Lundulph's Birthday Cake 2016

We were away for Lundulph's birthday this year, so his cake couldn't be anything fancy at all. I've been wanting to make lemon drizzle cake for some time now and after fining Mary Berry's recipe here, I thought it was simple enough to do while coping with a massively outdated and insufficiently furnished kitchen in the holiday flat where we stayed.

There were no scales available, so I went to my trusty website for cookery conversions and converted as much as I could into volume. There were no spoon/decilitre measures either, so I sort of guessed at those as well using the mad selection of odd cutlery available. We even had to buy a baking tin, luckily these come cheap. So below are the amounts I believe I used.

Also to add, Mary's recipe called for one and a half large eggs. I find this to be an unreasonable thing to state. Although this was briefly mentioned by Ghalid Assyb at the patisserie master class I attended a few years ago, if a recipe calls for half an egg, use just the yolk. I disagree, not good enough. But the eggs we had were medium size, so I guessed that 2 medium eggs would correspond to one and a half large ones, so problem solved.

Ingredients

2 medium eggs
12 tbsp self-raising flour
7 tbsp caster sugar
6 ¼ tbsp salted butter at room temperature + butter for greasing
¾ tsp baking powder
finely grated zest from one small lemon
4 ½ tbsp caster sugar
juice from one small lemon

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 °C and grease a 1-pound loaf tin and line with baking paper.
2. Beat together eggs, flour, caster sugar, butter, baking powder and lemon zest until smooth and fluffy.
3. Pour into the tin and bake in the middle of the oven for about 35 minutes, until golden brown on top and shrinking away from the sides.
4. While the cake is still baking, make the lemon drizzle by mixing the second lot of caster sugar with the lemon juice.
5. when the cake is done, remove from the oven and use a fork to make holes over the top surface.
6. Give the drizzle a stir, as the sugar will sink to the bottom, then spoon as evenly as possible over the cake and leave to soak in.
7. Once the liquid has soaked in, lift the cake out with the baking paper and once completely cooled, remove the paper as well and serve.

In addition to not having ways to reliably measure the ingredients, there was also another thing missing - an electric whisk or mixer. Luckily Lundulph very kindly volunteered and whisked the whole caboodle by hand and did a massively fine job of it too! The cake turned out really fluffy and light, wonderful texture. Annoyingly the lemon drizzle didn't quite work. Perhaps I poured it too soon after removing the cake from the oven, I don't know, but it was very sour and I don't think the syrup was enough, it didn't feel like it anyway. In fact, I think an orange drizzle cake would work a lot better. Lundulph and his Mum both reckon there should have been additional icing on top - the slightly see-through thin stuff. We didn't have icing sugar, so skipped this and it wasn't mentioned in Mary Berry's recipe. Perhaps it would have made a difference, I'll have to do more research. But would be great if I can achieve this level of fluffiness in the future too, it was so nice.

I'm not sure what that slightly darker spot in the middle is, it didn't taste differently to the rest of the cake and I'm pretty sure the cake was thoroughly baked through. Still, I must have hit the measurements relatively well, because I did end up with a cake.