Eton Mess Cake

Right so not the most glamorous of cakes.....but as long as it tastes good, right?!

I made the sponge from a lemon meringue cake recipe here but I wasn't impressed with the sponge - it took an hour and a half to cook and the cake was far too dense. The recipe says to cook the cake and meringue together which I thought was an interesting idea to try out.

I made the batter and covered it with meringue (pic below) and baked it for ages! The meringue was well cooked though and I managed to get them out of the tins okay (second pic below).

When I went to layer cream over the meringue shell it kept lifting the meringue shell off so in the end I crunched up the meringue and folded it into the cream. I then covered this in a layer of raspberries and plonked the top layer on top. I say plonked because it's not exactly neat, but as I had baked it with the meringue on top (and I was assembling it at work) I hadn't levelled out the cake, hence the floating top layer. If I had been able to transport it to work, without the fear of it spilling in my bag, I would have drizzled some purée on the cream. I had some blackberry coulis at home so I would have used that but any berry coulis or purée would be good. I also used raspberries as there were no strawberries in the little M&S I popped in to after work. You could have used either or both here.

The whole effect was yummy so I would make it again, I would just change the sponge recipe so it was light and fluffier. There are lots of combinations to try out really!

This cake was again for the lovely Alva on her leaving day. We ate half in the office and the other half with sparkling wine in St James Park (in the sun!). Yum.