The Cake With No Leftovers

Annie makes this cake for every birthday in the family, and it never once makes it to a second day. Not because anyone's being polite about it — because the whole point of the thing is that it can't hang about. Once it's cut, the sorbet on top starts to soften into the cream, and by the next morning what was a cake is just a very good mess in a tin. So everyone knows: you eat your slice tonight, or you miss your chance.

The base is Annie's version of Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Cloud Cake — a dense, flourless chocolate cake, more like a set mousse than a sponge, that cracks on top and stays soft and almost molten in the middle. Nigella's original has a good glug of Cointreau and orange running through it. Annie leaves both out, because once you start adding raspberry sorbet and passion fruit on top, there's already plenty going on, and the orange starts to fight rather than help.

What she adds instead is very much the Baboo way of doing things: a proper scoop of Raspberry sorbet, made with real raspberries and nothing else doing the flavour's work; a generous amount of squirty cream, because a birthday cake shouldn't take itself too seriously; a passion fruit coulis poured over the top so it pools into the cream rather than sitting on top of it; and a scattering of silver balls, because it's a birthday and silver balls are non-negotiable.

The cake underneath is rich and quite dark, closer to a chocolate torte than anything spongey, so it can take the weight of cold sorbet and cream on top without disappearing under them. That's really the trick to any pudding we build around our gelato or sorbet — the base needs enough character to hold its own, not just be a vehicle for something cold. A plain Victoria sponge would go soggy under all that cream and coulis within the hour. This one is built to take it.

And because it's a cake that's genuinely better eaten within hours of being assembled, rather than one you'd keep going back to over a few days, it makes for a proper occasion. You light the candles, everyone has a slice, and that's the cake done. No sad half-eaten cake sitting under clingfilm on the side three days later.

This cake came about because Annie wanted a cake worth stopping for, and once you've got a really good Raspberry sorbet made with proper fruit, it seems a waste not to put it somewhere as good as this. That's more or less the whole Baboo approach in one pudding — take something made properly, and don't overcomplicate what you do with it.

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