When I was growing up, I remember eating these small, square butter cakes dusted with powdered sugar and berries on top. My mother used to make them from a recipe that was given to her by an acquaintance and they were so good that I would eat 2-3 of them in one sitting. When I saw plump blackberries at my local market, I thought of those light, fluffy butter cakes from long ago and decided to make them with blackberry sauce.

Tableware

I took out my vintage blue bread plates, “Old Britain Castles” by Johnson Brothers. Deep purple blackberries against the blue and white colors of these plates look beautiful together and thought they’re perfect match. Johnson Brothers as a brand no longer exists, but there are many vintage or antique pieces still available today. My pieces were purchased from a seller on Etsy.

Another reason I wanted to make these small cakes was so I can stack them and put them in my cake tin. This is more of a kitchen accessory, but I saw this vintage style tin at Williams-Sonoma store one year and just fell in love with it. Unfortunately until now, it has never been used to store cake or cakes of any kind. I have been using it as a biscuit tin and it’s been sitting in a corner of my kitchen.

I’m using a small tankard made by Burleigh to hold extra blackberry sauce. This is a British pottery manufacturer based in Stoke-on-Trent, where they have been creating beautiful tableware pieces since 1851. Pattern for this tankard is called Blue Asiatic Pheasant and it’s one of my favorite Burleigh patterns.

Blackberry Sauce

I used 4 cups of blackberries to make my sauce which was more than enough for baking so I served my cakes with extra blackberry sauce. Making blackberry sauce is very easy, just be sure not to crush the berries before hand or while it’s cooking. You would want the berries to remain mostly intact, that way your cake would look more beautiful with whole berries baked on top. You also get bites of fresh juicy blackberries.

Let the berries cook over low heat, with sugar and lemon juice. In about 20-25 minutes, juice from your blackberries will thicken and that’s when you can remove from the heat and let it cool.

Butter Cake

It’s been many years since I had this cake and unfortunately when I asked my mother for the recipe, she couldn’t find it anymore and she did not remember how she made them. The only thing she remembered about this cake was using whipped butter as one of the ingredients. So I ended up experimenting for a while and after several attempts at baking this cake, I think I finally got very close to what I ate as a child.

I wanted to make the cake recipe simple and easy as possible mostly for my own sanity so there’s no need for baking powder, milk or the need to separate eggs. You only need 5 ingredients to make this cake batter and you start by whipping the whipped butter for 2 minutes. This is what makes your butter cake so light and fluffy.

After you add your sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and flour, you will end up with a smooth but sticky batter. I transfer the batter to my ungreased glass baking dish (10″x 15″) and make the batter flat and even across the dish. This may take few minutes because as I said, the batter is sticky. Then take your blackberry sauce and place it on top of your cake. When I cut my cake, I want to see a pattern of blackberries and cream colored part of the cake on top, so I don’t cover my cake completely with the sauce.

Biscuit Cutter

To stack them in my cake tin, I decided round cakes would fit better than squares, so I used a biscuit cutter to cut perfectly round cakes. I found a set of biscuit cutter on Amazon and used a largest cutter in the set (2.75 inch diameter). Using this cutter, I was able to cut out 12 small cakes which was perfect size for my bread plates. What’s great about this set is that it comes in 4 different sizes so any remaining areas of the cake, you can use the smaller 1.5 inch diameter biscuit cutter and cut out mini cakes.

If you don’t have biscuit cutters and you don’t care if your cakes are round, you can just cut them in squares. These cakes will taste delicious no matter what their shape is.

As a final touch, I dusted some powdered sugar on the cakes, spread some extra blackberry sauce onto my plates and placed each cake on the sauce. You can enjoy your butter cakes with or without the sauce. I definitely enjoyed mine with sweet and tart blackberries soaking the bottom of my cake.

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