Saturday Entertainment – Baking a Cake!

I was craving for something sweet, but homemade and at the same time didn’t want to engage in too much work – I hate cooking when the recipe involves using hundreds of pans that have to be scraped afterwards… So the decision was made – it would have to be a cake that could be prepared very quickly. Do you know what cakes are prepared quickly? Usually the ones where one of the ingredients is jam!

I searched for inspiration in a book called “Cakes. 1001 Classical Recipes from Around the World” (if you ask me 1001 is far too many as I doubt that I will ever try all of them… as most of the time I get stuck with the recipes that I like and keep using them again and again…) and found what I was looking for.

Italian Shortcrust Cake with Jam

Ingredients

375g flour
1 tea spoon of baking powder
¼ tea spoon salt
70g melted butter
125g fine sugar
2 room temperature eggs
1 tea spoon vanilla sugar
250g jam

Preheat your oven to 180 C. Mix up flour, salt and baking powder. Use a food processor to whisk the butter and sugar well (use medium speed for stirring until the sugar melts and you get an even liquid). Then add an egg at a time whisking everything well again. After that start slowly adding your flour, salt and baking powder mix.

Place your dough on the bottom and sides of a baking tray (they recommend to use one with a 25cm diameter, but I guess it really doesn’t matter as long as you don’t decide to use a tray that would be too big for the amount of dough you have). Put jam on top of the dough and bake your cake for about 30-40 minutes, until it gets light brown. Let it cool after taking it out of the oven.

I added a finely sliced fresh apple and raspberry jam to mine, but the beauty of this cake is that you can use anything you want as your filling. So use your imagination. Off you go… and bake!