Port cake and visual songs

Some of the songs I love, besides being great music, are very visual to me – I can picture the scenes as the lyrics go by a lot easier than other songs, it’s like having my very own private video clip inside my head. :)

While listening to “Am I Right?”,“Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” or “The Golden Path”, I can easily imagine all the actions while they’re singing because of all the details; I picture two gentleman having a conversation when Morten Harket sings the first verse of “Manhattan Skyline” – it’s impossible not to.

I could not however imagine what a cake with ½ cup of fortified wine in the batter would be like (in this cake the raisins got boozed up so heavily that there wasn’t much Marsala left to go in the batter), therefore the sherry cake recipe I saw on Delicious magazine got me really curious. I ended up baking it but used Port instead, and the result was a very unusually flavored cake – but not in a fussy way – and so tender it was hard to slice it.

Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but something worth trying at least once, especially if when it comes to cakes all you can picture in your head are the usual suspects like lemon, orange and apple ones. ;)

Port cake
slightly adapted from the always wonderful Delicious UK

225g all purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
125g unsalted butter, softened
125g granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
200ml Ruby Port wine
Icing sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F. Butter a 20cm (8in) square pan, line the bottom with baking paper, butter the paper and dust everything with flour, taping out the excess.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Using an electric mixer, beat together the butter and sugar until fluffy and pale. Beat in the eggs, one by one, then beat in vanilla. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold in half the dry ingredients. Add the wine and fold in along with the remaining dry ingredients (at this poing I wasn’t happy with the consistency of the batter and added 20g all purpose flour).
Pour everything into the prepared cake pan and bake for 35-40 minutes until risen and cooked through (a skewer inserted in the center of the cake should come out clean).
Cool completely in the pan, then carefully turn out, remove the paper and transfer to a serving plate. Dust with icing sugar.

Makes 16 squares