Lemon cake
Last Sunday was Limoncello day! After peeling the rind of around 100 lemons we ended up with all these ready to use, rind-free lemons, thus the boys started squeezing and we looked for recipes with lemon juice. In the meantime, the boys prepared a lemon gelee which turned out to be a tangy lemon sorbet rather than a ‘gelee’. The gelatine did not fulfil its function yet the result was superb! Within minutes, they also mixed up some sugar and water to the remaining lemon juice and came up with a lemonade. So from these 100 lemons we produced around 3 large containers of sorbet, 4 litres of lemonade and we had another 4 litres lemon juice left on the scene. What else with the lemon juice?
The group of Limoncello day helpers voted for a lemon cake and as I flipped through my new River Cottage recipe book I came across this Lemon trickle cake… and lemon cake it was!
Lemon trickle cake (recipe taken from River Cottage Every Day)
Ingredients:
Serves 10
- 175g unsalted butter
- 175g caster sugar
- finely grated zest of 3 lemons
- 3 medium eggs
- 175g self-raising flour
- a pinch of sea salt
- a splash of milk
- 200g icing sugar
- 75ml lemon juice
Beat butter and sugar with the electric mixer until pale and fluffy, ideally up to 10 minutes since this will make the cake lighter. Add grated lemon zest and beat the eggs one at a time adding a tablespoon of flour with each egg. Sift the remaining flour and salt, folding lightly into the mixture. Add splash of milk only if necessary to make sure the mixture drops off a spoon easily.
Spoon the mixture into a greased and lined (with baking paper) loaf tin and bake in a preheated 170 degrees Celsius oven for 45- 50 minutes until skewer inserted comes out clean.
Put icing sugar in a bowl and mix with lemon juice stirring until the mixture is smooth. Make lots of deep holes in the cake with a skewer and pour the icing on top so the cake soaks in. Leave to cool, remove from tin and serve.
The cake vanished in less than 60 seconds!
[caption id=”attachment_1289" align=”aligncenter” width=”500" caption=”Lemon cake”]
[/caption]
