Recipe: White chocolate, ginger and sour cherry biscuit cake from Postal Bakes by Lucy Burton

Recipe of the week from Lucy Burton's book Postal Bakes

This recipe took a few attempts to get right, but I knew I was finally there when I found myself having to post the results to friends to stop me standing and eating it straight from the fridge. It is very rich thanks to the industrial quantities of white chocolate, so I recommend cutting this into bitesize pieces.

For the base

• 400g white chocolate
• 75g ginger syrup (from the jar)
• 100g unsalted butter
• ½tsp fine sea salt
• 250g ginger biscuits
• 150g stem ginger
• 20g freeze-dried sour cherries

For the topping

• 400g good quality white chocolate
• A couple of freeze-dried sour cherries

Line the tin with baking paper, including the sides.

Put the white chocolate, ginger syrup, butter and salt in a heatproof bowl. Set this over a pan of boiled water, off the heat, to melt. White chocolate catches easily and will go grainy if it gets too hot. Stir occasionally to help the process along, but not too often as this can also encourage the chocolate to catch. If you are struggling to melt it, you can put the pan on a low heat for a few minutes and then remove it again, using just the residual heat of the water to melt everything.

Put the biscuits in a big mixing bowl, and use the end of a rolling pin or wooden spoon to break them up. Do this gently, as you want to retain some bigger pieces of biscuit to ensure there is texture. Stop when you have a mixture of biscuit crumb and biscuit pieces.

Finely chop the stem ginger. Add this to the bowl, along with the white chocolate mixture. Stir well until everything is well coated. Add the cherries and stir to mix through.

Decant the mixture into the tin and use a spoon to push it into the corners, levelling as much as you can to create an even surface.

Put in the fridge for two to three hours to set fully.

For the topping melt the white chocolate as you did for the base, then pour over the base mixture and use a spatula to spread it into an even layer. Top with a sprinkling of crushed freeze-dried sour cherry dust. Allow to set hard before slicing.

Shelf life When wrapped in airtight packaging, this will keep well for two weeks.

Substitutions You can use dried sour cherries in this recipe instead of freeze-dried. Pistachios are a nice addition, too.

Posting Wrap a single-layer slab tightly in cellophane and tissue. This is quite sturdy, so can be in a mixed box, or posted on its own in a well-fitted box.