Thursday, September 6, 2012

Adventures in Cooking - Raspberry Lemon Cake

Once again, it's been ages since I did one of these! When you have a four month old baby who only sleeps for 30 minutes at a time, it's kind of hard to do the full photo posts I used to do when I baked. Actually, it's kind of hard to even bake, full stop. Hopefully one day I'll be able to do the old style posts again, but for now it's just a recipe and the finished product!

Originally I saw this recipe on Pinterest (such a good time waster during 4am feeds!) and thought it seemed easy enough to make while the bub sleeps. It was! And it was totally delicious.



Ingredients
1 1/2 cups of plain flour
1 tablespoon of plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup raspberries (fresh or frozen)

Method
1. Preheat the oven. I have a fan forced oven that gets quite hot very quickly, so I had mine on about 150 degrees, then turned it down to about 120 degrees after about fifteen minutes of cooking.

2. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. In a separate bowl, whisk together buttermilk, sugar, eggs, lemon zest, vanilla essence and oil. (Sidenote: why does buttermilk smell sour? I always think it's gone off when I use it, then I remember that it's meant to smell like that. WEIRD)

4. Mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients.

5. Mix the raspberries together with the tablespoon of plain flour. Gently fold into the mixture. I have no idea why you mix the raspberries with flour. Seems kind of pointless, and to be honest, next time I won't bother. I'll just chuck the raspberries into the mix.

6. Pour into loaf tin and bake for about fifty minutes, or until a toothpick comes out of the cake clean.

That's it! Really, really simple, and the cake is lovely and moist without being too dense. The lemon is subtle and zesty, and the raspberries add a nice tartness to the cake.

Notes
- If you have a look at the original recipe, you'll see they also have a lemon syrup and a raspberry topping. I didn't add either of these because I think the cake seemed sweet and tart enough, and looking at the ingredients for both those things I think the cake would be way too sweet to enjoy. Also, no one really needs a cake with that much additional sugar (and I say that as someone who loves sugary things). If anything, you could add a splash of lemon juice to the mixture before baking it, which is what I did. I probably added about a table spoon of lemon juice to the mixture and it's zesty without being sour.

- I used frozen raspberries (fresh ones were TWELVE DOLLARS a punnet at my supermarket this week. Um, no), but I think fresh ones would be slightly nicer.

- When you mix the berries in, make sure they go throughout the cake batter. I didn't mix them in enough because I didn't want them to break apart and the majority of them ended up at either end of the cake, which was kind of annoying. It made the middle of the cake seem a bit nude. NUDE, I TELL YOU. Pin It

Monday, September 3, 2012

Monday Morning Melody - Mumford & Sons

This is one of my most looked forward to albums of the year. New Mumford & Sons! Not much else to say - just listen to the first track released, I Will Wait.



Thoughts? I love it. Pin It