Lemon drizzle drenched cake

Written up by mum.

Dan has not had much time to spend cooking since he went back to school after his years of homeschooling. He still asks to help out with peeling and chopping veg but he hasn't had the time or energy to initiate cooking like he used to.

It made us wonder for a moment, perhaps his interest in 'cheffing' was just a phase. He is,after all, only 7 years old. That's quite a young age to have decided your future career path. We've always been careful to encourage and support him but not to be pushy. If his interests change, then we respect that. 

But it did make us smile to see him pick up his cookery books as soon as school was over and the Christmas holidays had started. His love of food and cooking and his talent of sniffing out flavours, herbs and spices started at such a very young age (he was just 3 or 4 at the time) that it does makes us think that he does have a real in-built passion for cookery. Particularly as neither of his parents have any particular skills in this area, his passion has to be a God-given gift. 

He's planned something he wants to cook over Christmas involving white chocolate, so look out for that; but in the meantime we had a whole lot of lemons that needed using up so Daniel and I cooked a triple sized batch of lemon drizzle cake. Granny had been nagging Daniel to cook her something for ages. She liked the look of the New York cheesecake he made or the Panettone. But two problems with that: 1) they both take quite a long time to make (by the time we allow for interruptions from baby sister and autistic big brother, we would have to set aside a whole day for each of those), and 2) Daniel prefers to cook new things he hasn't made before so he hasn't been so keen on making the New York cheesecake or Panettone again.  

So here's the lemon drizzle cake we made. We called it 'Lemon drizzle drenched cake' because we used lots and lots of juice from the lemons.  These quantities are for one cake (20cm-ish circle cake tin or you could use a small loaf tin), but we made three times as much to make three cakes, one for granny, one for a friend and one for us.

Ingredients for the cake:

175g butter or margarine (we used stork)

175g caster sugar 

Zest of 2 unwaxed lemons

3 large eggs

225g self raising flour

Ingredients for the drizzle:

100g caster sugar

Juice from the 2 lemons you used the zest from

(We used an extra lemon to make it extra moist)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees.

2. Line your tin with baking paper. We often both grease and line it but this time we only needed to line it. I think because of the moisture from the drizzle it helps the cake slide out.

3. Beat together 175g caster sugar with the butter or marg and the lemon zest. Then beat in the eggs, with a little of the flour. Add the eggs one at a time and then add a little flour. We also added a bit of lemon juice at this point as we didn't manage to get much zest off the lemons as we don't have a proper zester.

4. Then fold in the rest of the flour. You don't have to be too gentle with the folding. We just used the low setting on the mixer and it was fine.

5. Pour into the cake tin. Bake for 40-45 minutes. Check with a skewer to see when ready (the skewer should come out clean when it is cooked).

6. Whilst the cake is cooking, squeeze out the juice from the lemons. Mix it with 100g caster sugar. We put it next to the oven so it would warm up a bit and stirred it a few times whilst the cake was cooking.

7. When the cake is cooked, and whilst it is still warm, use a skewer to make lots and lots of little holes all over it. Keep the cake in the cake tin!  Then spoon on the drizzle trying to get it into those little holes too. It should soak into the cake making it taste all lemony and yummy.

8. Don't try to remove the cake from the tin yet. Wait until it is completely cooled.

This post was from a few years ago but am linking up with 2016 Great Blogger Bake off hosted by Mummy Mishaps as it was such a tasty lemon drizzle recipe!