Last week it was my partners birthday, but it was also a year since I started this blog (I didn’t notice till after the fact or I would have posted this sooner!). I cooked a birthday cake for my partner, and I’ve decided to hi-jack it and make it a happy first birthday post for my blog as well.
In terms of the cake, my partner’s only request was that the cake be a lemony one. Browsing through the BBC Good Food website, it was the recipe for lemon and poppy seed cupcakes that jumped out at me. Rather than make 12 little cakes (which were maybe a tad feminine for a 27 year old bloke) I decided to make one large one as a birthday cake. Gratifyingly this worked out really well.
This really was a very simple cake to make. To begin, I mixed together all my dry ingredients for the cake, combining self-raising flour, caster sugar, lemon zest and poppy seeds in a large mixing bowl. Separately I combined my wet ingredients of eggs and yoghurt (not the prettiest looking mixture I have to say!)
Adding the wet ingredients to the dry ones
I then melted my butter before adding to my wet ingredients to the dry, gently combining the two together to form a smooth batter. I then lined a 7 inch cake tin with baking parchment before pouring the in the mixture. This went in the oven for around 80minutes (a big cake takes a lot longer than a cupcake to cook through I discovered!) at 180°C
The cake mix in tin
In the oven the top of the cake did crack which was a shame, but it had lovely firm but spongy texture which meant that it was easy to get out of the tin and handle (fragile cakes are so hard to ice!).
The cake out of oven
Luckily the recipe also called for an industrial quantity icing, more than sufficient to fill and cover the crack. The icing was a basic buttercream mix of butter (almost a entire block!), icing sugar, lemon juice and a little yellow food colouring. The sheer quantity made this quite hard to mix, even with very soft butter, but I got it fairly smooth in the end (although there were spots of food colouring that didn’t get mixed in giving it a slightly spotty look).
The mountain of icing
Icing this cake was great fun, I’m still learning the tricks of doing this and managed to get icing all over my kitchen in the process. The result was not patisserie quality, but I was still fairly chuffed. The cake was completely covered and you couldn’t spot the crack at all. I then finished the cake by trying to arrange the candles in the shape of the number 27. You could just about see it if you squinted.
The cake all iced complete with candles
Despite being firm on the outside the cake was very soft inside. The lemon taste was subtle but pleasant. Not as in your face as a lemon drizzle cake, but it was still fresh and had a nice sharpness to counter the sweet icing. My partner was very pleased with his cake and I have to admit I was quite chuffed as well. So happy birthday my darling, and happy birthday to my blog as well!
The cake cut open
Rhi's Foodie World 