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I have been procrastinating recently, and so I am too late to write a column for the previous weekly topic, about favourite winter activities.
However, I have decided to write one anyway!
One thing that I enjoy doing in winter is baking - the ingredients tend to be fairly cheap, it’s an activity that takes place in a warm kitchen, and at the end you have a delicious cake to eat!
One of my personal favourite things to bake is a lemon drizzle - a variation on the classic ‘pound cake’, that uses equal weights of four ingredients: butter, sugar, self-raising flour, and eggs.
It is a simple recipe but one that yields delicious results - I use the recipe from BBC Good Food as a guide, and I will give you the link at the end of this column.
I modify the recipe slightly - I use 250 grams of flour, butter, and caster sugar rather than the 225g listed in the recipe, because butter is sold in 250g blocks, and then I use four large eggs to keep the ratio the same. I also use double the amount of lemon zest that they recommend, because I want my cake to be very lemony!
Zesting the lemons is probably the most labour-intensive part of the process - my food mixer does most of the hard work.
The recipe says that it takes about 45 minutes in the oven, but I find that it’s generally closer to 50 or even 55. To ensure that the cake is done I take a smooth metal skewer or a thin knife and push it right into the middle of the cake - the cake is done if the knife comes out clean, without any cake mix on it, although there will be a thin layer of melted butter.
After the cake has cooled a little I make the drizzle, and I like to do this in two stages.
First I poke holes into the top of the cake and I mix lemon juice and sugar in about a 50/50 ratio, then pour this over the top of the cake so that it soaks in. I then make a much more sugary mix, with less lemon juice, and pour this on top to make a sugary lemony layer that stays on top of the cake.
Once I am done, I have to fight the temptation to eat the whole cake in one go!
Do you enjoy baking? Or are your winter hobbies quite different? Book a ‘Conversation and Correction’ class with me, and we can talk about it!
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