Fall favorites like Jenna’s Harvest Soup feature roasted garlic, pumpkin, and nutmeg flavors.
| Prep Time: | 25 mins |
| Cook Time: | 40 mins |
| Total Time: | 1 hr 5 mins |
| Servings: | 12 |
| Yield: | 1 to 3 – layer cake |
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 2 cups white sugar
- 8 eggs
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 2 tablespoons water
- 2 cups seedless blackberry jam
- 3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 ½ teaspoons ground cloves
- 2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
- 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 cup chopped black walnuts (Optional)
- ½ cup golden raisins (Optional)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease three 8 or 9 inch round cake pans and set aside.
- In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, mixing until each one is blended in. Dissolve the baking soda in the water; stir into the batter along with the blackberry jam. Combine the flour, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt; stir into the batter by hand, alternating with the buttermilk. Fold in the black walnuts and raisins if using. Divide the batter equally between the three pans, and spread in an even layer.
- Bake in the preheated oven until the top of the cakes spring back when lightly touched, about 35 minutes. Cool in the pans until cool enough to handle, then invert the cakes over a wire rack and remove pans to cool completely.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 685 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 107 g |
| Cholesterol | 166 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 3 g |
| Protein | 12 g |
| Saturated Fat | 11 g |
| Sodium | 583 mg |
| Sugars | 73 g |
| Fat | 26 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
This recipe is from a Better Homes and Garden cookbook. It’s a lovely cake but a bit too spicy as written. Worth a try if you know how to edit spice.
Made a half recipe with orange marmalade, currants, and walnuts, baked in a bundt pan for 40 minutes. Basted with orange glaze (juice of 1 orange and 1/4 cup sugar) while it was warm. DELICIOUS. I could see this going well with cream cheese frosting as a layer cake, and it would make a good holiday cake with all the spices.
I loved it. I think I need to double the walnuts and golden raisins. Family loved it
Delicious
A great recipe for this old Kentucky favorite. My mom and my aunt have had a jam cake rivalry for decades, and this one beats both their recipes. Wonderful.
I have big fig tree in my yard, but I don’t like figs. So I make fig preserves every summer…but can never eat all of them. This was a great way to use them up! I left out the raisins and walnuts (personal preference) and cut the recipe in half. I made a two layer cake, with more preserves as the filling. Unlike some other reviewers, I didn’t find the cake to be too sweet – I imagine sweetness can vary a bit depending on your preserves or jam.
An excellent, rich jam cake! I followed the recipe in all regards except for the quantity of buttermilk- I used 3/4 cup and replaced the remaining 1/4 cup with Bourbon. I’m a Kentucky girl, what can I say? Will definitely make this again! I’ll be trying it with elderberry preserves next time.
My family and I really enjoyed this cake and found it as described. It does not taste like blackberry jam; however, the jam does impart a very unique flavor to the cake, especially alongside the spices, and also adds to the texture of the cake, which is quite dense, but not heavy or leaden. Also to be mentioned is that the next day, the cake tasted even better, the flavors melded, were enhanced and the cake was very moist. I think next time I will make it the night before and store it. NOTE: It makes a ton of batter, enough for two bundt cakes, so I recommend halfing the recipe or making two cakes. In American recipes, I always half the sugar (1 cup), which I did with this recipe. Especially with the jam, which has loads of sugar in it anyway. The sweetness was perfect. I also substituted 1 cup of toasted pecans, because we do live in the south where they are plentiful and reasonably priced. I omitted the raisins. I dusted the finished cake with powdered sugar and garnished with fresh blackberries. Also, had some canned whipped topping for each plate. Very elegant. I would recommend this cake as it tastes delicious and unique, plus it makes a beautiful presentation. (I have posted a pic.) Thanks to Amy and her gramma for this traditional recipe !
I am not a big fan of spice cakes, but they are my hubby’s fav. I made this for his birthday today and it filled my whole house with its delicious scent while baking. We just both had a piece and it was very good! I used seeded jam because it is all I had. Also, I did not have real buttermilk, so I put a tbs of white vinegar in a cup of regular milk. I made sort of a butter cream – cream cheese frosting. I cut the recipe into 9 servings because I only had 6 eggs. It still made 3 nice round layers, but I had to cut the bake time down to about 22 minutes. Will definitely be making this again. 🙂
What an exceptional cake! It was tender and flavorful. My husband loves spice cake and he loved this. The only thing I did that I will change the next time around is to use seedless blackberry jam, as the recipe specifies. I had jam with seeds in it and thought it would be ok. It was… but the seeds were throughout the cake, and crunched. Would have been better without. Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful recipe. I am making it for the second time this weekend, and had to take a moment to comment on how incredible it is.
I hate to tell you this but my grandmother made that exact same cake more than 60 years ago in Arkansas. I don’t know where she got the recipe but I have it and I have loved it all these years including the black walnuts.
This is an exceptionally good spice cake. However, the blackberry really didn’t come through with so much clove and nutmeg added. The jam’s real purpose seems only to be to moisten the cake. For that you could just use applesauce as a cheaper alternative. For my second attempt, I drastically reduced the amount of clove and nutmeg, to 1/2 tsp each, and added 4 tbsp of blackberry liquor. Both cakes got rave reviews but the second was more “blackberry”, IMHO. As a side note, I frosted the first cake with cream cheese icing and found it to be way to sweet for my taste. My family ended up just scraping the icing off. Also, for both cakes, I spread blackberry jam between the layers. Finally, as with most fruit and vegetable based cakes and breads, this gets better with age.
A very nice cake! Not too dry at all – just right. I scaled your recipe by 3/4 and, as it baked, it rose to fill two 9 x 1.5 pans. I buttered and floured the pans well, but it still stuck a bit. I will use parchment paper next time. I boiled a can of sweetened condensed milk to make dulce de leche and used that as my topping – came out great! Thank you for the recipe.
This is an excellent cake recipe — very moist and full of flavor. I used fresh nutmeg, which was a nice fresh touch to it. The cake was very dense, but the three layers was a nice contrast to the density. I used a caramel frosting, which was nice, but I think it would also be great with a cream cheese frosting, and think I would prefer the tang of that next time. I also subbed chopped dates for the raisins, and you don’t notice them once baked — they just give the cake a nice richness. Did not use the nuts. On one of the inside layers, did a layer of blackberry jam instead of frosting — would recommend that; it was nice. Also, would suggest heating your jam a bit before adding to the batter, if it’s cool out, because I had trouble getting it to blend in; it clumped a bit. Overall, really nice cake!
This is a nice cake. It makes a lot–I made a full bundt cake and 12 cupcakes. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do with it all, so it’s a good thing it tastes good! It is very reminiscent of a spice cake–all those spices really jack up the flavor. I didn’t have blackberry jam, so I used strawberry freezer jam I had made a while ago. I can taste the jam, if only slightly, but it goes well with the other flavors in this cake. I actually had walnuts (we usually don’t have them–bf doesn’t like them) so I tossed those in, along with the raisins. I didn’t use golden raisins, though–just regular. This cake turns out very sweet, so I personally don’t think it needs an icing or glaze at all. I just sprinkled it with powdered sugar and called it a day. Thanks for the recipe!
makes a nice sized sheet cake AND 2 dozen cupcakes!
Great taste. I was curious on this and wanted to try it out for my father-in-laws birthday. This came out similar to what I would consider a spice cake and I did not really taste the jam. Thank you for sharing the recipe and your story about Georgia.
My grandmother, too, was a proud Virginia lady who called her recipes receipts (which is the traditional old English way).She called her jam cakes Tennessee Jam Cake because she had eaten her first one at a wedding there and had requested the recipe from a cousin who had cooked it for the wedding feast. It is entirely correct to call a jam cake, in the south, Tennessee Jam Cake because it is traditionally associated with that state and its long and noble culinary traditions- no matter where it was invented -England has a very similar cake- it is Tennessee Jam Cake! Last word! Tradition rules! Oh yes, I can’t imagine anything but burnt sugar icing on jam cake; by all means try cream cheese, but I think you will go back to caramel. I use cream to keep the burnt sugar from curdling- forget the calories! My grandmother beat the egg whites separately to lighten the cake. Misha
Fabulous cake! I followed the recipe exactly and it was perfect. I frosted it with Caramel Frosting, but think the Cream Cheese Frosting would be yummy too! Maybe next time I’ll try caramel between the layers and Cream Cheese outside the cake — the best of both worlds!
Georgia was my grandmother, but she passed away in January of this year. She was poor and had no access to cookbooks. Of course, there are tons of jam cake recipes out there, but this was her own special recipe, written and modified many times to make good use of the things she had lots of — homemade blackberry jam, walnuts, buttermilk, butter and eggs. I can’t speak for anyone else’s recipe, but my grandma’s special tricks included cutting circles from brown paper, greasing those with butter, and lining her round cake pans to keep the cakes from sticking. She was a phenomenal person.