Soured cream blueberry and raspberry cake

I'm absolutely sure that I'm not the only person with so many things on the 'to make/bake' list that only the top few are ever going to be made, no matter how hard I try to make my way through it. This cake is one that I've glanced at on many an occasion, but always glossed over. The reason is that in the picture, pretty much all of the fruit has sunk to the bottom. Generally speaking, this annoys me because the bottom of the cake is soggy and the rest of the cake boring, with no fruit, so it was easy to push this cake to one side and let others creep up the list.

What made me think again then? The Caked Crusader made and blogged about this cake recently, and it made me think again. I was also liberated by the thought that I didn't have to pile the cake with great swathes of soured cream icing, which I didn't much fancy. And since pretty much everything I've made after seeing it on her blog has been delicious I was inspired to make this cake too. That, and the pressing need to use up some of the fruit mountain that accumulated in my freezer last summer and hasn't been eaten yet. This summer is rapidly approaching (yes, really, it is.... well, at least in terms of how quickly items in my freezer get used up) and I need to use last years fruit to..... ahem, make room for this years fruit..... (yep, my mind works in strange ways). Plus I had soured cream that also had no purpose in my fridge, just begging to be used.

Lets get back to the cake now shall we? The original recipe can be found here, on the BBC Good Food website, but is also in a number of their recipe books I imagine, it's certainly in my 101 Cakes and Bakes book.

I decided to give my cake a crunchy sugar crust, achieved by a liberal hand with the caster sugar just before the cake went into the oven. I used a mixture of blueberries and raspberries, but decided to break the raspberries up a bit as they were quite big ones. This worked well, and the lovely pale pink streaks you can see dotted through the cake are probably raspberry. The original recipe states a 22cm cake tin, which is what I used. The CC used a 20cm tin, so if you want a deeper cake go for that. My cake cooked in the original specified time though, and if it had been deeper I would have had to cook it for a little longer.

I think I like blueberries - I certainly like them when they're flavoursome and blueberry-ish but I think I must have had quite a few bad examples of this fruit where there is just colour and little taste. I do think that cooking the berries helps the flavour and this is probably the case in this cake too. The juicy, moist blueberries were a lovely contrast to the soft, moist, rich crumb of the cake and the crunchy sugar topping added another texture. The sour cream definitely gave this cake an edge and I'll have to try baking with it more often.

Extremely well received, this cake gained compliments from lots of people and I was asked for the recipe too (and I think said person may even make this cake, as they seemed particularly impressed by it). I'd definitely make this cake again, I'm just sorry it's taken me so long to get round to trying it in the first place.

Mmm, crunchy sugar crust...