I wrote earlier this week about how I had a sudden sugar craving and just had to have some cake, stat. And I wanted something quick and something moist and buttery.

So I did something very bad, calorically. I added butter, sugar, ICING SUGAR and full-fat cream to the batter. Quite a bit of it, too. I wanted a moist pillowy sugary cake and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to get one. I knew that icing sugar and butter combined to make something soft and rich and delightful, and I wanted to see what would happen if I added some to cake batter.

I also wanted to bake something I had not baked before, for the sake of posting.

So I thought- now is a good time to use up some of the pomegranate I have lying in my fridge! I didn’t really look for a pomegranate cake recipe; I just made things up as I went along and added the pomegranate to the batter. How difficult could it be?

I made my batter and put it to bake; and then I started worrying that the copious amounts of cream and butter I used, might make my cake fall. But I prayed that the baking powder and eggs would bring some extra ammo and let everything rise.

And rise it did.

Except- my pomegranate arils sank to the bottom. (Dear readers, do you know how to avoid this? When I baked a chocolate chip cake previously, I was met with a similar problem.)

And they bled. (Which was expected.)

But they also turned blue!

Well, a purplish blue.

Oh, who am I kidding, that’s the same colour as a bruise on an injured arm.

But I can vouch for one thing- this cake is moist and buttery and soft and delicious. Even with blue pomegranate!

BUTTERY VANILLA-POMEGRANATE CAKE

INGREDIENTS

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3 tablespoons icing sugar (you can leave this out if you wish. No pressure.)
• 1/3 cup butter at room temperature
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup cream
• 1/4 cup pomegranate arils (yes, the translucent ruby-coloured little things are called arils! I was going to call them kernels but decided to check.)

METHOD

• Pre-heat your oven to 180 C
• Combine the flour, white sugar, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl and keep aside.
• Lightly whisk egg, cream and vanilla extract together in a small bowl and keep aside.
• Beat the butter into the dry ingredients, a third at a time, until the mixture resembles fine bread crumbs.
• Add the egg-vanilla-cream mixture and continue beating.
• Add in the 3 tablespoons of icing sugar and beat some more, till the batter becomes light and kind of fluffy. Do not overbeat. You want slightly fluffy, not meringue fluffy.
• Fold in your your pomegranate.
• Pour into greased loaf pan or baking dish and bake at 180 C for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick or knife inserted comes out clean.

So this cake is really an accidental pomegranate upside-down cake, because the arils sank to the bottom when I did not intend for them too. But who cares? Not like the search engines can sue me. Or can they?