Last week I shared my favourite recipe for a simple strawberry jam. This week I’ve a great way to use up some (but not all) of the jam in a strawberry cream cake.

I took a wee break from blogging over the weekend to overhaul the back-end of the blog. You may have noticed there are a lot more categories in the menu at the top of each page. This means you can now browse through the blog by the type of recipe you’re looking for. I’ve divided recipes up by meals and then by the main protein. This took many, many hours and I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t done it sooner. When I started off this blog I thought that just “sweet, savoury and reviews” would be easy enough to navigate. Nearly 350 blogposts later I admit I was wrong and that as time went on it was harder to find the recipes to share or to browse through the blog.

As there are some more big changes to come to the blog in the next month or so, it was really important to get the foundations right!

Back to the strawberry cream cake.

I think that when you put butter into a cake, it doesn’t match particularly well with cream. Which is why I like to bake a no-fat or fatless sponge when using cream as a filling. It balances the fat content of the entire, finished product and you can use as little or as much cream as you like.

This recipe works just as well with some ripe raspberries and raspberry jam. The key is to use the freshest seasonal fruit for the jam and the filling. You’ll find the recipe below:

Strawberry Cream Cake (Serves 8)

Ingredients

• 3 medium eggs
• 3oz caster sugar
• 3 oz plain flour
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• 300ml fresh cream
• 4 tablespoons of fresh strawberry jam (best if it’s still warm)
• 300g fresh strawberries, hulled and chopped

Method

Preheat a (fan) oven to 170 degrees Celsius, line 2 sandwich tins (12cm diameter).
Whisk together the eggs and caster sugar until light, frothy and the mixture has about trebled in size. Turn off the whisk. Stir baking powder into the flour, and then sieve 1/3 of the flour into the egg mixture. Fold using a metal spoon. Repeat two more times until the flour is gone.

Divide the cake batter between the two sandwich tins and bake in the oven for 20 minutes, or until golden on top. Remove from the oven and allow cooling for 20 minutes before turning out of the tins and assembling the cake.

To assemble the cake

Whip the cream to soft peaks. Take 1 of the cakes and place it on a cake stand. Spread the top liberally with the strawberry jam. Top with 2/3 the chopped strawberries then lashings of whipped cream. Gently put the second cake on top. Sprinkle icing sugar over the top of the cake and finish with the remaining chopped strawberries.

This cake is best eaten on the day it is served but will keep for a further 24 hours in the fridge.

Don’t forget my book, Wholesome, is on special discount on Amazon at the moment where you can also pick up the e-reader version. My publisher, Mercier Press, also has a special offer on the book, which you can buy for €15 with free delivery in Ireland. It’s available in bookstores nationwide too and thanks a million to everybody who’s been getting in touch to let me know that they’ve grabbed a copy for themselves!