Tag Archives: Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking

Coffee and walnut cake

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whole cake side

Coffee and walnut cake

Serves: 8
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

Sponge:

250g (8oz) self raising flour

250g (8oz) margarine.

250g (8oz) sugar

4 eggs

1 tablespoon instant coffee mixed in a little hot water

1 tablespoon crushed walnuts (I added quite a lot more than this, just because I had walnuts which needed to be used up)

Icing:

125g (4oz) butter

250g (8oz) icing sugar

1 teaspoon instant coffee mixed in a little hot water

Method

Sponge

Preheat the oven to 200C or gas mark 6

1. Cream together margarine and sugar in a mixing bowl.

2. Add the beaten eggs to the mixture.

3. Add the crushed walnuts.

4. Add the coffee mixed with water and stir well.

5. Fold in the flour gently.

Put equal amounts into 2 x 8″ greased round sandwich tins, bake for 20 mins at 200C/360F/gas 6

Filling

Cream together butter and icing sugar in a bowl
Add mixed coffee

Sandwich cakes together with filling leaving a little to spread on top, then sprinkle with whole walnuts. You might be able to see from my photo that I grated some white chocolate over the cake, in an attempt to get Jack to eat it, but of course it just made it even sweeter.

This is a good cake, although it is quite dense, but not heavy – if that makes sense. I was not keen on the buttercream aspect of it though, it was too sweet.

The next time I bake this one I’m going to bake it in a loaf tin and make up a coffee syrup, skewer it all over and drizzle the syrup into it. I’m also going to use pecans instead of walnuts as Jack doesn’t like walnuts. I can’t taste much difference between them, but there you go, our taste buds are all different I suppose.

This is one of the cakes which is served in National Trust tearooms. It’s the third most popular one, they sell 102,000 slices of it per year! I think I’m going to bake their biggest seller next week – can you believe that it’s Victoria sponge? They sell 171,000 slices of that in a year.

a slice of cake

This post is linked with Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking.

Lemon Drizzle Cake

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18

Lemon drizzle cake

When we found ourselves in a National Trust property in York in October we ended up having afternoon coffee there and that means cake too. I plumped for the lemon drizzle cake as I just love the flavour of lemons. Jack didn’t have any, he was being good!

The cake was lovely and I offered to share it with Jack – but he refused as he was still being good. When I cleared up the last crumb of cake and said how tasty it had been, he said – well I’ll never know as you didn’t leave any for me. Did he think I would feel guilty? I didn’t! Tough – I said.

Anyway, when the National Trust’s Spring magazine came through the letter-box I was really pleased to see it has an article about the cakes which are a staple feature of all their coffee/tearooms, including the recipes. The five cakes are, in order of popularity, Victoria sandwich, chocolate sponge, coffee and walnut cake, carrot cake and last but definitely not so in my opinion is the lemon drizzle cake. So that is what I baked one afternoon last week, I wish I could have shared it with you – really, because I’ve put on weight. That’s what happens when you aren’t feeding hungry young men any more, and you have that empty nest.

sliced lemon drizzle cake

The recipe below makes two cakes, so I halved the quantities as I only wanted one. The cake is best sliced quite thickly I think. It’s quite a big cake, in the first photo the cake is on a large serving dish, the sliced cake is on a dinner plate.

Lemon drizzle cakes.

300g/10½ oz self-raising flour
300g/10½ oz butter
300g/10½ oz caster sugar
50g/1¾ oz cornflour
6 eggs
3 large lemons

For the drizzle
300g/ 10½ oz caster sugar
150 ml/¼ pint lemon juice

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180 C/360 F (gas mark 4) line two 1 lb loaf tins with baking parchment. (I used greaseproof paper and it was fine.)

2. Place the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and mix with the electric whisk until fluffy and light in colour.

3. Add the eggs in two batches, whisking well between each batch.

4. Add 100 ml/3½ fluid ounces of lemon juice and the cornflour and whisk again.

5. Add the flour and fold in with a wooden spoon or spatula.

6. Divide between the tins and bake for about 40 minutes, testing with a skewer to see if cooked, it will come out clean if it is ready.

To make the drizzle

1. Place the lemon juice and sugar in a large bowl or jug and stir until the sugar has dissolved.

2. Allow the cakes to cool for a couple of minutes and then prick them all over with a skewer. Pour the drizzle over the cakes.

3. Allow to cool completely. Eat. Do more exercise!

As usual I’m going to tweak the recipe a bit. I didn’t add as much sugar to the lemon juice for the drizzle as I thought it would be too sweet, but it was still too sweet for me. So next time I’ll use less than half of what the recipe calls for and I’m going to try using icing sugar instead of the caster sugar, so that it should dissolve better. I wondered if I should have heated the lemon and sugar to make sure it dissolved properly and I had a look at different recipes, some heat and some don’t, but I think that you aren’t meant to in this recipe. BTW if you don’t know what caster sugar is – it’s just a finer version of normal white granulated sugar.

You can vary the recipe by substituting oranges for the lemons.

This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking.