Another lemon cake for Lawrence

It seems a tradition now to make Lawrence’s birthday cake of the lemon variety, he claims, or did so once, that it’s his cake of choice. I reckon any cake his now his cake of choice, he’s given up trying to convince himself that he doesn’t really have a sweet tooth! Perhaps it’s living with me that did it?

I had a look on the internet this time, uninspired by lemon cakes in my cook books and found this one on the Good Food website.

It looked so tempting, I didn’t have enough almonds so made up the amount with poppy seeds. This may be why it sank! Or I opened the oven too quickly at once stage. It’s funny, we were only just talking about cake disasters the other day and how cross Dan gets when things go wrong (obviously I do too, but I think he’s more of a passionate baker than me!) I thought we should publish the mistakes and catastrophes – makes it a bit more of an honest blog. I’m sure I’ve published some near disasters on here.

Anyway, taking a leaf out of Mary Berry’s book (not literally) I decided to make the sunken middle a feature and filled it with Chocolate hearts and balls (not sure about the balls). To add to the mishaps, I was working against the clock and decided to cheat and melt the chocolate in the microwave – never being lazy and doing that again! I started again in the smoke-filled kitchen, the conventional way, a bowl over simmering water. Not the best quality chocolate – it was an emergency operation) so it’s a bit patchy.

It’s a lovely moist cake that goes well with crème fraîche or a bit of cream perhaps. I baked in a smaller tin than they suggest which may also be the reason it sank – the volume of ingredients is rather large and needs a wider tin. Yummy though!