Lemon Drizzle Cake

Anon (see below)

What's left of the lemon drizzle cake 🔗

This came from an old magazine cutting of unidentified origin, so if any author or publisher would like to claim it, please get in touch. The original title was slightly different, but the ingredients and method are unchanged. Baking and serving suggestions are my own.

The cutting says this is ‘the classic lemon cake recipe — fail-safe and incredibly easy to make’. For a cake that’s extra moist and lemony, it recommended making up double the quantity of syrup and saving half for serving.

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Makes 1. Serves 8. Heat your (fan) oven to 160°C. Prep time: 5 minutes. Cooking time: 45 minutes.

Ingredients

Cake

  • 110 g butter
  • 175 g caster sugar
  • 175 g self-raising flour
  • 4 tbsp milk
  • Zest of 1 lemon | grated
  • 2 large eggs
  • pinch salt (see tip)

Syrup

  • Juice of 2 lemons
  • 75 g icing sugar [plus extra for dusting]

Method

  1. Butter a 2lb loaf tin, then line sides and base with greaseproof paper, and butter again.

  2. Put all the cake ingredients in a bowl or mixer and beat for about 3 minutes until well blended.

  3. Pour into the lined and buttered cake tin and bake for about 45 minutes.

  4. Remove from oven and leave in the tin to cool.

  5. Gently warm the lemon juice and icing sugar in a pan until the sugar has fully dissolved.

  6. Prick the cake with a fork or skewer and pour the hot syrup all over.

  7. Leave until the cake is almost cold before turning out. Dust with icing sugar.

Serving

  1. In England they ice the cake with lemon water icing but this is unnecessary if you make more syrup as mentioned above, and dust it liberally with the icing sugar.

  2. The cutting suggested serving slices with double cream.

Instead of greaseproof paper, use silicone parchment or (even better) two loaf-tin liners, one inside the other. Then rather than trying to turn out the (by now) very sticky cake, lift it with the inner liner and peel that off when serving, or just leave it while you cut the cake into slices.

Any timings underlined in red are in addition to the preparation time (eg waiting time)

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