We were recently given a bag of dried apricots and a jar of apricot preserve by Justin’s sister. He’s not too fond of the dehydrated fruit, and we already have tons of jams and jellies in our store cupboard, so I thought it would be best to use them as ingredients in my baking.
A couple of weeks ago, I used some of the conserve in a stuffed French toast recipe. Today, I’ve used both types of apricots to make a glazed apricot cake.
If you use those dark brown, unsulphured (often organic) dried apricots, you may need to cover them in boiling water and leave them to soak for a couple of hours to plump them back up a bit.
I chose to make this cake as a round, but it would work just as well as a loaf cake. However, you may need to adjust the cooking time.
After glazing the top of the still-warm cake, I stuck it back into the oven for a further 5 minutes. Doing this gives the top a lovely, shiny sheen.
Click here or on the image below to save my glazed apricot cake recipe to Pinterest for later
Glazed apricot cake
Ingredients
- 200 g/7oz caster sugar
- 240 g/8½oz unsalted butter softened
- 3 eggs
- 90 g/3oz plain flour
- 210 g/7½oz self-raising flour
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 150 g/5¼oz dried apricots
- 2 heaped tsps apricot conserve/jam
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 150ºC fan/325ºF/Gas mark 3
- Grease & line a 20cm/8" round cake tin
- In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter
- In a jug, whisk the eggs. Add to the sugar and butter mixture in 3 batches, combining well each time (if the mixture looks like it's going to curdle, simply stir in a tablespoon or two of the plain flour)
- In a medium-sized mixing bowl, sift together the flours and bicarbonate of soda
- Fold in this dry mixture into the wet mixture
- Roughly chop the dried apricots and stir them into the mixture
- Spoon the mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 1 hour or until golden brown on the top and a skewer inserted into the middle comes away clean
- Remove from the oven, leaving it in the lined tin
- In a small bowl, stir in a teaspoon or two to the apricot conserve/jam. Warm slightly by pinging in the microwave in 10-second bursts or in a small saucepan over a low heat on the stove-top
- While the cake is still warm (and still in the lined tin), brush the top generously with the apricot glaze
- Put the cake back into the oven for 5-10 minutes to brown the glaze ever so slightly
- Remove the cake from the oven again, put it on a wire rack to cool completely before taking it out of its tin
