookery demo, they never got round to cooking anything), a potential Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sighting and a brilliant day out, ended by taking a groaning carrier full of goodies back to Cardiff.