Sunday's blackcurrant bake

My colleague Jan had very kindly given me a bowlful of blackcurrants from her garden. Blackcurrant is one of my favourite flavours of all time (developed I think from an early fondness for cassis sorbet on holidays to France), but I have never cooked with them before. I could have gone for a granita (the closest to a sorbet that I'm ever likely to attempt), but decided that a cake might be in order. There was an early evening beach barbecue planned and I wanted to make something that I could take to share.

There was nothing suitable in any of my recipe books, so I got out my shoe box of recipes extracted from magazines. The only specific blackcurrant recipe used jam rather than whole blackcurrants. There were quite a few for general summer or other berry puddings, but I had no other sort of berry. In the absence of what I was looking for I was going to have to improvise, but improvising on a blueberry recipe would surely be a fairly safe bet – I chose a tray bake recipe.

I did my usual of scanning the ingredients before I started (I was amazed that we actually had half a bag of flaked almonds in the cupboard – I've no idea what the other half went in), but not looking at the method. If I had looked at the method I might have thought twice before embarking on this recipe – it ended up using loads of bowls and pans and given me a clue as to the number of separate processes to be completed.

First you are directed to deal with the blueberries, by turning them into a kind of sauce – so I set to with my blackcurrants. I had no appreciation of how long it would take to remove the little stalky bits from 150g of blackcurrants. I started off by trying to chop them off with a sharp knife (our sharpest) but this was unbearable so I ended up yanking with my finger-nails (clean, short and unvarnished for those of you concerned about infection control). I would recommend that you wear an apron to make these as blackcurrants turn out to be very messy. I would especially recommend to wear an apron if you are baking in your favourite pyjamas.

Once you have (finally) prepared the blackcurrants, you add them to a small pan with 100ml water, 2 teaspoons of cornflour and 50g caster sugar and then heat / stir until it starts to thicken. I'm not sure mine thickened as much as it was supposed to, maybe blackcurrants have less thickening agent (pectin I think) than blueberries. I will put a bit more cornflour in next time, or a bit less water. I think that blueberries are sweeter than blackcurrants so maybe you would want to slightly increase the sugar but I really like the not-too-sweetness of blackcurrants.

While that was on the hob I started with the main cakey bit. This was not a normal cake method, more like a pastry method and I generally have to psych myself up to make pastry – I wasn't feeling psyched but it was too late. You combine flour, sugar, ground almonds and baking powder and then rub in butter. Fortunately the food processor came to my rescue and did the rubbing in bit for me. Then you stir in a beaten egg. It wasn't looking hopeful, very crumby, but eventually came together in a sort of doughy mixture. It still looked kind of dry and I was very tempted to add a splash of milk, or even another egg, but resisted and pressed this mixture into the base of a 20cm square tin (I had gone to the effort of greasing this).

By which time the blackcurrant mixture was ready (or if it wasn't I was going to wait any longer) and I poured this over the “cake”. Then I discovered the destiny of the flaked almonds. They go in another pan with some milk and honey and brown sugar which you are supposed to heat until it started to thicken slightly. But it was kind of difficult to tell whether it had thickened in the presence of the flaked almonds so I just heated for a few minutes (the oven had been at it's pre-heated temperature for quite a while now) and then poured this mixture over the top of the blackcurrant.

It baked for about 35minutes and then you have to cool it in the tin. After which time the extraction from the tin proved quite challenging. I ended up cutting it up into 4 squares and then scooping out with a fish slice which didn't create too much carnage, there were just a few crumbs left in the tin for me to test. The test indicated that it tasted nice, although I probably wouldn't have done any harm in adding a bit more moisture to the cake layer. 

I packed up a boxful to take to the beach. Unfortunately by the time it came to get the cake out everyone was full up with barbecue, except Matt who I'm not sure I have ever known to be full up, so I brought most of it back home again (if I had been organised I would have taken some food bags so that people could have taken a goodie bag home, but I wasn't organised). We've been making our way through it over the last few days – it seems to keep very well in an airtight box – but I'm going to take the rest to work tomorrow.