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.
 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries

It is a strange world indeed when strawberries and blackberries come out at once, and yet last weekend I found myself blackberrying in England in mid-July. I was visiting Tom for the week and we set off Saturday morning, Tupperware in hand, to see if the roadsides of Warwickshire were going to be as obliging as our one, thumb-thick branch at home, a welcome trespasser from next door’s garden (from which all our good plants come; sadly green fingers still elude me). 

 

  We didn’t have to walk far, a spring of faintly bipolar weather, with rainstorms following on from heatwaves, had so badly confused the hedgerows that they were already bowed with ripe and swollen fruit as well as plenty of juicy looking red berries, as a promise of even better foraging not too far in the future. Blackberries amounting to maybe four supermarket punnets, and all for the price of a bit of nettle sting and a few scratches from the brambles!

my lovely hoard from Coventry

my garden's offerings!

It’s been years since I last looked at this poem, or the Sylvia Plath one I borrowed for the title, but my activities over the last few days have dug it out from some dusty Filofax in my memory;

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. The red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet gras bleached our boots. 
Round hayfiends, cornfields and potato drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full 
Until the tinklist bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned 
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. 
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

(Blackberry picking, Seamus Heaney)

Having no byre or bathtub to store my berries in, and definitely not wanting any mould, I gifted my loot to Tom's mum, who's frozen them and promised a pie next time I visit.
I still had plenty (alright, some) left from my own garden to make a few friands though. Or financiers, depending on where in the world you heard of them first.

blackberry...

  Miniature Blackberry Friands

   (adapted from Tartelette)

   Makes about 30 in a mini cupcake pan
   115g butter
  100g caster sugar
  60g ground almonds
  30 plain flour
  ~30 berries

  I'm not home for very long, so I  substituted whole eggs for the usual whites, as I didn't feel like making emergency custard, or throwing out good yolks. I also switched the rice flour, as I don't need to bake gluten free, and obviously subbed fresh berries for Tartelette's jam. 

I love my sister's mini cupcake pans. A bite sized cake with a whole berry nearly filling the middle just explodes with juice between your teeth.

...and raspberry!

 1. Melt 115g of butter in a pan (I use salted and just don't add any more later). Heat until brown flecks appear and the kitchen smells hazelnutty and warm. DO NOT leave this butter browning alone. Keep it compant, otherwise it has the habit of burning as soon as your back is turned.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients, add the eggs, mixing a little after each one. 
3. Add the butter. Only after it has cooled a little though, you do not want to scramble your eggs. Mix.
4. Plop a little mixture into your cases, only filling halfway up. Muffin tops are like, so totally out this summer. Pop a berry into the centre of each one and push down a bit. Archimedes' Law is another good reason not to overfill before you do this. 
5. Bake in 180C for 12-14 mins, but keep an eye on the first batch because these teeny cakes burn in a flash. For 'normal' one, bake 15-20 mins
6. Eat! Delicious warm with the blackberry still hot and jammy, or cool with a cuppa and maybe the smallest bit of thick cream.

Who needs a BlackBerry?