Layer cake

Tam West

This impressive cake is made from a basic butter cake batter, taken up a notch with layers of cream cheese and mascarpone, berries and caramelised walnuts.

Cake

200 g	Butter, diced (Main)
200 g	Caster sugar
4	Eggs
1	Lemon, zested, use the juice in the filling below
½	Vanilla pods, seeds scraped out
200 g	Self raising flour, sifted

Filling

200 g	Cream cheese (Main)
200 g	Mascarpone (Main)
1 Tbsp	Caster sugar
1	Lemon, juiced
1 serving	Berry compote, as much as needed (Main)
1 handful	Walnuts, we roasted ours with honey until caramelised and crushed them (Main)
1 handful	Berries, to decorate top (Main)
1 sprinkle	Icing sugar, for top of cake

Directions

1. Breheat oven to 180C. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, incorporating well after each addition.
2. Add the lemon zest and the vanilla seeds, then fold in flour.
3. Grease a 20cm springform cake tin and line the base with baking paper. Pour in cake mix and bake for 45 minutes until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
4. Once cold, slice the cake horizontally into three and fill with your favourite fillings. We whipped cream cheese and mascarpone caster sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Then we folded a fresh berry compote into half and crushed walnuts (roasted with honey until caramelised) into the other half. We layered the cake with the fillings, and topped it with berries and icing sugar.

More of Warren's butter cake baking

• Basic butter cake
• Stonefruit pudding cake
• Banana blueberry puddings