mixed berry and lemon drizzle cake

A fresh, fruity and zingy cake. Perfect for a sunny, socially distanced summer picnic in my mum and dad's garden a few weeks ago.

It's based on this recipe, another classic from BBC Good Food's website which I've baked before. I actually made the original version (with lime) the previous week and thoroughly enjoyed it but then fancied trying it again with lemon instead.

The recipe states to use an 8" square tin but like the previous times I've made it I used a 9" round tin (it holds the equivalent volume) as I find round cakes easier and more pleasing to slice.

Usually I buy fresh berries for baking but this time I used a bag of frozen mixed berries (a mixture of blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and red currants, maybe even blackcurrants?!) as that's what I had to hand. This worked really nicely and was also a lot cheaper. I'll definitely do this again.

And for the first time ever the berries didn't all sink to the bottom. I don't know if this had something to do with using frozen over fresh or the consistency of the batter. Regardless, I did a little happy dance when the cake came out the oven.

As far as I'm concerned this is a complete winner of a cake. It's a decent size too for feeding a family, although no judgement from me if you plan to eat it all yourself. 

coconut and lime drizzle dinosaurs

Admittedly there isn't a huge amount of coconut in this recipe, but there's enough to give a bit of flavour and texture so I felt it was worth including in the title.

But you're not here to question the coconut content are you? You're here because you're excited about dinosaur shaped cakes. DINOSAUR SHAPED CAKES.

Remember the super cool 3D dinosaur biscuit cutters  my friend gave me for Christmas? Well the same friend gave me silicone dinosaur shaped moulds for my birthday last year. She's awesome like that.

Although I have used these a few times, this is the first they've made it on to the blog. Tasty, bite sized dinosaurs sneaking into people's mouths, unphotographed. How dare they!

There was a lonely lime sitting in the fruit bowl this week which presented me with the perfect opportunity for dainty dino drizzle cakes. Drizzle cakes are perfect for little moulds like these as there's no icing to spoil the definition. Ideally I would have preferred two limes as I like my drizzle cakes quite punchy with citrus flavour, but one lime worked fine. 

I added desiccated coconut into the mix as I fancied another flavour and discovered that I *still* had a bag of coconut in the baking cupboard left over from the chocolate and coconut cake I made back in January. I've been working my way through the desiccated coconut stash throughout the year but thought I had finally come to an end last month. Nope. I have no idea what I was thinking buying so much coconut, but I am determined to use it all!

Coconut and lime drizzle dinosaurs

Makes 8 dinosaurs, or a tray of cupcakes, or a loaf. Remember to adjust baking times if you're making a loaf!

 

cake:

125g margarine

125g caster sugar

2 large eggs

zest of 1 lime

100g self-raising flour

25g desiccated coconut

lime syrup/drizzle:

juice of 1 lime

30-50g caster sugar (depends how sweet you want it. I guessed!) 

Preheat the oven to 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4. Spray your moulds with cake release spray and coat with a light dusting of flour (or grease and line your cake tin.) Beat the sugar and margarine together until light and fluffy. Add the first egg and beat well. Put a spoonful of the flour in with the second egg to stop the mixture from splitting. Mix together. Add the lime zest, desiccated coconut and remaining flour and mix until everything is fully combined.

Spoon the mixture  into the dinosaur moulds until 2/3 full and bake on a tray in the oven for 25-30 minutes until well risen, light golden and springy to touch. Just as your cakes are about to come out the oven, combine the lime juice and sugar in a small saucepan. Stir over a gentle heat, allowing some of the sugar to dissolve. Don't let it boil though. 

Leave the cakes to cool in the moulds for a minute before inverting onto a wire rack then immediately pour the warm lime syrup on top of each dinosaur. I sprinkled on a little extra caster sugar as I thought it looked pretty! 

lemon drizzle poppy seed bundt

At times I think my blog could be renamed What Do You Make Of My Lemon Cake? because I bake them so often. As much as I try to use other flavours, I inevitably return to lemon. It's a firm favourite.

There was a pile of lemons sitting in the fruit bowl last week so I searched the interwebz for baking inspiration and landed on this beautiful bundt recipe on Sally's Baking Addiction. It's packed with lemon flavour and different from my usual lemon cakes in that it also contains poppy seeds and buttermilk.

The buttermilk provides a lovely, creamy balance to the punchy, lemon flavour. I also like that it gives the sponge a soft yet weightier texture, which is perfect for bundt moulds. I should use buttermilk more often.

There were two near disasters with this cake though, the first being the lemon soaking syrup. All the ingredients are weighed using American cup measurements so I got a chance to use my heart shaped cup measures, which are all handily strung together on a loop. Handy for storing, yes, but not so handy when you have just filled 1/2 cup of squeezed lemon juice and the weight of the other of the measures pulls it off the worktop as you pick it up, catapulting lemon juice across your kitchen.

I wasn't best pleased, although it made the kitchen floor smell very fresh.

Luckily I had a spare lemon although I did need to soak up some lemon juice from the floor with a kitchen towel to fill up the cup measure. Before you judge, the floor was clean so I deemed this action acceptable.

Near disaster number two was a pack of writing icing falling out the cupboard and bouncing off the freshly iced cake. Luckily it was a light tube, not a massive bag of flour, so it didn't damage anything. Perhaps I need to clear out that cupboard... 

Other than that, the cake was great. Give the recipe a whirl if you feel like something a little bit fancier than a lemon drizzle loaf. Just don't throw lemon juice around the kitchen like me.

dairy free lemon drizzle traybake

Since discovering one of my nephews is dairy intolerant I have been making an effort to experiment with dairy free baking. Lemon drizzle cake is a family favourite so it was the first recipe I wanted to play with.

For this cake I used Mary Berry's lemon drizzle traybake recipe, substituting the softened butter for Vitalite dairy free margarine and the milk for soya milk.

The only noticeable difference through using a dairy free margarine was the texture. The batter was looser and it produced a very soft, moist cake with a smooth surface rather than the hard sugary top you usually get with a lemon drizzle. Flavour wise it was excellent and received thumbs up from everyone. I don't think anybody would have noticed it was dairy free had I not pointed it out.

If anyone else is new to dairy free baking (or gluten free baking) I highly recommend visiting iced gem bakes. I found her breakdown of dairy free margarines really useful.

Lemon drizzle cake and bad raspberries

I didn't actually intend to bake a lemon drizzle cake at the weekend. The original plan was to bake lemon and raspberry cupcakes but on the day cupcakes no longer appealed to me. That's when I thought I'd bake a drizzle cake with some raspberries thrown on top.

When I'm baking with berries I always have to eat at least one before adding them to the batter and this was no exception.

However when I tipped the raspberries into a bowl to coat in flour (to stop them sinking in the mixture) I noticed a little bug inside one of the raspberries...... and another..... and another.... and in the packaging. Basically the raspberries were crawling with tiny bugs.

Ewwwwwww I ate a bug!!!!

Needless to say I put the raspberries in the bin. And I cleaned the fridge.

So it's just a plain old lemon drizzle cake. Perhaps not exactly what I had planned, but always reliable and delicious in its simplicity.

I also noticed that my cake and plate matched my outfit. It's nice when that happens.

Raspberry and blueberry lime drizzle cake

This is summer in cake form. It's the sort of cake I can imagine eating outside in the sunshine, probably whilst swatting flies away and running away from bumble bees, but that destroys the dreamy picnic image.

This is a zingy, juicy, refreshing cake. I loved the combination of fruity flavours: sharp bursts of raspberry, sweet hits of blueberry and tangy lime.

Surprising for some perhaps, but I've never baked with limes before! If you're not such a fan of lemon drizzle, you may actually prefer lime as it has the tang but without such a sharp, sour hit as lemon.

Only three berries managed to stay near the surface of this cake! The rest all sank to the bottom, despite coating them in flour before adding to the batter, but thankfully they didn't form a soggy mush.

This is definitely on the to-bake-again list, I love a good drizzle cake! The recipe can be found here on BBC Good Food. My changes to the recipe were:

I baked the cake in a 9" round cake tin instead of a 8" square.

I only added 1-2 tbsp of lime juice to the batter as I felt it already had a good dropping consistency.

I only had three limes so was a couple of tablespoons short of juice for the syrup but I was perfectly happy with my results so I don't think an extra is necessary.


On a separate note, is anyone else experiencing problems uploading photographs to Blogger? After reading advice on the troubleshooting section I disabled pop-ups on Blogger which allowed me to upload this post but it still put up a fight. ARGH! Technology.

Lemon drizzle cake

I could wax lyrical about my love for lemon, but I'll refrain and show photographs instead.

I used duck eggs in this recipe and it produced the most amazingly yellow sponge. I loved the colour against the blue crockery; yellow and blue look so fresh together.

I didn't particularly intend to bake with lemons this week, but I had a slice of lemon curd cake in town last Saturday and soon found myself picking up a couple of lemons in the supermarket before heading home.

It's not a very flashy cake, but there is something very attractive about the humble lemon drizzle.

Crunchy top lemon cake (lemon drizzle)

Recipe from Mary Berry's Baking Bible, page 72. Oh how I love that book.

100g (4oz) softened butter
175g (6oz) caster sugar
175g (6oz) self-raising flour
1 level tsp baking powder
2 large eggs, beaten
4 tbsp milk
finely grated rind of 1 lemon

For the topping:
juice of 1 lemon
100g (4oz) caster or granulated sugar (I used granulated)

Preheat the oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4. Grease an 18cm (7 in) deep round cake tin then line the base with baking parchment. Measure all the ingredients for the cake into a large bowl and beat for about 2 minutes until smooth and well blended (Hurray! The best kind of recipes!) Turn the mixture into the prepared tin and level the surface. Bake in the oven for about 35-40 minutes or until the cake has shrunk slightly from the sides of the tin and springs back when lightly pressed with a finger (I think my cake took closer to 50 minutes.)

While the cake is baking make the crunchy topping. Measure the lemon juice and sugar into a bowl and stir until blended. When the cake comes out the oven, spread the lemon paste over the top while the cake is still hot (although I'm sure I read somewhere that it was best to leave the cake to cool slightly before adding the topping, so I waited 10 minutes before adding it.) Leave to cool completely in the tin, then turn out and peel off the parchment.

Versatile Blogger and some cake.

Fallen from Flavour kindly nominated me for a Versatile Blogger award recently. The rules state that once nominated you pass the award along to 15 other bloggers and reveal 7 facts about yourself. As I passed a Liebster Award along not too long ago I felt it would be wrong/annoying to re-nominate the same people or even to not re-nominate them (as they're obviously blogs I enjoy) in favour of other blogs who then may feel second rate as I didn't pass on the first award to them (I'm completely over thinking this aren't I?)

However (if you're still following me after that confusing ramble) I thought it would be fun to do the latter part and reveal 7 random facts about myself. It's always nice to find out more about the face behind the blog isn't it? Even if you discover they're a bit strange.

1. Despite my blog and the china I collect being predominantly pastel coloured I never wear pastel colours. I much prefer mid to darker tones, the colours I wear most being green, turquoise, teal and plum. I rarely wear black.

2. I like heavy rock music, particularly the stoner variety which usually surprises people. Kyuss, Alice in Chains, Dozer, the Hellacopters and Audioslave are on my little ipod shuffle. I blame having two older brothers who play in bands and a Mum who brought us up on Free and Thin Lizzy. Saying that I also love listening to piano music, Chopin's Nocturnes in particular, and will quite happily dance along to 90s boybands like Backstreet Boys (ah wonderful nostalgia.)

3. If there's an empty cardboard box lying around I will try to fit myself in it. If I do fit inside I will sit and wait for somebody to walk past so I can scare the life out of them.

4. I massively dislike the following phrases and descriptions: "EPIC", "WIN", "FAIL", "TOTES", "GOOD TIMES", "BANTER" or even worse "BANTS". It just annoys me when I hear people say "That was a totes epic free sandwich we got from Costa at closing time today. WIN!" .... What?! I've also recently discovered "AMAZEBALLS" although I find that quite funny as it's so ridiculous.

5. Despite being a barista, where I serve coffee and alcohol all day, I drink neither. I keep trying to make myself like coffee but I don't and I can't find a type of alcohol which doesn't make me pull my "disgusting face". I would love to be refined and drink good wine but I'm afraid it pulls the biggest "disgusting face" of them all. Alcohol in food is fine though.

6. I took to collecting and drawing pebbles from beaches at uni (I'm a fine art graduate and they informed my work). It then extended to larger stones, some of which were probably bordering on small boulders. I also had a big box of sand as I liked mixing it in my paint. After three years my uni bedroom resembled a beach. You can imagine how much fun I had moving out of my student flat, on the top floor, especially when I was so attached to practically every stone and owned quite a lot of crockery.....

7. I grew up thinking I didn't like lemon things. It was only when I set myself a "try things you used to hate" challenge when I was about 18 that I discovered I absolutely LOVE lemons. Lemon cake is quite possibly my favourite cake now. I also discovered that I like cinnamon, broccoli, courgette and pickle.

So there you have it, seven random facts. And just to prove how much I love lemons, I baked a lemon drizzle traybake on Tuesday (recipe blogged here). My nephew requested it and I didn't need persuading.

I also baked my favourite banana bread at the weekend but it disappeared  before I got a chance to photograph it.

Just for fun, write a random fact about yourself if you fancy leaving a comment. In the words of Mrs. Doyle, "go on go on go on go on go on!" And while you're at it, have a nice cup of tea.

Lemon drizzle traybake

I made this traybake last Sunday and it was a massive success with the family. Mary Berry has yet to fail me. There's a reason why she is the queen of baking. Despite having an unfounded distrust of the all-in-one mixing method, I did as I was told. What a beautiful result.

I think this has to be one of the fluffiest traybakes I've ever made. I bow down to your superior knowledge Mary Berry.

I loved how fuss free this recipe was, it was very quick and easy to make. Perfect for Sunday tea.

Hope you all have a good weekend!

Lemon drizzle traybake

Recipe from Mary Berry's Baking Bible

225g (8oz) softened butter (I have a feeling I used margarine though)

225g (8oz) caster sugar

275g (10z) self-raising flour

2 level tsp baking powder

4 large eggs

4 tbsp milk

finely grated rind of 2 lemons

For the crunchy drizzle topping:

175g (6oz) granulated sugar

juice of 2 lemons

Preheat the oven to 160C/Fan 140C/Gas 3. Grease a 30 x 23cm (12 x 9 in) traybake or roasting tin then line the base with baking parchment. Measure all the ingredients for the traybake into a large bowl and beat until well blended. Turn the mixture into the prepared tin and level the top gently with the back of the spatula. Bake in the oven for 35-40 minutes or until the cake has shrunk from the sides of the tin and springs back when pressed in the centre with your fingertips. Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out, carefullly peel off the parchment and finish cooling on a wire rack. Stand the wire rack on a tray to catch any drips of the topping.

To make the topping, mix the granulated sugar and lemon juice in a small bowl to give a runny consistency. Spoon this mixture evenly over the traybake while it is still a little warm. Cut into squares/slices when cold (I'll leave you to decide how big you want them!)

Chocolate orange drizzle cake

When I was given Traditional Teatime Recipes by Jane Pettigrew for my birthday four years ago, this was the first recipe I wanted to make. Unfortunately nobody around me at the time seemed that excited about chocolate and orange as a flavour combination (why?!) so I never got to make it.

I was at a friend's house yesterday who had just bought the book and she really liked the look of this cake so I jumped at the chance to make it with her.

The cake certainly lived up to my expectations, it was so juicy and light with a really lovely, even texture. The melted chocolate topping was an added bonus. If you love cake and Terry's chocolate oranges then this is the cake for you!

We also baked other goodies from the same book but I think they deserve their own blog post which I'll try to do within the next couple of days.

Chocolate orange drizzle cake

Recipe from "Traditional Teatime Treats" by Jane Pettigrew, a National Trust book.

For the cake:

175g (6oz) butter, softened

175g (6oz) caster sugar

3 large eggs

Grated ring of 2 oranges

175g (6oz) self-raising flour, sifted

2 tbsp milk

For the topping:

The juice of 2 oranges

100g (4oz) granulated sugar

50g (2oz) milk or plain chocolate (I used some milk chocolate buttons, then ate the left overs!)

Makes 1 x 900g (2lb) loaf or 17.5cm (7in) round tin. (I have a feeling ours was a 8in tin)

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4 and grease and line your tin. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat well. Add the grated orange rind, flour and milk and fold in with a metal spoon. Turn into the prepared tin, smooth the top and bake for 30-40 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. (We put a piece of greaseproof paper over the top of the cake for the last 5 mins or so as it was browning on the top too much but not fully cooked). Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.

When cool, score the top of the cake lightly with a sharp knife. Pour the orange juice and granulated sugar into a pan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil and boil for 1-2 minutes, then pour over the cake. When all the juice has soaked in, carefully remove the cake from the tin. Melt the chocolate (either in stages in the microwave or in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water) and then pour over the top. Make a pattern with the prongs of a fork and leave to set (it doesn't matter if it looks messy!)

This is such an easy cake to whip up so I can fully recommend it. Great with a cuppa too!

Lemon drizzle cake

It's my Dad's birthday tomorrow but he's not home for it so I had to think of a cake which could be transported easily. He likes lemon flavours so I went for a lemon drizzle. He took the rest of the banana loaf to work with him on Friday and apparently it was well received so hopefully they'll all enjoy the lemon drizzle too.

I'm gutted I don't get a piece of this cake, I really should have made a second one for home. I also should have taken more exciting photos, but unfortunately this is all I have folks. The recipe is from the Hairy Bikers' "Mums Know Best" book which I got for my birthday a couple of week ago. Perhaps it's a bad move to make an untested cake but I thought the Hairy Bikers looked fairly reliable. The recipe was very straight forward and the only problem I encountered was that it took an hour rather than half an hour to cook.

Now I'm going to settle down to some Ben 'n' Jerry's (chocolate fudge brownie!) and Strictly Come Dancing results! I'm staying at my Aunty and Uncle's house this week as they're away on holiday and need somebody to look after their cat. Coincidently she is also called Jo. Isn't she pretty?

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Recipe from Hairy Bikers' Family Cookbook "Mums know best!". Si King and Dave Myers

2 small, unwaxed lemons, well scrubbed

275g granulated sugar

175g butter, softened and extra for greasing

200g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

3 large eggs

Preheat oven to 180C/Gas mark 4. Line the base of a 900g (2lb) non stick loaf tin with baking parchment and butter the tin well. Finely grate the zest of both lemons. Put 175g of the sugar in with the butter, flour, baking powder, eggs and lemon zest. Mix until just combined and it has a thick, smooth texture. Spoon in to the tin and level the surface. Bake for 35 minutes or until well risen and pale golden brown (mine took an hour and I put greaseproof paper on the top for the last 20 minutes to stop it from burning).

Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for 5 minutes. Squeeze 1 lemon to get 3 tbsp of juice and mix with the remaining 100g of sugar. Turn the cake onto a wire rack set above a tray or plate. Remove the parchment and make about 50 deep holes in the top of the cake with a skewer. Slowly and gradually spoon over half the lemon sugar, allowing it to thoroughly coat the top of the cake and drizzle down the sides. Leave the cake to stand for 5 minutes and repeat with the remaining lemon sugar. Leave to set for an hour before slicing and eating.