Strawberry Ice Cream Soda & Buttermilk Cake

With the warm weather that we've been having, this strawberry ice-cream soda was a deliciously lazy way of cooling down. Equally lazy ways include turning on the air-conditioner but where's the fun in that?

I had made a batch of strawberry ice-cream a couple of days back, together with some raspberry sauce to go with a buttermilk cake (see pic below). Inspired by the Kiwi-Pop in Changing Appetites, I stirred 3 tablespoons of my homemade raspberry sauce with 3 tablespoons of heavy cream in a tall glass (whipping it slightly), poured in chilled Schweppes soda water and happily enjoyed watching my soda grow until it overflowed onto the kitchen counter, at which point it stopped being fun. Caution for future sodas: pour soda in sl..ow..ly.. My scoop of strawberry ice-cream went on top, but I believe I was a little heavy-handed with size of scoop - by the time I located camera, my ice-cream was sinking!

The buttermilk cake with raspberry sauce comes from Bill Granger's Bill's Food. It's a light buttery cake (not too rich in taste that you'll immediately worry about calories) and the pairing with the sweet tarty raspberry sauce gives the cake a really nice additional lift. Adding that one cup of buttermilk (replacing, of course, the usual quarter or half cup of milk) and an additional half cup of flour (total of 2 cups) to an ordinary butter-cake recipe (125g unsalted butter to 250g caster sugar) made quite a lot of difference to the texture of the cake. The raspberry sauce is simple: dissolve half a cup of sugar in a quarter cup water with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and cook for a few minutes before adding 200g raspberries and cooking for a couple more minutes. Puree and sauce is ready for use when cooled.