Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

Forest berry slices

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 | Cooking

There is this small cake that is a staple at almost any Danish bakery, the raspberry slice. While it is small and not terribly fancy compared to a lot of other cakes, it has a rather religious following of people who simply cannot do without it. At the basic level it’s two thin layers of baked shortcrust pastry on top of each other, separated with a layer of raspberry jam and decorated with layer of glacé icing and hundreds and thousands. But for some reason, a bite of this unseemly cake can compete with a lot of fancier cakes.

So, it is on shaking ground that I break with dogma and not only replace the raspberry jam with forest berry jam (we were out of raspberries, sorry!), and use margarine instead of butter (so us poor lactose intolerant people won’t suffer the worse, apart from gaining weight). Of course, we didn’t really have any jam at all, so we had to make that first from a blend of forest berries that we had in our freezer, along with some fresh Danish apples to provide thickening.

Allow to cook in with a smidgen of sugar.

Once that’s reduced a lot more, we can apply it to the baked shortcrust pastry slices.

And now, with jam, glacé icing and hundreds and thousands ready, just smear, smear, smear (carefully, though, so the slices don’t break apart).

Once the jam is applied on two of the slices, the remaining two are carefully placed on top. If you are wondering, this is what too much jam between the layers looks like.

So, just add the glacé icing and the hundreds and thousands, carefully cut into mouth-sized bites (provided you have extremely large mouths).

You can see how the jam is spilling out a tad too much. But even if we broke dogma, they had that raspberry slice feel and taste to it that is always great to bite into. Our daughter applied the hundreds and thousands; according to dogma, they should only be placed in a small but generous strip in the centre of the slice, but that was a bit too much to explain to a two year old who got to sprinkle them across the slices (I know, it’s almost sacrilegious).

Tags: baking, cake, pastry

No comments yet.

Leave a comment