I have just made the easiest three-ingredient fruit sponge cake ever. It’s a recipe that has been floating around the internet for a little while, and enjoyed a resurgence when a mum posted her creation in an Aldi’s mums facebook group.

I first saw the recipe on the foodie blog, Love, Shoes and Cupcakes which combines a simple vanilla cake mix with a drained tin of fruit. The Aldi mum upped the ante, by adding a layer of custard in the centre of the cake – transforming a simple cake into a sublime dessert.

I used a Greens Vanilla butter cake mix for the base – but you can really use any kind of plain vanilla cake mix. I had a tin of pears in fruit juice in the cupboard so I used this as the fruit ingredient. You can really use any kind of fruit you want. Apple works beautifully, but you can even experiment with fruit salad or pineapple.

No need for any butter, oil, milk, sugar, flour or anything else. This recipe is as simple as draining the tinned fruit really well and then mixing the fruit with the cake mix in a bowl. I added a dash of cinnamon to the mix, as I just love cinnamon with anything.

Add Custard For An Extra Treat

The custard is actually optional and the original recipe simply mixed the fruit and cake mix and then added this to a cake tin and baked. However, we’re big custard fans in our house and we often have a big bowl of homemade custard in the fridge (I use my thermomix to make my never-fail custard but you can just buy a thickened custard from the shops). I added half the cake and fruit mixture to the greased baking tin, then a layer of custard, followed by the rest of the cake mixture.

The only issue I found was that there wasn’t enough cake mix leftover to cover the cake so the finished result was more like a crumble rather than a fruit sponge cake. But it was still absolutely delicious – moist, custardy, cakey, fruity – just YUM!

Perhaps next time, I would use two boxes of cake mix instead, if I wanted to produce a more authentic fruit sponge cake.