Lemon delicious

I had a couple of lemons sitting in the fruit bowl, and a pottle of sour cream in the fridge. Sounds like it might be time to make a lemon sour cream cake (p49)!

Most cake recipes have you cream the butter and sugar first, then add eggs one at a time, and so on. Interestingly, for this one you just bung the butter, eggs, sugar and lemon zest in a bowl together and beat it all up. I'm all for shortcuts - when they work - but unfortunately I hadn't softened my butter enough, so I wound up with a sugary, eggy mixture with big lumps of butter in it.


To remedy this situation, I bunged the whole bowl in the microwave for just long enough to soften that butter, then got the beaters back into the mixture again. All this extra beating made the creamed mixture very light and fluffy. I was quite pleased with it.


Until I started folding in the sour cream and dry ingredients, that is! I scooped the sour cream straight into the cake mixture from the pottle, when really I should have stirred it up a little first. This would have helped the mixture to combine, instead of just floating around the mixture in big lumps.


I eventually got the dry ingredients and all the sour cream mixed in to my satisfaction. I was sure I'd overmixed it, but otherwise it looked pretty good. I poured the mixture into a greased and lined springform tin, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes.

The cake baked a little oddly, with a raised rim around the edge that baked darker than the rest, while the centre rose only slightly. When I took the cake out, the raised centre sank back down until the top of the cake was almost flat. The skewer test indicated the cake was cooked, though, so I figured maybe it was supposed to be like that.


I took my lemon sour cream cake to work this morning to feed the hungry workmates. This one disappeared much faster than most of the things I bring in, partly because Sue cut it into fairly generous slices, but mostly because it was really tasty - I'd worried it would be a bit dense and soggy, but actually it was moist and deliciously lemony. I'm not sure if the appearance of the cake was what it should have been, but certainly the flavour was spot on.


Make a note of this cake. It's definitely worth a go. Two recommendations: make sure your butter is nice and soft before you start, and give your sour cream a bit of a stir before you add it, so you're not plonking in lumps of the stuff.