I have a lot of jam made with all kinds of berries – are there any bakes that would use some of it up?
Anne-Lies, Gouda, the Netherlands
“Jam is at the heart of many great British puddings and cakes, so there are never too many jars in my house!” says Emily Cuddeford, co-founder of Edinburgh’s Twelve Triangles bakery. Her first thought, though, would be to tip a jar of the sweet stuff into a buttered ceramic baking dish and top it with sponge: “Make a classic, equal-parts mix scaled to your dish by creaming, say, 180g butter and 180g sugar, slowly beating in an egg and a dash of vanilla or lemon zest, and finishing with 180g self-raising flour.” Spoon that on top of the jam and bake at 190C (170C fan)/375F/gas 5 until the sponge “bounces back” and a skewer comes out clean. Serve warm with cream or custard, and job’s a good ’un.
You’ll also want jam to fill or top cakes. “Obvious things are a Victoria sponge, but that doesn’t use much jam,” says the Guardian’s own Benjamina Ebuehi, so she’d be more inclined to spoon buttercream over the top of a coconut cake, for example, make a dip in the middle with the back of a spoon and pop some jam in there: “That’s a nice way to decorate a cake and it also uses up a decent amount of jam.” It wouldn’t hurt, either, to use berry jams to finish a classic school dinner traybake sponge: “Once it’s out of the oven, top with jam then scatter with desiccated coconut.” Otherwise, Ebuehi says, joy can be found in a nostalgic jam tart or Italian crostata (look out for Ebuehi’s blackberry version next week).
