Lemon cake.

If I was going to do the food blog thing properly, I'd have to start taking photos of things as I cook them. I'd have to get into food styling. I don't really do styling with my food. A heap on a plate is usually what I'm after. I KNOW that the Japanese say 'you eat first with your eyes', but I disagree. You eat first with your NOSE, and THEN your eyes. One day maybe I'll get time enough to think about how things look on the plate, but my dinner parties are always more low key affairs than that.

In the food blog spirit, I'm posting a recipe or two that I keep cooking for work and that people often ask for. I have just trawled through the archives and am slightly perturbed that I never posted the lemon cake recipe. Gah. So. Here it is.

8 oz butter
8 oz self-raising flour
8+2oz light brown sugar
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
2 eggs, beaten
2 lemons

Preheat the oven to 200ºC and line an ordinary roasting tin (around 35cm by 25cm) with greaseproof paper. In a pan on the hob, gently melt the butter and 8 oz of the sugar together. When melted, remove from the heat and grate in the zest of the lemons. (The purpose of doing things in this order is to allow the mixture to cool a bit before you add the eggs.) With a whisk, beat in the eggs and then the flour, salt and baking powder. Bake in the preheated oven for around 20 minutes, until golden brown and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

In the meantime, heat together the juice of the lemons and the remaining 2 oz of sugar until dissolved. When the cake comes out of the oven, prick it all over with a fork and pour the drench all over, making sure you don’t miss the edges. Leave in the tin to cool completely (overnight), and then cut into squares. Eat within 24 hours… NB, the recipe can easily be halved, but it then relies on you having a 20x20cm tin, which nobody ever seems to have…