STRAWBERRIES AND LIME SPONGE CAKE WEDDING TRIFLE #recipe @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: Chef Martha Hubbard brings this dessert to serve at Hayley and Nathan’s wedding reception in A DEADLY FEAST by Lucy Burdette. She layers the ingredients in individual-sized mason jars, but you could also serve slices of the cake garnished with whipped cream and strawberries. It would also be nice with raspberries or peaches, depending on what’s in season.

For the strawberry layer:

2 cups hulled and halved or quartered strawberries

Sprinkle of sugar

For the whipped cream layer:

2 cups whipping cream

2 tablespoons powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the cake:

6 large eggs, separated

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

1½ cups sugar, divided

2 teaspoons grated lime rind

¼ cup lime juice

¼ cup water

1¼ cup flour

¼ teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Sprinkle the strawberries with sugar and set aside.

Whip the cream until stiff with the powdered sugar and vanilla. Put this in the refrigerator while you make the cake.

In a large bowl, combine the egg whites with the cream of tartar and beat with an electric mixer until they hold soft peaks. (You can test this by slowly withdrawing the beaters from the eggs. Soft peaks should stand up with the slightest droop at the top.) Next, gradually add ½ cup of the sugar, beating until whites are stiff but not dry.

In another large bowl, place the separated yolks. Beat them with unwashed beaters until thick. Add the remaining sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating until the yolks are very thick and ivory colored.

To the beaten yolks, add the grated lime rind, lime juice, and water, beating until just blended. Beat in the flour and salt at a very low speed. Add the beaten egg whites to this mixture, and fold them in with a rubber spatula—gently.

Turn the cake batter into an ungreased 10-inch tube pan. Cut through the batter several times with a knife to break up any air bubbles and then smooth the top.

Bake at 325 degrees for 50 minutes to an hour. The top of the cake will appear golden and the cake should spring back when lightly touched.

Invert on a wire rack to cool. Loosen cake from the sides of the pan with a spatula. Set on a serving plate.

When the cake is completely cool, cut it into bite-size squares. In small mason jars, alternate squares of cake with strawberries and whipped cream. Refrigerate until it’s time to serve.

​ABOUT A DEADLY FEAST:

Before Key Zest food critic Hayley Snow's family descends on the island for Thanksgiving and her wedding to heart throb Detective Nathan Bransford, she has one last assignment--a review of a seafood tasting tour conducted by her friend Analise Smith. But when one of the tourists collapses on the last stop, Analise begs her to investigate before the police destroy her business and shut down the local Key West eateries on her tour. Pressure mounts when Analise calls a second time to request that Hayley meet with Chef Martha Hubbard, who prepared key lime pies for the tasting tour and is terrified that someone poisoned her pies to ruin her reputation. Chefs all around town are preparing their versions of a Thanksgiving feast, but with a murderer on the loose, will Hayley and her friends have anything left to be thankful for?

Praise for Lucy Burdette's Key West mysteries:​

“There’s a lot to love about this series—deft plotting, likeable characters, and an ending that always satisfies. But one of the things I love the best is how the author transports her readers to Key West with every page, describing real landmarks and restaurants with such realism that I feel I’m actually there. Magical and delicious fun!”

—Suspense Magazine

Clinical psychologist Lucy Burdette (aka Roberta Isleib) has published 17 mysteries, including the latest in the Key West food critic series, A Deadly Feast (Crooked Lane Books, May 2019.)  Read more at https://lucyburdette.com. You can also find Lucy on Facebook and Instagram.

Wimbledon Cake

I love it when the stars align. This week there’s a perfect example:

-- You foodies may know that The Great British Bake Off has returned with a whole new season of yummy baking projects that I most likely will never attempt to make. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is hosted (and judged) by Paul Hollywood (really), Mary Berry, Sue Perkins, and Mel Geidroyc.

Mary is the more serious baker of the judges, and I have one of her many cookbooks. Her recipes are simple and direct, and the ones I’ve tried have worked well. But you do have to do a bit of translating from British measurements to American ones. This is an example that I have adapted and tweaked a bit.

Now for the serendipity:

--One of her recipes is for Wimbledon Cake. Wimbledon happens to be playing this week. Perfect!

In case you have been living in a cave all your life, “The Championships, Wimbledon, commonly known simply as Wimbledon, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, and is widely considered the most prestigious. It has been held at the All England Club in Wimbledon, London since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments… Wimbledon is the only major still played on grass.” (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

I have a fondness for Wimbledon, and not because I’m an avid tennis fan. The summer after college, I found myself a job in London (not simple in those pre-Internet days), working as a sales clerk and sometimes receptionist in the barber shop, at Simpsons Piccadilly, a venerable department store right on Piccadilly Circus. The pay was minimal (yes, I even had a green card for the summer!), but it was enough to cover a rented room in a flat and my Tube pass and food, and what more did I need?

It was also right in the heart of a fabulous city, and I took advantage of cheap tickets for musical events, plays, museums and anything else. Including Wimbledon, an easy train ride away. I saw Chris Evert play there—I think she was 18. (She lost to Evonne Goolagong that year.)

But I digress. You don’t go to Wimbledon just to watch tennis. Part of the tradition was to enjoy a dish of fresh strawberries and cream (the real stuff, not out of a can). Hence Mary Berry’s Wimbledon Cake, made with (you guessed it) fresh strawberries and whipped cream. It’s quick to make and not too heavy—and should be eaten quickly (or it will get soggy)!


Wimbledon Cake (adapted from Mary Berry’s recipe)


Ingredients:

3 large eggs, separated
1/2 cup sugar
Zest and juice of one orange
1/2 cup semolina
Pinch of salt

4 oz fresh strawberries
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a deep round 8-inch cake pan, and line the bottom with parchment paper. (Note there are no fats in the batter, so don’t skimp on greasing the pan.)

Put the egg yolks, sugar, orange zest and juice, semolina and salt into a bowl and beat until blended.

In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until they are stiff but not dry. Fold gently into the first mixture. Pour into the prepared baking pan.

Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes until the cake is risen and the top is springy when you press it with a finger. Remove from the oven and let cool a few minutes in the pan, then remove it from the pan and peel off the parchment paper. Let it finish cooling on a rack.

Put aside a few strawberries for decoration, then slice the rest. Whip the cream (sweeten it if you like--you might taste your strawberries first to see how sweet they are).

Cut the cake in half horizontally. Put a generous layer of sliced strawberries and whipped cream between the layers.

When you’re ready to serve it, put the top layer on and garnish it with the reserved strawberries, whole or sliced. (Feel free to add more whipped cream if you like!) Sit down and watch the last matches on the telly—Wimbledon runs until Sunday!

And here's a bonus (and a reminder why I should not be allowed to browse in cookware stores). It's an English measuring cup, the likes of which I have never seen.

Book, you say? Well, I'm currently working on three, or is it four? (First edits, proofs, first draft, revised draft--one of each. Can you tell this is why I bake?) The next one to hit the shelves will be Seeds of Deception (Orchard #10, and don't ask me how that happened), coming in October. But I'll be telling you plenty about that in coming weeks, I promise.

Yellow Birthday Cake with Strawberries and Cream

LUCY BURDETTE: As long as I can remember, the birthday tradition in my family has been choosing the cake of your dreams:). This chocolate lovely is the one most of my family prefers.

 As a kid, I always wanted angel food cake with a whipped cream frosting. 

Now I've grown into a yellow cake recipe I found years ago on a Softasilk flour box. The cake itself is light and pretty simple. And then you whip cream and frost it, with fruit and cream stuffed in the middle of the two layers and more fruit decorations on top--strawberries, blueberries, or raspberries, or some of each!

By the time you read this, my whopper birthday will be in the rearview mirror--thank goodness! Now I can relax and enjoy the year and the cake...Hope you will enjoy it too. (And it's a mystery why my cake in the picture is upside down:).

Ingredients

1 and 1/2 cups sugar
1 stick butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
4 egg yolks
2 and 1/4 cups cake flour
2 and 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
2 cups whipping cream
sliced strawberries, or blueberries, or raspberries

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease and flour 2 9 inch cake pans. Beat the sugar and butter until fluffy. Then add eggs and egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each. Mix the dry ingredients together and add them to the butter/sugar mixture in three parts, alternating dry ingredients with the milk and beating on low until everything is combined.   Split the batter between the two prepared pans. Bake for about 25 minutes until a toothpick tester comes out clean. You can tell the cake is done when the edges pull away from the pan and the center springs back when lightly touched. Cool ten minutes in the pan, then turn the cakes out onto plates.

While the cake cools, whip the cream. You may add another 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1 tsp or more of sugar, if desired.  Center one of the layers on a nice plate. Frost the top with whipped cream, then a layer of fruit. Add a few more dollops of cream to cement the layers, then carefully place the second layer on top. Frost everything thickly and decorate! If anything is left of this cake, or if you are preparing it ahead of the celebration, it should be refrigerated. 

Aside from the cake, here's another way we celebrated the birthday season: This is me with my lovely stepdaughter after the "Duck" tour in Key West--a little goofy:). No end to the silly and fun things you can find to do on this island!

Lucy Burdette is the author of the Key West Food Critic mysteries. TOPPED CHEF will be on bookshelves in May! To help celebrate this big birthday, please "like" her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter or best of all, pre-order the book!