Weekly dessert: Fluffy Earl Grey Cake

It’s Iris’s birthday today. She’s a very good friend of mine, a former college roommate and also one of the sweetest girls I know. So I decided to make her a special cake, one that goes well with her warm personality. What can be better than a classy Earl grey cake with white snowy frosting, I thought. So here it is – the fluffy Earl grey cake.

Well, we haven’t got a chance to taste the cake yet, as birthday dinner is tonight, in a Belgium restaurant where they make very juicy mussels and pig knuckles, and we will have the cake as dessert after. I am very looking forward to it.

The recipe is adapted from the Earl Grey tea cake from “the apron archives”

Ingredients:

4 Earl Grey tea bags
1 cup boiling water
1 stick unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups caster sugar

3 large eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almonds (chopped)

A pint of salt

1 tsp of vanilla extract

1 cup whipping cream 

2 tsp caster sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

coconut powder

      The cake

• Pour the boiling water over the tea leaves iand set aside to steep for at least an hour.  Strain the tea and discard the leaves.
• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a cake pan with parchment.  Butter the parchment.
• In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until fluffy.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating the egg into the wet mix.
• Fold in the flour, salt vanilla extract, and almonds.
• Finally, add the tea and mix everything.
• pour the mix into the cake pan and bake for one hour. Test it with a cake tester ( something long and very thin) until you feel the cake is all solid. 
• When done, remove from the oven and cool it completely. 

     Frosting

• Keep the bowl and beater in fridge for at least 30 minutes before beating the cream.
• Pour whipping cream in the bowl and beat at low speed until frothy. 
• Add vanilla extract and sugar gradually. Keep beating until frosting is stable. 
• Coat the cake with cream (important: wait till the cake cools down completely)
• Dust coconut powder on. Be generous!

Enjoy!