Cake for Aimée: Madeira Loaf with Strawberry "Eyes" (Warning: Long Post)

On this wonderful day before World Goth Day, I present to you a cake that's been weeks in the making: Madeira Loaf Cake... with Spooky Eyes!

A few weeks ago, I began to make videos again for my YouTube channel. Normally when I do a video (although life has been a bit hectic recently so I've not done one for a while; I'd better correct that) I finish with an invitation for suggestions or questions. After I released a cake review video, I got a message from a friend of mine, named Aimée, who is currently travelling Southeast Asia. Our conversation went a little something like this:

"My Nannie used to buy this cake when we were younger but I thinks it’s been discontinued for a good while now, and I thought who’d be there most likely person to know about it: you my cake guru friend"

I was flattered to be referred to as a "cake guru", so I continued reading:

"It was a rectangle log, with shiny green-black wrapper, the inside was Madeira and the outside had a light layer of chocolate covering the whole thing. And through the middle were two strips of limey jelly so when you cut into it the line bit almost looked like eyes.

It was utterly delish but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called and I've been trying for weeks to remember!"

After posting this question into a few baking groups on social media, and doing a bit of scratching around on Google, I came to a possible answer. After Aimée and I conversed back and forth, we came to the conclusion that the cake her Nan used to buy must have been this:

From my research I discovered that these kinds of cakes are very common on the continent, and used to be found here in Ireland in the Polish goods aisle of most large supermarkets: Aimée told me her Nan used to get hers in Supervalu. However, she was right in her assumption that this cake is now discontinued: I could not for the life of me find a cake like this in the Irish supermarkets, or the Eastern European supermarkets here in Limerick.

Because I couldn't get a hold of the actual cake itself, I had to do all of my investigation from photographs of the outer packaging, promotional photos of the cake itself on the company website, and from other people's blogs where they reviewed the cake.

I must have made about six versions of this cake (nearly all of which ended up in the food processor to be reincarnated as cake pops), and I tried loads of methods to get the two channels of jelly into the cake: I tried baking the cake with the jam in it with raw jam and cake, I tried freezing the jam into logs first and then baking it into the cake - some dusted with flour, some not - I tried baking half of the cake then adding the jam and the remaining cake mixture on the top to prevent to jam sinking. None of these worked, as each time the jam sank to the bottom, or there was a seam where the two cake halves met.

Then, on closer inspection of the photographs, the answer became clearer: the cakes were injected with jam filling. In the factory, the cakes must be stabbed with a double injection nozzle. Of course! It's so simple; and here was I making it unnecessarily complicated.

Here, you can see the difference between baking the jam in (left), and injecting is afterwards (right):

Of course, no-one has an industrial injection nozzle in their home, so the way I found to mimic it is to poke a channel, or two, all the way through the cake with a chopstick, widen it with the handle of a wooden spoon, and then squeeze the jam in with a piping bag. Make sure to make the opening of the piping bag quite narrow, and if needs be you can coax the jam all the way in using the chopstick.

I used raspberry jam which I had thickened with a little cornflour, as directed in my Bakewell Gateau recipe, and am still working on how to make a kiwi version as I've never, ever seen kiwi jam. I may just have to make it myself. I tried making a version using kiwi jelly crystals, but it was a miserable failure as the cake soaked up all the liquid jelly; you need to use something with a thicker consistency to prevent soakage, and you need a cake with a fairly dense texture, like a Madeira cake or a pound cake.

So, let me explain how I did it:

INGREDIMENTS

1 loaf-shaped Madeira or pound cake, made in a two-pound (1 kilogram) loaf tin, or shopbought

Roughly 4 ounces (115 grammes) filling of your choice: strawberry or any other jam, lemon curd, Nutella, custard, etc.

About 4 or 6 ounces (115 to 170 grammes) glaze of your choice: glacé icing, melted chocolate, etc.

METHOD

• Take your completely cooled homemade or shopbought cake and chill it for about 20 minutes to make it easier to work with.
• Because this cake will be served upside down, cut the dome off the cake so it will sit flat. If the two short ends are sloped, cut a narrow slice of each end to make them completely flat.
• Turn the cake up on its narrow end and using a chopstick, poke channels gently through the middle of the cake to resemble two eyes. Widen the channels by going through them again with the handle of a wooden spoon.
• Fit a piping bag with a narrow round nozzle - or better, an injection nozzle (don't worry, this isn't an affiliate link: it's just a link for visual reference) - and pipe the filling into the channels. To get the most filling in, you might have to fill from both ends and coax it down with the end of the chopstick.
• Pop into the fridge again for about 30 minutes to help set the filling.
• To decorate, glaze with some simple glacé icing, or with melted chocolate. I used a simple glaze of dark chocolate and sunflower oil.

STORAGE

This cake is best stored in the fridge in an airtight container for up to a week, but is best served at room temperature. For that reason, I recommend taking the cake out of the fridge an hour before serving.

THIS TIME IN 2016: Mocha Cupcakes: Chocolate and Coffee Join Forces (Gluten Free; Dairy Free Option)

THIS TIME IN 2013: Bake Sale Madness: Raising Funds for Christian Aid

There were no blogs on this day in 2017, 2015, nor 2014.