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!

Chocolate Brownie Muffins - Baking Mad

I expect most food bloggers receive promotional emails offering free goodies in return for a mention in a blog post. I've only taken advantage of these twice before - once to receive a charity recipe book, and once for free samples of one of the low sugar/stevia products. I don't like feeling obligated to cook or write about something in particular, which stops me taking up a lot of the offers I get - they just don't fit into my style of cooking or the general theme of the blog. However, the ongoing campaign for Baking Mad caught my eye - bake from a selected bunch of recipes from the Baking Mad site and receive a book by Eric Lanlard.

I'm only peripherally aware of Eric Lanlard, as I don't watch many of the food programmes on TV - we only bought a Freeview box just before the digital changeover, and I still try not to watch TV during the day. My impression of him is of a French patissier whose recipes looked amazing, but far too complicated for the average cook to follow. This certainly isn't true of all the recipes on Baking Mad, but then, they are not all Eric Lanlard recipes; he seems to be associated with the site through the name of his TV series, but the site itself is run by a conglomeration of food companies such as Silver Spoon, Billingtons and Allisons - are all these owned by the same parent company? Yes - they are all under the Silver Spoon umbrella!

The Baking Mad site seems to give extensive coverage of all aspects of baking, with several ways of looking for particular types of recipes - from Cakes and Pastry recipes through Jams and Chutneys, to gluten free baking. There's a section on Kid's Cooking as well as baking tips. There's also a community area, where you can join in discussions on baking. As well as Eric Lanlard recipes, there are others contributed by TV cooks, although the vast majority have no noted contributor, other than 'bakingmad'.

One of the choices on the list provided was for something from the range of muffin recipes on the site. I chose these Chocolate Brownie Muffins because they looked quick and simple to make, and were relatively low in both fat and added sugar. I followed the recipe exactly, only substituting hazelnuts for the pecans in the recipe, so that FB could eat them. The recipe was as simple as it looked, although I couldn't find an explanation of the electric oven temperatures - I had to assume the first was for a conventional oven and the second for a fan assisted oven. There was also the puzzle of the additional ingredient - 50g of dark muscovado sugar  - which wasn't used in the recipe. Perhaps it was an option to increase the sweetness, if preferred. The muffins could certainly have done with the extra sweetness, but I would have liked to read something in the recipe which explained this!

Now, you will know by now that muffins aren't my forté, so it's possible that someone else would get a better product, but I found these a little on the dry side, and although they were light in texture, they didn't rise much. They were also nowhere near as chocolatey as a good muffin should be - the addition of some cocoa to the batter, and some chocolate chips stirred through, would have improved this. The cooking temperature also seemed a little on the high side - the muffins looked a little overdone even on the minimum cooking time!

I certainly can't dismiss the whole site on the basis of one recipe which wasn't a complete success. I'll try another recipe - perhaps one by Eric Lanlard himself - and I will add the site to my list of sites to search when I'm looking for new ideas. I've already wasted spent a lot of time there! From what I've seen, the majority of the recipes are quick and easy to make, and don't need unusual or hard to find ingredients.