The recipe for this cake has been in the family for at least two generation and it’s a great cake if you like your cakes fruity. I was going to make it with either tinned (as in the original recipe) or frozen berries (works equally well) but in the end I plumped for fresh ones. The only drawback for using fresh fruit is, that the cake doesn’t keep as long, but that is never really a problem in our house. You can make this cake with any mixture of berries – blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries or just one kind of berry. My cake is a mixture of strawberry and blackberry.

Ingredients

300g berries

2 egg whites

250g soft unsalted butter plus a bit for greasing the baking tin

250g sugar plus about 4 tablespoons for the syrup

4 egg yolks

400g flour

1 heaped teaspoon baking powder

Icing sugar

A dash of a berry liquor, for example Chambord

Method

Keep a few berries aside for the decoration and put the rest very briefly in the blender (you don’t want a smoothie!)

Beat the egg whites until they are stiff.

In the meantime boil some water (half a mug or so) with the 4 spoonful of sugar and the liquor until it is a syrup. Cut up the remainder of the berries in immerse in the syrup, but only for a minute as you still want them to keep their shape and not end up with jam. Let them cool.

Beat the butter until it is creamy, add the sugar and the egg yolks whilst mixing. Add the flour and the baking powder. Add the beaten egg whites.

Mix the puréed berries carefully with the cake mixture, but don’t mix it in completely, otherwise you don’t get the swirls.

Grease a baking tin (2 litres), fill in the cake dough and put it in the pre-heated oven (200C, 180C for fan oven, gas mark 6) and bake for 50 minutes.

Check the cake is cooked by pricking it with a toothpick. If it comes out clean, the cake is ready.

Let the cake cool down for an hour.

Mix the icing sugar with the syrup until you have a good consistency. You’ll just about want to still be able to pour it on the cake, but also to set fairly quickly. Decorate with the stewed berries.