Cardamom and red currant cake

The red currants are all ripe and ready now in our garden, and we're using them a lot for making different cakes and desserts. Here's the most recent one - a simple red currant cake, served with homemade and freshly churned red summer berry and mascarpone ice cream.  So simple and so delicious. The original recipe from a Swedish food magazine glazed the cake with a toffee-cream cheese topping, but we never got around to making the glaze - the cake was lovely the way it is presented here:



I must admit that not many of these berries make it to the kitchen, as both our kids love eating fresh berries straight off the red currant bush (the same fate falls upon black currants, raspberries, garden strawberries and small Alpine strawberries - and any other edible berries in our garden):
 
Aksel, 1 y 6 m (July 2012)

Here's our daughter (now 3 y 5 m) doing exactly the same thing last year:
Nora, 2 y 5 m (July 2011)

Cardamom works really well with red currants. If you're making this cake in Estonia or Finland and not podding and crushing your own cardamom pods, I suggest using Meira's ground cardamom - it's much more flavoursome than the other readily available competing brands, mainly because Meira's cardamom is not ground to a fine dust but left rather coarse.

Cardamom and red currant cake
Adapted from the Swedish Allt om Mat magazine (original recipe)
Makes 20-24 cake slices

 

150 g butter, melted
50 ml (3 Tbsp + 1 tsp) milk
3 large eggs
250 g caster sugar (about 300 ml)
275 g all-purpose/plain flour
1 Tbsp vanilla sugar or 2 tsp good-quality vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cardamom
300 ml (a heaped cup) of red currants

Pre-heat the oven to 175 C/350 F. 

Whisk eggs and sugar until pale, thick and fluffy in a big bowl.
Mix melted butter and milk until combined. 
Mix dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, vanilla sugar and cardamom) in a medium bowl, then gently fold into the egg mixture, alternating with the butter and milk mixture.
Line a 25x35 cm cake tin with a parchment paper, spoon the batter into the cake tin.
Scatter the red currants on top.

Bake the cake in the middle of a preheated oven for about 25-30 minutes, until light golden brown on top. Remove from the oven and let cool either lightly or completely before cutting into squares and serving.

More excellent recipes using redcurrants:
Red currant meringue pie (Nami-Nami)
Simple and versatile redcurrant jelly (Nami-Nami)
Red currant jam (David Lebovitz)
Red currant tart  (Delicious Days)
Red currant mini cakes (La Tartine Gourmande)
Red currant sorbet  (Delicious Days)
Peach redcurrant crumble (Mowielicious)