I made a number of lemon cakes in the last few weeks to get it perfectly right. It’s also due to the fact that my daughter loves baking, i.e. stirring the batter, and lemon doesn’t stain my carpet like chocolate does!

The secret is in putting the lemon zest in the batter, so don’t get lazy and skip this step!

The quantities are for 2 medium cake loaves. If you’re going through the hassle, you may as well do 2 cakes in one go.

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 3 lemons
• 225 g of butter
• 400 g of flour
• 350 of sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 250 ml of buttermilk or soured cream
• 2 cups of powdered sugar (icing sugar)

My step by step lemon cake recipe:

Preheat the oven to 180 / 200 C

1- Mix 350g of sugar with 225g of butter until smooth. You can use an electric mixer or a manual one.

2- Add 4 eggs, 1 at a time and mix thoroughly.

Add the zest of 3 lemons – keep the lemons aside for later use

3- In another bowl, mix 3 cups of flour (400g), half a teaspoon of baking soda, half a teaspoon of baking powder.

4- In a third bowl, mix the juice of 2 lemons with a teaspoon of vanilla extract and 250 ml of buttermilk (You can also use soured cream)

5- Alternatively add the flour mixture and the buttermilk mixture to the batter.

6- Grease and flour 2 loaf pans. You can use vegetable oil instead of butter to grease your loaf pans.

Divide the batter evenly between the 2 pans.

If you only have one loaf pan you can cook half of the batter first and half of it later.

7- Bake for about 45 min to 1 hour, until a knife that you dig in the cake come out clean.

8- Cool for 10 min- that’s the easiest step, so you can sit down and chill. When the cakes are cool, take them out of the pan and put them on your cake stand or dish.

9- Mix 2 cups of powdered sugar (icing sugar) with the juice of 1 lemon and whisk until smooth.

10- Poor over the tops of the cakes and allow to drizzle down the sides. Leave the cakes to rest until the icing becomes hard.

Yummy… enjoy!