Nectarine Blueberry Lemon Sponge

This week, the nectarines were on sale at my local supermarket (a kilo for one euro), so of course I took advantage of that! When me and my friends made sangria on Friday, we added one nectarine, which was very tasty, and I figured I could use some of the rest of them for a nice, summery cake.

I settled on a sponge, and decided to add some blueberries and lemon juice as well (as I still had a lemon lying around). This was my first bake since my vacation started, and you have no idea how much fun it was to have all the time in the world for this recipe! I just sat behind my computer with a cup of tea this morning and scrolled through some recipes to get inspiration. Then I slowly figured out the best ingredients and amounts, and after some fine-tuning I went to the supermarket to get the last few ingredients and got to baking after lunch. I took my time. It was wonderful.

About an hour ago I took the first bite of this sponge and it is so delicious! I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do if you decide to make it. It made my day, perhaps it’ll make yours!

You’ll need…

– 100 g butter

– 100 g white caster sugar

– 2 eggs

– 100 g plain flour

– ½ teaspoon baking powder

– ¼ teaspoon vanilla flavouring

– 2½ tablespoon lemon juice

– 2 nectarines, diced (not too small, though!)

– 100 g blueberries

– optional, for decoration: another nectarine, a few extra blueberries and some lemon zest

– a springform tin (20 cm)

– parchment paper

– and an oven, of course! This sponge needs to be baked at 180 °C (don’t forget to preheat your oven!)

So, let’s get baking!

1. Mix together butter and sugar First of all, you need to mix the butter and the sugar together, until it’s nice and fluffy. As you guys might know, I usually melt my butter, but I didn’t do so this time (it was soft, though).

2. Add eggs and half of the flour Next up, add the eggs one by one. Also add half of the flour while adding the eggs, and mix eveything together. I used a spoon for this, by the way, but you could use a whisk or handheld electric mixer as well. I wouldn’t use a free-standing mixer though, since this batter needs a lot of air in it.

3. Add rest of flour, baking powder, vanilla and lemon juice Now, you need to fold in the rest of the flour, the baking powder, the vanilla flavouring and the lemon juice (I used a fresh lemon for this). You have to stir all this together well, and make sure as much air as possible gets into the mixture.

4. Add the fruit! The last thing you need to do is add the blueberries and the diced nectarines to your mixture, and mix them through it. You’ll probably get all hungry now because of the rich scent of the nectarines. Yummy!

5. Bake the sponge Line the base of your springform tin with some parchment paper, and grease the tin as well. Now it’s time to pour your batter into the tin and smooth it out before putting it in the oven. The sponge needs to be baked for about 30 minutes. It should be slightly golden brown on top, and an inserted skewer should come out clean (except if you hit a blueberry or nectarine of course).

Let the cake cool for a while before taking it out of the tin. If you want, you can decorate it like I did for picture taking or presenting purposes, but it tastes incredible without it as well!

And that’s it for this Nectarine Blueberry Lemon Sponge! I hope you enjoy!