Raspberries with two cakes and a whole lot of lemon

For the first experiment on this blog, I decided on the following general idea: cake soaked in limoncello, raspberry sauce, whipped cream, fresh raspberries. Sounds pretty good, huh? Feeling adventurous, I decided to make two versions. The first was with a pound cake recipe (picture below) and the second with angel food cake (picture at left).

The recipes for the cakes aren't original, but from a great source. Annie and I have used this book often- it's a great way to make small desserts for 1-3 people. I made one recipe of each cake, and split each in half for one serving.





For the actual dessert recipe, though, here are the ingredients and the steps:

• 1/2 oz. Limoncello for each serving of cake

• 6 oz. container of fresh raspberries
• 4 tsp. sugar
• 1/4 cup water
• Juice from 1/4 of a lemon
  

• 1 pint whipping cream
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla

• Zest from aforementioned 1/4 lemon for garnish
  
• Additional raspberries for garnish
  

I poured the Limoncello on each serving of cake and let it sit while I assembled everything else. In a saucepan, I combined the package of raspberries, water, sugar and lemon juice and let simmer for 5-10 minutes, stirring to break down the raspberries. Once it looked like it was broken down, I strained out the seeds and discarded them, then returned the sauce to the saucepan to reduce to a good syrup-like consistency.

Meanwhile, I made the whipped cream, with the cream, vanilla and sugar. This was WAY too much whipped cream for this experiment, but the container I had was the smallest I could find at Hannaford's, and what else am I going to do with a container of heavy cream? Shave? No.

Once the sauce and whipped cream were done, I assembled. For the purposes of taking pictures, I put the pound cake version in martini glasses, and the angel food cake on dessert plates we have.

After putting Pete to bed, we finally ate them. My pre-conceived notion was that the angel food cake version would be better because it's lighter, fluffier, and that usually works better with fruity desserts. Not this time. It was a unanimous decision that the pound cake is the way to go, mostly because the richness of the cake is better at sopping up the liqueur, and goes better with the whipped cream. Fortunately, when you're working with small batches of cake, it's really a quarter-pound cake, so the guilt factor is mitigated (slightly).

I think this recipe could be altered pretty easily, especially deciding what liqueur to use instead of Limoncello- Grand Marnier comes to mind pretty quickly. If you have any other suggestions, or general feedback on this post, please click the "Comments" link below. I'm hoping this will be as interactive as possible.