Blackberry Basil Poppy Seed Cake

When the jam is so good you have to bake a cake for it. # 346: Blackberry Basil Poppy Seed Cake

Happy June! I’m so ready to get overwhelmed by summer fruit. Bring on the piles of berries, cherries and nectarines.

This cheerful stack was also the perfect excuse to test out a new sponge cake recipe. Sophie Bamford of All Day Cake recently dove into the challenge of finding the perfect sponge cake recipe and this one was her end result. I personally hadn’t found a good go-to for a vanilla sponge and this one is definitely a contender! It’s a one-bowl situation that has good structure without being too dry of dense. Next time I’m going to add in a cake soak at the end, and maybe slice the layers thinner. It just needs a little something extra to hold my attention when I get a bite of just cake without jam or frosting.

There’s something so satisfying about slicing a super tall cake. I had to whip out a dinner plate though – it was too tall for my dessert plates, oops!

Let’s be honest, this slice of cake is an entire meal. While I love cake for lunch, I’m looking into less intimidating ways to slice large cakes. Apparently you can get way more pieces if you cut the cake like a checkerboard: 1.5 inch strips lengthwise and then spin the cake 90 degrees and make the same cuts again. And if it’s a towering bb like this one, you can even get away with cutting each slice down to just two layers each. Cake math.

I was secretly proud of myself for not sneaking chocolate into this cake. I really wanted the jam flavors to shine! But of course my brain made a list of all the ways anyway (cocoa powder in the frosting, a dark chocolate ganache layer, mini dark chocolate chips in the sponge instead of poppy seeds, cacao nibs as decoration and texture, etc.) and when I handed my mom a slice, she said, wait where’s the chocolate? Welp. Guess my constant chocolate debate isn’t so secret after all.

The poppy seeds were entirely unnecessary, but they’re cute little freckles and add a fun texture element. Also a quick blog search revealed this is not the first time I’ve let poppy seeds jump into a cake that didn’t ask for them. They’re very persuasive, what can I say?

Mmm butter cake. The recipe had me cream the butter into all of the dry ingredients at once instead of just the sugar, which threw me a bit. But it didn’t end up overworking the gluten, so huzzah for easier methods!

Thicc.

Love a chubby 6” cake. It’s the perfect candidate for halving the recipe and still getting a substantial cake.

The sides and bottom got a little more golden than intended, c’est la vie.

Oooh, aaaah.

Jam time. I used a little less basil than recipe called for, but I didn’t want to fully decimate the plant in my yard.

Shouts to the jam recipe for this clutch tip: blitzing the juices, sugar and basil in the food processor before simmering with the fruit! Nobody wants big leaf chunks in a jam.