Crème Fraiche Cake with Raspberries

I've been having doubts about my cake karma this weekend. The recipe sounded delicious. It's one of those that instantly attract my attention. I mean, crème fraiche cake. Also, it looked like total no-fuss recipe. And it was - until I released my cake from the baking tin. All the berries had gone to the bottom, they were oozing and the cake kind of sunk and lost its shape while I was decorating it with the icing. Well, it wasn't that bad, but I'm a perfectionist. And I've truly made better looking cakes... But in the end, it was still delicious and I even managed to get a few nice shots. So I decided to share it with you anyway. Since I still don't exactly know what went wrong, I can't give you any precise advise on this one. Just make sure your cake is baked thoroughly. I might have taken it out of the oven too early. And you might want to try and use frozen berries. Maybe the result will be better.

Recipe

(again from the wonderful Zucker, Zimt und Liebe by Virginia Horstmann)

for the dough:

175g flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 pinch of salt

1 pinch of baking soda

115g softened butter

150g sugar

2 eggs

(I added the scraped out seeds of a vanilla pod)

200g crème fraiche

200g raspberries (frozen work as well)

2 tablespoons brown sugar

for the glaze:

100g icing sugar

1-2 tablespoons milk

Preheat the oven to 175°C and line a 25cm cake tin with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda. Set aside. In another bowl, beat butter and sugar with an electric hand mixer until pale and creamy. Add the eggs, one after the other. Beat until well combined. Add vanilla seeds if you want to.

Add about a third of the flour to the creamy mixture, keep mixing. Then, add some of the crème fraiche and mix. Keep alternating between the two while constantly beating and until everything is well combined. Then, carefully, add the raspberries and fill the dough into your prepared tin. Sprinkle with the brown sugar.

Bake for about 60-70 minutes. Cover with aluminium foil if it browns too much during the last third of the baking time. Test with a wooden skewer whether your cake is done. The skewer should come out clean. Take out of the oven and let cool.

When your cake has cooled, release from the tin. For the icing, combine icing sugar and milk in a small bowl. With a spoon, spread over your cake.