Friday 8 July 2011

Lemon drizzle cake



Unfortunately this cake is not much to look at, but that's essentially because it is a traybake rather than a cake in the traditional sense. In any case, the taste makes up for its boring look!

I decided to make a lemon drizzle cake as it's my friend Eley's birthday tomorrow, and cake at work on your birthday is a must. I also made some chocolate brownies (new recipe, post to follow!) as Laura who we also work with celebrates her birthday this weekend too, and I wanted to make sure there was enough to go around. I knew Eley likes lemon drizzle cake but as it turned out, this is also Laura's favourite cake so it was a good choice all round!

The recipe was one I'd found in Good Food magazine a while ago and kept as it looked a) simple and b) yummy. My judgement was right on both counts! The recipe is a simple cake, full of lemon zest for flavour (butter, sugar, SR flour, milk, baking powder, eggs and lemon zest) and to make it even tastier, a lemon juice/sugar syrup is poured over the cake whilst it's still warm. It makes the cake moist and gives it a slightly crunchy topping.

This is a definite keeper - yummy, light cake (and dare I say it, a nice change from chocolate!).

3 comments:

  1. My mum often makes lemon drizzle cake. There are a number of recipes for it in different recipe books, though I think most of them are pretty identical. There are only so many ways to bake a cake... It does make an excellent change from the standard chocolate or vanilla sponge cakes, and with the lemon syrup "drizzled" on it can have quite a strong lemon flavour and is really moist which is good. If I remember correctly you can also do a similar thing with lime and coconut where you put the coconut and lime zest in the cake mixture and then pour a lime syrup on the top and sprinkle the top with coconut to decorate it.

    For your photo I'd have chopped it up and presented it stacked on the plate to make it look slightly more appealing and try to show the moistness of the cake. However since you were taking it to work the next day you probably didn't want to slice it up at home just to take a photo for your blog, so feel free to ignore that comment!

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  2. Haha, to be honest I only just remembered as I was leaving for work that I hadn't taken a photo - hence the very plain photo! I wouldn't have cut it up anyway since I was taking it to work, but you're definitely right - for a proper 'foodie' photo it would have looked best chopped and stacked.

    Lime and coconut sounds good!

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  3. Oh and the recipes probably will be quite similar - I guess what will change most is cooking time, depending on whether you're making a wider, lower traybake cake (like mine) or a taller loaf or birthday style cake.

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