Yotam Ottolenghi’s Brown Sugar Cake with Brown Sugar Cream

Yotam Ottolenghi’s new cookbook, Ottolenghi SIMPLE TOO, brings his signature bold flavours to 135 recipes designed for everyday cooking. Each dish has simplicity at its core, whether it can be made in under 30 minutes, cooked in one pot or prepared ahead.

Brown sugar cake with brown sugar cream
Serves 8
Prep time: 10 minutes
Bake time: 35 minutes
Ingredients

3 eggs
225g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar
150g plain flour
¾ tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
150g unsalted butter, melted and warm
75g crème fraîche
icing sugar, to serve (optional)
Brown sugar cream
200ml double cream
200g crème fraîche
1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
50g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar

An ingredient can easily sit in the pantry forever, before we suddenly rediscover it and see it in a new light. Here it’s dark brown soft sugar, which we have always loved but have never made a concerted effort to build a whole cake around, using its deeply unique toasty notes and the sugary moisture that it holds within. It does, however, make the cake sink in the middle ever so slightly, but we don’t mind – once it’s topped with cream no one will ever know!

The brown sugar cake and cream are pretty perfect as they are, but they are truly completed by adding sumac roasted strawberries (opposite); 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.

Keeping notes: 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.

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan.

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.

Transfer the mix to a 23cm round cake tin (bottom and sides lined with parchment paper) and bake for 30–35 minutes, until springy to the touch. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a wire rack.

For the cream, put everything into the bowl of a stand mixer and whisk to soft peaks.

Remove the cake from the tin and put on a serving plate, dollop the cream on top, sprinkle with icing sugar, if using, and serve.

Sumac roasted strawberries

Serves 6–8
Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Ingredients

600g strawberries, hulled and halved
1½ tbsp sumac
5g mint sprigs
1 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
70g dark brown soft or muscovado sugar

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 everyday granola. They also go especially well as a topping for the brown sugar cake (opposite).

These are best eaten on the day they’re made, as they lose their vibrant colour after a few hours.

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C fan.

Put everything 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.

Recipe extracted from Ottolenghi SIMPLE TOO by Yotam Ottolenghi and Verena Lochmuller, published by Penguin Random House Australia, RRP $69.99.