Lemon Birthday Cake

My mum's very favourite cake is lemon drizzle, and so for her birthday I cooked up a Mary Berry special! I love making lemon drizzle cakes, the lemony smell coming from the oven always makes my mouth water.

Ingredients
4oz butter
4oz sugar
2 eggs
4oz self-raising, gluten-free flour
1oz ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
2 tablespoons milk
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
for the crunchy topping
3oz demerera sugar
juice of 1 lemon
finely grated zest of 1 lemon

L is for... Lemon Scones

Challenge time! This week's letter is 'L'. I wanted to make something lemony and settled on scones as they aren't very sweet usually so I thought omitting the sugar wouldn't matter too much. I based my lemon scones on a recipe from 'Be-Ro Home Recipes' a recipe guide from the 1920s! Scroll down to the end of the blog to see the original recipe book.

Lemon Scones
4oz plain gluten-free flour
4oz wholemeal rye flour
2 level teaspoons baking powder
1½oz butter
1 packet Stevia (equivalent to 2 teaspoons of sugar)
grated rind of 1 lemon
1 egg, beaten
4 tablespoons of milk

Almond and Lemon Cupcakes

These low-carb cupcakes have a lovely texture, as the ground almonds makes them light and moist. Even though they don't contain sugar they have a great cakey texture. The best fake cakes yet I think! Plus they are very quick and easy to make, you can easily whip up a batch if you have a sweet craving.

Ingredients (to make 6)
1oz butter, softened
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 egg
finely grated rind of ½ lemon
2¼oz ground almonds
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon Stevia or other sweetener

I is for... Iced Lemon Biscuits

It's week 9 in Baking the Alphabet, and did you know there aren't many recipes beginning with 'I'? Tiny, little confession: I have made iced lemon biscuits before, and blogged about them here. BUT I have never put soft cheese in biscuits and I was intrigued to see how they would taste. Plus I wanted to try out a recipe from this brand new book Great British Bake Off: How to Bake, it is published by Ebury (where I work) and is beautiful! I didn't quite follow the recipe to the letter so you'd better go and buy the book if you want to...

Iced Lemon Biscuits

Ingredients (to make 20)
80g unsalted butter, softened
50g caster sugar
finely grated zest of ½ lemon (save the juice)
40g light soft cheese
150g gluten-free flour
pinch of salt
pinch baking powder
50g icing sugar

Potato and Lemon Drizzle Cake

It was my sister's birthday last weekend, and I cooked up a delicious chocolate cake, unfortunately it didn't cook properly, so my mum had to make a second one, but the less said about that the better. I, meanwhile, was living a gluten-free nightmare. Jelly babies and chocolate buttons on her cake were calling to me. There was only one thing for it, I made a rival cake.

Unfortuntely I didn't have any flour, after a bit of web searching I came across a gluten-free lemon drizzle cake, and its secret ingredient? MASHED POTATO!!

Here's how I made it:

Little Lemon Biscuits

This biscuit dough recipe can easily be adapted for a variety of different flavours, I chose lemon today. Make sure you use real butter in this recipe and not 'I can't believe it's not butter' which makes the dough much harder to roll out! It makes between 30-40 biscuits depending on the size.

Lovely Lemon Pud

Despite owning all twelve of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks I rarely cook from them. I'm not sure why, perhaps the sheer volume of them overwhelms me. My friend Sophie made this for me a while ago and it was so tasty and didn't look overly complicated. I had a friend round for dinner so after serving up home-made pizza and home-made chips I cracked out this lemon pud!

Lemon Bars

My final guest post (for now) comes from Pam, and looks like the perfect treat for a Tuesday tea-break!

I love lemons. The sharp sweetness and tangy bite they give is just like nectar to me. So when I offered to make, bake and blog a recipe for your site I knew it had to include one of my favourite ingredients! I decided to make some lemon bars I'd had my eye on trying for a while... 

The recipe I followed is from The Food Network website and was enough to feed the 5,000, so I adjusted the measurements down by half. This was an experiment after all...

Lemon Bars

Tasty little biscuits

Lemon and Courgette Cupcakes

Carrot cake is an old favourite, yet when adding other vegetables to cakes people often scoff. It's time to embrace vegetable cakes! Courgettes add moistness, and make cupcakes light and fluffy, and don't have a strong taste. This recipe is a standard cake recipe with courgette added.

Ingredients
6oz butter, softened                                           Makes 18 cupcakes
6oz sugar
3 eggs, beaten
6oz self-raising flour
grated rind of 1½ lemons
6oz raw courgette, peeled and grated
For the butter icing:
4oz butter
8oz icing sugar
juice of 1 lemon
decorations of your choice

Raspberry and Lemon Cake

This cake is one I made in my 'Week of Cake' - I brought it into work, where it was met with much appreciation! I've made a cake like this a couple of times now, once with blueberries and once with raspberries. The first one I made didn't have crumbled almonds, and I definitely think it is a nice touch to add them. The cake ends up quite moist so best to eat with a fork!

Raspberry and Lemon Tray Cake

Ingredients

6oz butter

6oz caster sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 eggs

2oz flaked almonds

grated zest of 1 lemon

4oz ground almonds

4oz self-raising flour

2 tbsp milk

200g raspberries, fresh or frozen (tip: if you are using frozen allow them to defrost for a while, otherwise the cake will be too soggy)

Bakewell Tart

After promising to make a Bakewell Tart all week it was today I finally found the time. There was a great recipe in a book called The Great British Book of Baking. I followed the exact recipe (for once), and unusually it worked perfectly!

The Great British/American Bake Off

A good friend of mine is a fellow baking blogger (see Baking-in-Brooklyn), and we have often shared and compared recipes. We decided to cook the same cake and compare, hence the 'bake off'.


After much deliberation we chose lemon drizzle cake - in any form we wanted - and the baking commenced!

I found a recipe for a 'Lemon Drizzle Traybake', and as usual adjusted it to fit my ingredients/equipment. I enlisted the boyfriend to be my official taste tester as he is a particular fan of the lemon drizzle cake.

Lavender Cake

Happy New Year readers!
This Christmas I was lucky enough to get quite a few cooking-themed presents. One of which was a jar of lavender sugar. I looked through my cookbooks (mostly Jamie Oliver) and browsed the web, but I didn't find any recipes that I was enamoured with so I decided to experiment. The advice I did take was not to totally replace regular sugar with lavender sugar as it is quite strong

Roxanne's Lavender and Lemon Cake

Ingredients
6oz butter
1oz lavender sugar
4½oz caster sugar
3 eggs
1½oz ground almonds
4½oz plain flour
1½ tsp baking powder

2 tbsp icing sugar
grated lemon zest


Step 1
Cream together the butter with the 2 types of sugar, until smooth and creamy.

Step 2
Beat 3 eggs and add gradually to the butter and sugar. Sift in the flour, ground almonds and baking powder and mix well.

Step 3
Spoon the mixture into a standard cake tin and bake in the oven at Gas Mark 5 for 30-40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. (Or a 'Cake Tester' like the one I got for Christmas!)

Step 4

Lift the cake out of the tin and leave to cool. Meanwhile mix the icing sugar with the lemon zest and enough water to make a smooth icing. Spread the icing over the cake and sprinkle with a little of the lavender sugar.

The verdict

Bizarrely the cake didn't rise much (if anyone has any suggestions as to why this might have been please let me know). However, the lavender was just right, not too strong and complimented the lemon icing well. The overall texture reminded me of a lemon drizzle cake, moist and quite light.

Christmas Cupcakes

For the last few Christmases I have succeeded in stressing myself out making chocolate logs (the weighing scales didn't work, the sponge splits when I rolls it, the chocolate doesn't melt...) so I decided this year I would make stress-free cupcakes!

I assembled Christmas-themed cupcake cases, giant chocolate stars, silver balls and holly. I made several small cupcake mixes using a standard recipe for each (2oz butter, 2oz sugar, 1 egg, 2oz flour and 1 tsp baking powder) and added different flavours.

Lemon tart

This is a variation on a MasterChef recipe from this year's Celebrity series, Christine Hamilton made a 'Citrus Meringue Tart'. The thought of meringue on top of a sweet tart was a bit too much for me so I just stuck to the tart itself. Christine put lime in hers, but having only lemons to hand I went with them. The pastry base was delicious, it uses mostly ground almonds with just a little flour. It is moist and crumbly all at the same time, and with a little lemon zest to bring out the flavour I was pleasantly surprised. The filling is simple too, double cream, eggs, and lemon juice. It isn't too sickly so you can eat a nice hearty slice of it, and it works wonderfully as a light dessert. The only thing I would fault is it doesn't look too special, perhaps why Christine put a meringue on top of hers!