Lemon Drizzle Cake - Baking Mad part 2

The Baking Mad PR person listed several links to recipes and recipe categories from which I could choose to bake, including the general categories of cakes and muffins. Having tried a muffin recipe which I wasn't entirely happy with, I turned my attention to cakes.

Unfortunately, once I'd excluded everything that someone in the rest of the family wouldn't (or couldn't) eat and those that I didn't have all the ingredients for, there wasn't much left that looked really interesting. I was particularly hoping to find a cake made with oil instead of butter, but eventually picked this Lemon Drizzle Cake - although it used butter it was quite a low proportion compared to standard recipes. I've tried several lemon drizzle cake recipes, but am always willing to try another; to my mind they need to be more interesting than a sponge soaked in lemon syrup, and this cake seemed to fit that brief.

The recipe used 150mls lemon juice in total, but I only got 120mls from the 3 average sized lemons I had available. This didn't worry me - I just reduced the drizzle mixture accordingly - most cakes use far too much for my taste anyway! As I was using 3 lemons, I added the zest of 2 to the cake, rather than the 1 stipulated. These were the only changes I made to the recipe, which was quite straightforward to follow. I haven't made this sort of cake with melted butter before - I was a little worried about adding lemon juice and eggs to hot butter, so let it cool as much as I dared, something which wasn't mentioned in the recipe.

As usual, I had trouble getting the cake to absorb the drizzle mixture, especially as the crust of the cake was quite crisp. I find drizzling only works really well on flat topped cakes, with domed cakes like this the tendency is for everything to run off, however careful and slow you are with the drizzling. Bigger holes might help, but then the appearance of the cake is spoiled! I didn't use all the drizzle I made - I guess, between this and making less, I only used about half the total volume made in the recipe.

This was a great cake - well flavoured and with a lovely texture, thanks to the ground almonds and cornflour. What drizzle I did get onto the cake made a crunchy coating which was intensively lemony, but it hadn't penetrated far into the cake. I often leave off the drizzle on these sort of cakes, as I find it so difficult to get them on, but used it this time because I thought the cake wouldn't be sweet enough without it. However, I needn't have worried - the interior of the cake was nicely balanced between sweetness and a gentle lemon flavour.

I think this is a recipe I'd use again, as it's simple and quick to make, but perhaps making a smaller volume of  more concentrated hot syrup with caster sugar and lemon juice, just to brush on the top. Alternatively the cake could be prettied up with a lemon glacé icing and some strips of lemon zest, as there is peel leftover from the number of lemons needed in the recipe.

There are several other lemon cakes on the site, including this traybake with cream cheese frosting, and a simple recipe search to enable you to get all the examples together to make your choice. This is worth doing, as some cakes aren't in the category you'd expect to find them. For instance, this lemon and poppy seed loaf was in the 'sweet doughs' category, even though it is obviously a cake!