recipe: cake

Lemon-iced Poppy Seed Cake

cake

• 250g butter
• 250g castor sugar
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 250g self-raising flour
• grated zest and juice of one lemon
• 100g poppy seeds

icing

• 250g icing sugar
• grated zest and juice of two small lemons

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, a little at a time, stirring in between each addition, until mixture is smooth and all the eggs have been incorporated. Sitr in the flour, and then beat in the lemon juice, zest, and poppy seeds.

Spoon mixture into a buttered and lined 8-cup capacity loaf pan or cake tin and bake for about 1 hour, or until golden and springy to the touch.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for about 20 minutes in the pan. Turn onto a wire rack and leave until completely cold.

To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a large bowl, add lemon zest and enough juice to give icing the texture of thick pouring cream. Spread icing over the cold loaf using a palette knife and leave until set.

simmer down notes:

• I took the cake out of the oven at about 45 minutes and it was a bit over-done. That could be the fault of my oven, I think it isn’t calibrated correctly, I have to get a gadget to measure the temperature in there.
• The juice of two lemons in the icing was a bit too much – one would have done the trick, but maybe I had a juicy lemon (and I have an excellent lemon squeezer).
• Other highly recommended lemon poppy seed cakes: