Instructions

1. Blend the blueberries and strawberries to a smooth puree on their own, before anything starchy joins them. Berry skins need the blades; cooked rice does not.
2. Tip the puree into a bowl with the rice, applesauce, lemon juice and stevia, and bring it together with a potato masher. Do not use a blender or a mixer for this part — whipped rice releases its starch and sets into glue.
3. Work it for about a minute, no longer. The cake wants whole grains held together by fruit, not a paste, and the grains are what give it the texture it is made for.
4. Scoop it in quarter-cup measures onto drying sheets. Keep every cake the same size, because the smallest one sets the point at which you start burning the largest.
5. Tap each mound four or five times with the masher until it spreads to about 8.9 cm across. Tapping compacts it evenly; pressing squeezes the moisture to the rim and leaves a raised centre.
6. Run the machine at 52 °C, and reckon on 12 hours. Once the cakes release from the sheets without tearing, move them onto the bare trays so the undersides get the same air as the tops.
7. They are finished when a cake is rigid, uniformly coloured, and snaps cleanly if you bend it. Anything that flexes has moisture left in the middle, and berry sugar holds on to moisture more stubbornly than plain rice does.
8. Seal them into canning jars, or vacuum-pack them with an oxygen absorber and put that inside a doubled Mylar bag. Packed like this the cakes are good for five years or more, which is the reason for going to the trouble.
9. To eat one, dip it in boiling water for fifteen seconds — count them, because longer turns it to porridge — and fry it in a spoonful of oil for half a minute a side.