Grape Harvest Cake

I came across this recipe quite by accident last week when looking for recipes to use up a glut of lemons.  I’d never tried grapes in a cake, but when I thought about it, realised it would probably be bloody delicious, so gave it a go yesterday.  Well, yum.  The recipe is taken from Not Quite Nigella, which in turn was borrowed from a NZ wine grower.  It would be great substituted with cherries, raspberries or blackberries, but the grapes are a bit different and really delicious.  I used dark grapes with seeds which pack a bit more flavour, but any grapes would work and this would be the perfect use for grapes that are just a bit too soft to eat.  Pete, this is indeed a moist cake 🙂

Ingredients

¾ cup caster or superfine sugar (I used golden caster)

2 eggs at room temperature

¼ cup lime or lemon olive oil (I used unflavoured olive oil which was fine)

60g butter, melted

½ cup milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

Finely grated zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon

1¼ cup plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

600g grapes (seeds in or out, don’t bother removing the seeds) taken off the stems

2 tbsp icing sugar to serve

Method

Preheat oven to 160C.  Grease and line a 20cm cake tin.

Whisk the sugar and eggs in an electric mixer fitted with a whisk attachment for 5 minutes or so until thick, pale and fluffy.

In a jug, mix the olive oil, melted butter, milk, vanilla and two zests together and in another bowl whisk the flour, baking powder and salt.

Add half the wet mix into the egg and then half the flour mix and fold gently.  Repeat with the remaining half of the wet mix and dry mix.  Then fold in three quarters of the grapes.  Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 15 minutes.

Remove from oven and then place the remaining grapes on top of the cake and bake for a further 60 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.  Allow to cool in the tin and then sprinkle over icing sugar (I didn’t even get this far before we started hoeing in!)