A very simple and rustic cake with a moist center and a crumbly topping. Red Currant Cake is an easy and gorgeous summer dessert! Easily prepared with fresh currants during harvesting season, or with frozen currants throughout the winter months!
Let me tell you about this cake! It is a super moist and delicious cake with a crunchy topping. I picked right in our new backyard! Yes!! This Red Currant Cake is the first recipe of four in my Red Currant Series.
A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!
This might be like a broken record for some of you who read the posts here at Lord Byron’s Kitchen religiously, but we are so excited it’s worth putting it out there again. Back in early June, John.e and I purchased our first home. It’s a country home, which has been a constant dream of ours for the past five or six years.
Again, you might have read that little tidbit in a past post or two as well. The home is 160 years old, which means that it’s got a lot of flaws, but none too severe it scared us away. We look at the flaws as slight imperfect perfections. It’s got so much character and I can’t wait to show it to all of you!
The home is located in a very small town about three and a half hours drive east of Toronto. It’s quite the hike every time we leave the city behind for the weekend, but once we get there, it’s all worth it. When I say a very small town, I mean it. I would have to guess that there’s less than 100 people and about 20 homes at rough count.
IT’S ALMOST COMPLETE ISOLATION, BUT NOT QUITE!
There’s no grocery store, no corner store, no post office, no bank, no school, etc. There’s just one church, which is quite the difference from the Newfoundland town I grew up in, which had four or five churches, depending on the year.
We certainly got more than we bargained for when we started out to find our dream home. With the exception of living on an isolated farm, or off the grid completely, I don’t think we could purchase a home anywhere less populated!
I’ll talk more about the house in future posts, and most surely I’ll talk about it (and post a million pictures!) in my Annual Christmas Posts. Again, Dear Reader, if you’ve been following along at Lord Byron’s Kitchen for sometime, you’ll know of my love for Christmas and you may have read through one of my Christmas posts.
And, yes, in true Lord Byron fashion, I’m already planning ahead for the 2019 Christmas season. We’ve got a brand new theme this year and a lot more space to decorate, since we’ll be spending Christmas in our new home.
RED CURRANT BUSHES AND A FEW OTHER SURPRISES!
But, alas, this post is about this Red Currant Cake. Once the weather became warmer, we were surprised to find that our new home came with a little garden with rhubarb, apples, and yes – lots of red currants. I just got around to picking them and there were more than I knew what to do with. The result is this cake recipe and three more recipes to come over the next few days.
Red Currant Cake was inspired by my Lemon Cream Cheese Coffee Cake and my Old Fashioned Rhubarb Cake. I wanted a rustic, old fashioned cake, but I also wanted a crumb topping – something with a lot of soft, moistness in the center, but a firmer, crunchy, crumbly top to add texture.
Of course, my Red Currant Cake is not exactly like either one of them, but I did draw inspiration from the two. The really cool thing about this cake is that if you don’t have fresh currants available, you can use just about any fresh berry. Blueberries immediately come to mind; they would be great in this recipe. I think it would be best to use berries with an outer skin, so that they hold up better in the cake without completely breaking down.
Like red currants, black currants would work and so would goose berries. If you can get your hands on some fresh goji berries, they would be great in this cake recipe as well!
Lastly, unlike the photographs, where I opted to garnish and serve the cake with fresh red currants and a dusting of confectioner’s sugar, I would recommend a scoop of good vanilla ice cream. (We were completely out, which is an extreme rarity in the Thomas-Ewing household!)
Red Currant Cake
Ingredients
For the Cake:
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup butter, softened
- 2 large eggs
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups red currants
For the Crumb Topping:
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1/4 cup brown sugar, lightly packed
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup quick oats
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 cup red currants, optional
Instructions
For the Cake:
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prepare a 9 inch spring-form cake pan by greasing it with butter. Set aside.
- In a large mixing bowl, using a hand-held mixer, beat together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy (about 3-4 minutes.)
- Add the eggs, vanilla extract, and milk. Beat into the sugar and butter mixture until just incorporated. Set aside.
- In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add this mixture to the wet ingredients and beat until just mixed together.
- Add the red currants and fold into the batter with a rubber spatula.
- Pour into prepared spring-form cake pan and set aside.
For the Crumb Topping:
- Add all ingredients (with the exception of the red currants) to a bowl and mix together with your hands, pressing the butter into the other ingredients until a crumbly mixture has formed.
- Loosely crumble this mixture over the cake.
- Top with the remaining 1/4 cup red currants. (Optional)
- Bake for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
- Once you remove the cake from the oven, it is very important to leave the cake in the pan. Place the pan onto a wire cooling rack. Leave the cake to cool for 30 minutes. Remove the cake from the pan and allow to fully cool before serving.
Patti L. says
Hello again. Happy you and John E. love your country home! We have abundance of huckleberries in PNW (USA) and I bet this cake recipe will accomodate them well, July or August. The huckleberres are growing upon dead Cedar tree stumps as ‘hosts’ and throughout the forest near Snohomish WA. Thank you again. Stay safe , stay home, stay well in these days of :conefinement”.
byronethomas@gmail.com says
Thank you, Patti. 🙂 We are staying put. You stay safe too!
Melanie says
Our red currants are just ripening. I’d like to try this recipe. My husband & I don’t need that much cake. Could I halve the recipe & bake it in a buttered loaf pan?
Myrlee says
Just ate the last piece! Yummy, used black currants. It is similar to a rhubarb cake recipe I have. I’m just learning what to do with my black currants, this is lovely. Thank you, I will make again.
Liz says
Hi, This recipe looks delicious and I would like to make it, it it seem impenetrable due to the ingredients being in cup. I would love it if you put your ingredients in grams as well as cups – for us Europeans 😊
Joanne says
Would appreciate metric measures for us Europeans ! Hopefully it will come out ok …🤞🤞
Kaslyna says
US|METRIC
16 SERVINGS
250 grams all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
200 grams sugar
114 grams butter (softened)
2 large eggs
118 ml milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
224 grams red currants
57 grams butter (softened)
36 grams brown sugar (lightly packed)
50 grams sugar
31 grams all-purpose flour
41 grams quick oats
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
28 grams red currants (optional)
I hope this helps! 😊
Liz Power says
Many thanks for the conversion! I made the cake for our community cafe and a customer sadi it was the best cake he ever tasted!
Ola says
I tried it last week and it came out great and very delicious. Thanks for sharing your recipe.
Kim says
Byron, I have never really had the opportunity to use red currants. This cake looks like a great way to try them out. The crumbly topping makes for a great finish.
Karen MacLean says
wow! i made this with our currants from the freezer and it was a smash hit! i used kefir instead of milk, because that’s what i had. the kids had vanilla ice cream because they think the red currants are too ‘strong’ (dh and had it plain, yum), and we are already thinking of trying it with rhubarb from the garden in a few months.
byronethomas@gmail.com says
Oh, I love the idea of adding rhubarb. My rhubarb plants didn’t do too well last year. Let’s hope I can get a good harvest this summer!
Mr David Shaw says
Made this cake with our abundance of redcurrants from our allotment, waiting for it to cool before I get stuck in. Just took time to work out cups to grams.
Geoff Turner says
To stop the/any berries from sinking, dust in a little flour, which helps them to stick to the cake mix.
cameron says
amazing recipe am tried it last night its full of LOL
You made my day
Thank you so much
Damian says
Can you freeze the cake please
byronethomas@gmail.com says
Yes, it can be frozen.
Anne says
Made it according to the recipe- it is delicious! Definitely worth repeating! The boys being on vacation, I’ll have to bring leftovers to work tomorrow… I’ll make more people happy 😁
Joanne Benkoski says
I made this yesterday. My topping is not white like yours. I will serve this later today. Needed to do something with the currants so will let you know how it goes over with guests.
Blanca says
Looks delicious!
Lara Shekhtman says
My family really liked this recipe that we tried for the first time. The only thing I changed was to cut the sugar in half, which is what I always do when I make baked goods. 🙂 Thank you for the recipe!