'A Cake for Midsummer' from Nigel Slater

This was a much more successful recipe from Nigel Slater - a rich almond sponge studded with fresh apricots and raspberries. I've made the cake twice in quick succession this month - once to try it out and again for a Clandestine Cake Club (CCC) meeting. The only changes I made to the recipe, the second time, was to add a few drops of almond extract to the cake batter and sprinkle some flaked almonds on top, to increase the almond-ness of the cake.

The theme for the CCC meeting was 'the third suitable recipe in one of your baking books' and I was stumped for a while, as few of my baking books had suitable recipes. In terms of CCC, 'suitable' means a full-sized cake - not a dessert, brownie, tray bake, small cakes or a tart. Suitable in my case meant something I actually wanted to make!

Most books dealing exclusively with baking go through variations of sponge cakes first, so many books were discarded on the grounds that a basic sponge was too ordinary. Others were discarded because the recipes were too difficult, or I'd already tried that recipe and didn't like the result, or I couldn't get hold of particular ingredients, or even that it didn't seem right for the season. I'd discarded all but two of my baking recipe books when I decided to look at recipe books not exclusively about baking, and found this recipe in Tender: Volume II (Fruit). Being called 'A Cake for Midsummer' made it doubly appropriate for an August meeting.

This is basically a sponge cake with fresh fruit folded in - the only online copy of the recipe coming directly from Nigel Slater uses peaches and blueberries - so it wasn't a difficult recipe to follow. I found I needed to use a tablespoon or two more milk than in the recipe, to loosen the batter enough to fold in the fruit, but other than that there were no problems.

The apricots and raspberries tasted good together, and the almonds kept the cake moist. Adding the flaked almond topping and almond extract to the second cake was a definite improvement, both in taste and appearance

We ate one portion of the cake as a dessert, with the raw fruit left over after making the cake,  and it surprised me that the cooked apricots tasted more intense than raw ones, whereas raw raspberries tasted better than the cooked ones!

Apricot Ginger Yogurt Cake

There's an obvious dilemma (dilemna?) when baking during hotter than usual weather at this time of year. The abundance of wonderful fresh fruit cries out to be used, but we know things won't keep well unless refrigerated, which often spoils the texture of cakes and pastries, even if they are brought back to room temperature before serving.

I decided to take my chances with this fresh apricot cake, to my cost. It was baked on Thursday afternoon, but was mouldy by Saturday evening - I had hoped it would last long enough, without refrigeration, to be finished as Saturday's dessert, but the last three portions had to be thrown away.

The recipe I used was the delightfully versatile Stone Fruit Yogurt Cake from Dan Lepard. I used about 450g fresh apricots - 175g chopped into the cake batter and the rest arranged carefully in the base of the cake tin before putting in the cake batter. I also reduced the lemon zest to that from one lemon and added 50g of chopped glacé ginger and a teaspoon of ground ginger to the cake batter to add a little zing, as fresh apricots are often a bit of a gamble in the flavour stakes. As it turned out these apricots were wonderfully tart with a good depth of flavour when cooked, but the ginger still added an extra dimension to the overall balance of the cake.

The texture of this cake is quite dense and moist, thanks to the semolina in the batter, which makes it a great dessert as well as a tasty cake. It would be good as a picnic dessert if left in the tin until ready to eat.

This month's Tea Time Treats challenge, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, is to use fresh fruit when creating something suitable for the tea-table, so I am submitting this cake. Karen shares hosting duties for this Tea Time Treats (full rules here) with Kate at What Kate Baked. This month Karen is using a linky for submission of entries but will still write a round-up post at the end of the month.