Brown sugar cake with brown sugar cream

The brown sugar cake and cream are pretty perfect as they are, but they are truly completed by adding sumac roasted strawberries (see Note); it really is (blissful) death by brown sugar. Still, you can take all kinds of different directions and finish the cake with chocolate shavings, a drizzle of carob or date molasses, passion fruit pulp or raspberry jam.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 225 g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar
• 150 g plain flour
• ¾ tsp fine sea salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 150 g unsalted butter, melted and warm
• 75 g crème fraîche
• icing sugar, to serve (optional)
• sumac roasted strawberries to serve (optional, see Note)

Brown sugar cream

• 200 ml double cream
• 200 g crème fraîche
• 1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
• 50 g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar

Allow extra cooking and cooling time if making the sumac roasted strawberries (see Note)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C fan. Line the bottom and sides of a 23 cm round cake tin with parchment paper.
2. Put the eggs and sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk on high speed for 5 minutes (or whisk by hand), until light and almost tripled in volume. Sift over the flour, salt and raising agents and whisk on low speed until just combined. Mix together the butter and crème fraîche and, still on low speed, stream down the sides of the bowl and mix until just combined.
3. Transfer the mix to prepared cake tin and bake for 30–35 minutes, until springy to the touch. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a wire rack.
4. For the cream, put everything into the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk to soft peaks.
5. Remove the cake from the tin and put on a serving plate, dollop the cream on top, sprinkle with icing sugar, if using (or top with strawberries, see Note), and serve.

Note

• Tightly wrapped, the baked sponge will keep for 2 days. The cream is best made on the day, and once the topping is on the cake, you should serve it straight away.
• If making the sumac roasted strawberries: Preheat the oven to 200°C fan. Place 600g strawberries, hulled and halved; 3 tsp sumac; 5 g mint sprigs; 1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract; and 70 g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar into a 30cm x 20cm ovenproof dish and roast for about 15 minutes, until soft and bubbling. Remove from the oven and leave to cool before serving. Any sumac strawberry fans will recognise this as a play on the recipe that features in Simple. Using dark brown soft sugar (or dark muscovado), instead of icing sugar as before, gives the berries an almost tamarind-like treacliness. They’re delicious on top of ice cream or with plain yoghurt and a handful of the granola.

This is an edited extract from Ottolenghi SIMPLE TOO by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller (Penguin/Ebury Press, $69.99)