Dan Lepard's Lemon Butter Cake

The Queen was fifty-one when I was born.  At eighty-six, she's spent the weekend in the spotlight, travelling up the Thames on a freezing cold barge; listening to a quite frankly terrible concert (was it bad sound on the BBC or was it just that the majority of the performers can't sing live without auto-tune?); and then attending a series of services to celebrate her sixty years on the throne.  I'm worn out just thinking about her doing all that!

This evening I'm suffering from Jubilee fatigue.  In the same way that come December 27th, most of us will happily see out of the year without further turkey/chocolate/alcohol/party food.  I just wanted to eat something light for tea.  We've not indulged in the same way that we would at Christmas; but having spent the last couple of weeks eating salads every day, I'm struggling with all the meat I've eaten these past three days.

If all else fails, there's always lemon icing!

I'd planned to make the Telegraph's Diamond Jubilee salad - a modernisation of Coronation Chicken - but when push came to shove, I realised that I'd be happier with a bowl of berries and Greek yogurt. 

Luckily, I got guilted into baking a cake to take to my colleagues at my home site when I paid a cake-less visit to them kast week.  This got me out of today's hole of trying something new.

I've made several different lemon cakes (sorry, the previous link is to 'lemon' so it will pick up the lemon lamb recipe too!) since I started my blog, with my favourite being Dan's Lemon and Poppy Seed Cake.  I picked this one, not because I'm a huge fan of lemon cake but because I had an open tin of condensed milk in the fridge that needed using up.  Lepard says in the blurb that this keeps the cake moist.  I can't confirm that because the cake is now boxed up and ready for serious testing at work tomorrow.

The batter follows a very different method to pretty much any other cake I've made before.  It involves making a meringue from the egg whites and folding this into a mixture of egg yolks, melted butter, condensed milk, sugar and flour.  It had a really strange texture.  I would've expected the meringue to go in before the flour and found it quite hard to get an even mix through the batter.  I was also worried about losing the volume from the egg whites, but it baked okay.  I'll be interested to see how it comes out when it's cut and I'll update this post with the verdict tomorrow.

In the meantime, you can find the recipe on the Guardian Website.