Mixed Berry Cake

I love using fruit for baking cakes - it gives a wonderfully refreshing taste. Generally I add chopped fruit to the batter, but for this cake I used pureed berries (a lot of them!), and it really helped enhance the flavor as well as add moisture.

This recipe is good for a 9 or 10” round pan, or 2 small (8x4) loaves. I used 1 (8x8) square pan and one little 3” round one for the leftover batter. The cake rises quite a bit so I ended up with fairly tall cakes with a nice crispy crust while the berries helped keep the cake moist.

Ingredients:

3 cups flour (I used 1 cup wheat, 2 cups all purpose flour)

1.5 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

pinch of salt

1-1.5 cups crushed/pureed berries (I used frozen strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries which were completely thawed before pureeing in food processor, leaving some chunks in)

1 cup oil (I used canola)

3 eggs

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease and flour baking pan(s).

Mix all the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs and oil. Add this to the dry ingredients. Add the pureed berries and mix until well combined (don’t over beat - using a spatula would suffice).

Pour the lovely purple batter into prepared baking pans and bake in preheated oven for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on your pan size, oven type etc) until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Let the cake cool completely before removing from pan.

~Gayatri

Note: If you don’t like to bite into the seeds, don't use the raspberries. However, they were quite soft after baking and I didn’t mind them at all.

Star-Spangled Cheesecake

As Gayatri mentioned in the recent Collar Cake post, we had a “Red, White, Blue Food Day” at work. I was not as ambitious or creative (or patient...story of my life...), but I did make a pretty little cheesecake topped with fresh blueberries and raspberries. The no-bake cheesecake recipe can be found in our Cheesecake Bites post. I didn’t really want to make the crust from scratch this time, though, so I used a pre-made 9-inch graham-cracker crust.

After whipping up the cheesecake filling and smoothing it into the crust, I added my red and blue embellishments - blueberries in the shape of a star (in honor of Memorial Day), with red raspberries for accents. The engineer in me needed a plan of action for the fruit design, so I drew up a couple options that I thought I might be able to replicate:

        

However, I severely underestimated the actual size of the berries...they were HUGE! Here’s how the finished product turned out:

Cutting it was a bit of a chore, as I didn’t want to totally destroy the design before people saw it, but I managed! It ended up being a super easy project that turned out super cute...but I might be biased :-)

~Karla