Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Motivation

When your housemate does your food blogging for you, it's probably time to get blogging again.

The cake in question is a Lemon Pound Cake from "Every Day With Bill Granger", a book I heartily recommend. The premise behind a pound cake is very simple - equal weights of butter, flour, sugar and eggs. This time with a little vanilla essence and half a lemon's worth of rind to add flavour.

Method:

You beat the butter and sugar together until they're fluffy, add flavourings, beat in the eggs one at a time, and fold in the flour. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius 'til lightly browned and springy to touch (45-50 minutes).

To ice, again start by beating a few tablespoons of butter, adding in icing sugar, the rest of the lemon rind and some of its juice. I firmly believe icing is a matter of personal taste, so monkey around with amounts until it looks and tastes right to you. Just remember to add liquid a teaspoon at a time, unless you want Lemon Drizzle Cake.

Enjoy with a nice cup of tea.

Musings:

In this case the magic number was 250g, technically making it a Lemon Slightly-Larger-Than-Half-a-Pound Cake. I weighed four eggs from the same carton, and they came in at approximately 275g (they're free range from Vic Market, I can't remember which size I bought), raising (not begging) the question of whether the original conception of a pound cake involves egg shells on or off in the weigh-up. Feel free to exercise your Google-fu on this, but I doubt the difference is significant.

Texturally, the cake had a coarser grain than I was hoping for, and a slight greasiness that I've also encountered in some of my pound cake based cup cake
endeavours. I suspect that this is from not beating the butter enough. The butter in question is Safeway's house brand unsalted Tasmanian butter, which I've noticed tends to stay quite firm at room temperature. Sadly our current beating apparatus (handheld, electric), probably isn't up to the task unless I take the butter to a little above room temperature.

The cake has quite a mild flavour. I used more lemon juice than recommended in the recipe (about half a lemon), and should probably have sacrificed the rind of another lemon to beef up the content in both the cake and the icing.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, nice blog :-) I'll have to make it one day, it sounds way yummy.

4:20 pm  

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