Gooseberry and Elderflower Crumble Cake

Sharp gooseberries, soft sweet cake, crumble topping - perfect for tea time!

Gooseberry and Elderflower Crumble Cake

Succulent but sharp gooseberries and the floral scent of elderflowers combine in this early summer classic crowdpleaser. It’s sort of a pudding and sort of a cake. It does hold together perfectly well in slices for eating with a cup of tea, but it would be equally happy in a bowl with some cream or custard.

After a break of a week I was back with the Seniors Lunch Club and took along this cake to complete their meal. We were supposed to be talking on the subject of “The Alphabet” and playing some games along the lines of:  “ how many objects of this topic (might be countries, or sports or animals) can you name starting with a letter pulled out of a bag?” but as there were only 5 members present, we decided to skip the games and have a gossip session instead. We had a lovely time, talking about detective stories we like to read and watch – Agatha Christie came out top as you might expect, including the TV adaptations of her books.

Serves 16             Timings:  2 hours

For the crumble topping:

• 150g plain flour
• 75g butter
• 75g brown sugar
• Handful porridge oats or crumbled cornflakes, or whatever you have for extra texture

For the cake:

• 200g caster sugar, 20g of which can be vanilla sugar for extra floral bouquet
• 4 medium eggs
• 200g butter
• 200g self raising flour, sieved
• 2 teaspoons baking powder – into the flour
• 50ml elderflower cordial
• 250g gooseberries, cleaned and topped and tailed

 
Pre heat your oven to 180°C. Grease and line a 22cm square cake tin, loose bottomed if you have one.

Make the crumble topping by rubbing the butter into the flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs, then stirring in the sugar and porridge oats. Set aside.

Make the cake:  cream the butter and sugar together until smooth and slightly fluffy. Add in the eggs one at a time with a spoonful of flour with each one, then add the elderflower cordial and the rest of the flour and whisk well to fluff up the mixture.

Scrape the cake batter into the prepared tin and top with the gooseberries – you should just have enough for a single layer of fruit. Top with the crumble mixture and even it up. Put the cake tin on another baking tray to cook as some juice might drip through.

Bake for an hour and test it – a skewer should come out clean and hot. Give it another 15-30 minutes as needed to cook right through; there is such a lot of moisture in this cake it can take quite a while to cook, and all the juices are coming out and making a sort of gooseberry syrup toffee on the underside and outsides which is delicious but can burn if you leave it too long.

Cool on a wire rack and remove from the tin.
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The cake will keep at least 2 days but if very puddingy inside maybe keep it in the fridge in hot weather.