Lemon loaf cake

Lemon loaf cake

Today, I bring you a recipe for lemon cake. As you can see, it is a very simple cake, and looks very homemade, but often simple is best when it comes to home baking. This lemon cake captures what I like best in cooking: excellent quality ingredients cooked simply with love and care. Fancy cakes are all well and good, but not what I want to eat every day.

This cake reminds me of cakes I have eaten in France. It is very plain and rich, with a denser texture than many traditional British loaf cakes. This is no doubt due to the milk, melted butter and relatively high number of eggs, 5.

It is the perfect cake to enjoy with morning coffee, and when I served this yesterday at 11am, with cups of steaming, freshly made Monmouth coffee, I didn’t even have any left to wrap up afterwards. It just disappeared.

I would also like to emphasise how easy this cake was to make. I made it whilst staying in London this week, without any of my usual kitchen paraphernalia around. And it worked beautifully.

Cake on the balcony!

Lemon loaf cake

Ingredients: 

• 300g vanilla caster sugar
• Zest of 4 lemons
• 90g unsalted butter, melted
• 150ml full-fat milk
• 5 large free-range eggs,beaten
• 245g self raising flour
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 tsp baking powder

Preparation method

1)   Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.

2)   Grease and line a 2lb loaf tine with greaseproof baking paper

3)   In a large mixing bowl, add the sugar and lemon zest and stir together

4)   Add the melted butter and stir

5)   Now, pour in the milk and eggs and stir vigourously

6)   Finally sift in the flour, salt and baking powder and stir to form a fairly liquid cake batter

7)   Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for 50-60 minutes

8)   The cake is cooked when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

9)   Remove the cake from the tin, turn onto a cooling rack and leave to cool for 30 minutes at least before serving