Raspberry Cream Cakes + DMBLGIT Thanks!

Scotney Castle, Kent

We had company over the Easter break and it was lovely to visit a few of the local tourist hot spots. We visited two castles, Scotney Castle and Hever Castle. Hever, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, is our favourite place to take guests - there is a fabulous water maze, a yew hedge maze and it has the most beautiful gardens.


Raspberry cream cakes

For our Easter dessert, I made this super-easy strawberry cream cake again. I had some of the cream filling left over, so I made some mini raspberry cream cakes. I spent a blissful hour trying to master the art of making sugar curls - there is an excellent tutorial here - I followed it to the letter. The cooling of the sugar is the important bit, and you can just reheat it up again and again until you have made your sugar curls. I discovered that if you run out of time, just leave the melted sugar to harden in the saucepan, cover with a lid and the following day you can gently reheat it and carry on making the sugar curls. My curls were wound around a knife sharpening steel and slid off easily - I tried winding the sugar around a wooden spoon and unless it's well oiled, forget it!


Sugar curls


Cutting out sponge cake, then slice it in half


Place a sponge layer on the bottom, then raspberries round the edge, fill with the vanilla custard cream (recipe here) and top with another round of sponge


Dust with icing sugar and top with sugar curls


Glorious Hever Castle

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Many thanks to the judges of February's DMBLGIT event, my photo of Banoffee Macarons came 2nd place overall. To see all the winners and who was judging the event, please visit Snacksgiving, which is hosted by Nidhi.

Thank you!

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