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.