I had a lovely post planned all about this loaf cake – all about baking during the rain break in the Wimbledon final and how it made my house smell like summer, despite the gloomy sky outside my window. Then I actually made the cake and against my better instincts I filled the tin to capacity. The result? Cake over most of my oven and a not particularly fun mess to clean up. Plus I burnt the edges of the cake. What I could salvage was good. Moist and kind of sticky from the berries, light cake forming a vehicle for summer berry excess.

I guess this is a very good example of why you should follow the instructions of a recipe. I’ve become complacent about adapting recipes and this is a sign that I should be paying more attention. The original recipe is on Smitten Kitchen and you can read about it here. Her cake looked lovely but I don’t yet have a bundt tin (I was all set to buy one in New York but I somehow never got around to it, now I have plans to shop for equipment when I’m in Paris and a bundt tin is top of my list) so I figured I would simply bake it in a loaf tin. My initial plan was to bake two smaller loaves but somehow I got all confident and well, you can see the result yourself below. Lesson learned. The only good news is that despite all the chaos and catastrophe, it still tastes good!

Disaster! Chaos in the oven.

And the burnt edges, carefully extracted with a knife.

It doesn’t look so bad this way up.

And it still tastes really good. No aesthetic awards though.