Almond and strawberry layer cake

I am quite fond of light and fluffy sponge cakes that bounce when you touch them, but equally I enjoy a damp and dense cake that sticks to your finger when you touch it. I was thinking about what to serve our friend Per for dessert and so was looking at what I had in my kitchen at the time, which is how a lot of my recipes come about. What I had a lot of was almond meal (I need to look at buying this in industrial sized bags soon), butter (I now just have a few kilos of butter in my fridge at all times it seems) and a punnet of strawberries which only had about a day left in them before they spoiled. I also had a few lemons and limes leftover form our Origin party (for green and gold decorations of course! Decorations you can eat, is there any other kind!).

I had a look through my recipes and based the idea of this cake on a damp almond and lemon cake of Nigella’s. To make the moist and dense cake batter you beat 225g of butter with 225g of sugar until it is really pale (anything with equal parts butter to sugar is bound to come out amazing). The eggs need to be added next, beating one at a time until 4 have been well mixed. Beat 50g of flour into this mix. Next fold in 225g of almond meal and the juice and rind of a lemon. This should form a very wet mixture. Pour 2/3 of this mix into a springform tin and level it out. To create the strawberry layer, mush fresh strawberries with a dash of sugar and cinnamon until it forms a thick sauce. I thought about heating the strawberries, but I didn’t want it to be too much like jam. Spread the strawberry goo over the cake and then add the remaining third of the cake batter. It doesn’t need to be neat, but ideally the cake mix will spread the whole way over the strawberries. This then baked for about an hour on 180 degrees, covering for half an hour with alfoil to prevent the top from burning.

Pete and I had a sneaky piece while it was still warm, and whilst we liked the flavour, the consistency wasn’t quite right. However, by the time I wanted to serve it the following evening, the flavours had all soaked up one other and the texture was now perfectly dense and moist. Perhaps serve with a little cream if you need a little more indulgence, however, it really doesn’t need anything other than a really big fork!