Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake

I think this cake might be my Eureka! moment - I think I've found a well-textured sponge cake made with oil, which could be varied in flavour. I have baked other cakes with oil, which have been wonderful, but it hasn't been easy to see how to adapt the best of them so that I can use different flavours. For instance, this Chocolate Swirl cake is almost perfect, but will always be a  chocolate swirl cake because of the way it's made!

However, this Lemon Drizzle Traybake Cake recipe, by Annie Bell, looks as if it could be adapted to other simple flavours such as coffee or chocolate. I need to experiment further to see if the batter bakes as well in other shapes such as loaves or deeper tins, and I'm not sure that it's dense enough to take solid additions such as chocolate chips and chopped nuts, but I'm hopeful that it will prove to be a really useful recipe.

As is often the case with oil based recipes, this was really simple to make - mix the sugar with the wet ingredients and the flavourings, then sift in the flour and baking powder and combine. However, I've had other similar recipes collapse after baking - I'm beginning to think that the proportions used in oil-based cakes are much more important than with buttery cakes. Fortunately we can  trust an Annie Bell recipe to be as reliable as always!

The flavour wasn't anything special - just a pleasant lemon flavour - and the topping didn't add a lot, but I was so pleased with the texture! It's not quite as light as a traditional Victoria Sandwich, but I'd say it's almost as good - somewhere between a sponge cake and a Madeira cake. Watch out for more cakes based on this recipe.