Lemon Layer Drizzle Cake

Back in June I received my weekly delivery of "family essentials" from Farmison. Along with the selection of fruit and vegetables and meat, there were a couple of "pantry" items. The slab of butter was most welcome, the jar of lemon curd was not. In a household overwhelmed with homemade preserves, a jar of preserve was not required.

Still, I'm not one for food waste and it occurred to me that my brother's birthday would be the ideal opportunity to use up some of the lemon curd. He had, I remembered, always been a fan of lemon curd, enjoying it in tarts even back in the day when it was bright yellow and had probably never even been near a lemon (what happened to food during the 80s?!). So I saw this an opportunity to make a Lemon Layer Cake using the recipe from my daughter's set of Usborne Book recipe cards.

Usually with recipes I can't help but fiddle and tweak as I go along, often reducing the sugar content to match the lack of sweet teeth in our household. However, this was destined for a large 40th birthday party where there would be an audience of sweet teeth, so I left well alone.

Lemon Layer Cake

225g (8 oz) margarine
225g (8 oz) caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 lemon, zest and juice
225g (8 oz) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Lemon curd

1 lemon, zest and juice
125g (5 oz) icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas mark 4 and grease and line 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins. Cream together the margarine and caster sugar then mix in the eggs one at a time and then add the lemon zest and juice. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix until well combined and smooth. Divide equally between the two tins then bake for 20 minutes. Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Once cool, smear a generous heaping of lemon curd onto one cake and place the other one on top. Next mix the juice of the other lemon with icing sugar and pour the icing over the top of the cake. Finally, scatter the lemon zest on top.

This proved to be a triumph of a cake. It both looked and tasted gorgeous. However, when I asked my husband what he thought of the cake he admitted that he found it too sweet and particularly didn't like the layer of white icing on top. Still, I had lemon curd left to use up so a few weeks later I made the cake again. This time, I took an ounce of icing sugar out of the icing layer and this turned it into a drizzle instead of an icing. To my mind it kept much of it fabulous character (although arguably it didn't look so appealing) and Steve was much happier with it too.

Then this week, Nicola from PicNics asked me if I could make something lemony for them to use as a filling in their cakes. "Maybe one of your lemon marmalades," she suggested. I pondered this and decided that my Honey & Lemon Marmalade would work well if it wasn't so lumpy. So on Thursday I set about making a fine shred version of this popular marmalade, which I'm pleased to say looked very promising.

As Friday was Steve's birthday I decided this was the perfect opportunity to try out my new lemon cake filling and once again tackled the lemon layer cake recipe. This time, with Steve in mind, I removed 2 oz of the caster sugar from the sponge layer, glued the layers together with a good dollop of fine shred Honey & Lemon Marmalade, and created a drizzle using 3 oz of icing sugar. And wow! what a revelation... the flavour of the lemon really taking centre-stage and no overdone sweetness. Yep, this is the one to add to the family recipe notebook. Steve, by the way, went back for seconds... but, hey, it was his birthday!

Lemon Drizzle Layer Cake

225g (8 oz) margarine
175g (6 oz) caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 lemon, zest and juice
225g (8 oz) self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Honey & Lemon Marmalade (fine shred)

1 lemon, zest and juice
75g (3 oz) icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas mark 4 and grease and line 2 x 20cm round sandwich tins. Cream together the margarine and caster sugar then mix in the eggs one at a time and then add the lemon zest and juice. Sift in the flour and baking powder and mix until well combined and smooth. Divide equally between the two tins then bake for 20 minutes. Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely. Once cool, smear a generous heaping of lemon marmalade onto one cake and place the other one on top. Finally,mix the juice and zest of the other lemon with icing sugar and pour the drizzle over the top of the cake.