Wednesday 3 July 2013

Chocolate Chip and Raspberry Loaf

This cake was an experiment to test the quality of the freeze dried fruit chips sold by Waitrose. Their description suggests they are for cake decoration, but I wanted to see how well they kept their flavour and colour when baked.

I used a 2 egg cake mixture, with Madeira cake proportions - ie a slightly higher proportion of flour than a Victoria Sandwich mixture. To this I added 100g of plain chocolate chips and the whole pack of freeze dried raspberry pieces (only 10g). This was baked for about an hour at 180C in a small loaf tin.

As you can see, the raspberry pieces kept their colour, and the flavour was pretty good too. This is a good way of adding raspberry flavour without the complication of how fresh fruit will react in a cake mixture. However, at £2 for a small 10g pack of fruit, it's quite an expensive addition, particularly as flavour extracts are becoming easier to find.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

what a brilliant idea and a fab combo... naughty bread!

cupcakegirl said...

Great idea! especially if you want a cupboard ingredient that will last a bit longer than fresh fruit ready for any baking whim

Anne said...

Oooh at how many chocolate chips are in that slice! About how many make it into me before going into a recipe roughly!!

I've never really considered using freeze dried fruit before in baking but guess could be handy out of season etc

Suelle said...

Only 100g of chocolate chips, Annes, but it was a small cake!

Caroline said...

Looks like a great cake - good to know those freeze dried fruit pieces work well in baking because I succumbed to buying some a while ago and am not really sure what to do with them now.