Lemon cake

Lemon cake

I had a few lemons that had been sitting in my fruit bowl, so I thought I may as well use them up. This recipe makes use of the lemon rind (minus the white pith) and the juice of the lemons. To grate lemon rind I prefer to use a vegetable peeler to peel the yellow skin off, then spread it out on a plate and into the freezer for 5 minutes or so, just to make it firmer. Then put the lid on the thermomix, and with the mc off, turn the speed up to 10. While the blades are spinning, gradually drop the lemon rind in through the lid. Put your hand over the hole if it starts flicking bits out. This usually gets it to a very fine consistency.

Today I decided to give it a go without freezing it first, to see if it makes a difference. As you can see from the picture, the rind is more of a chunkier grind. However in this case it didn't make much difference, because it is then being milled with the sugar, so you don't end up with noticeable pieces of lemon rind in the cake.

Lemon rind grated

I also found my cake tin was a bit too small for the amount of batter this recipe made. I probably filled it a bit too much, so the shape of the cake was a bit UFO like in the end! I actually ended up making 3 cupcakes out of the leftover batter. I cooked them for about 25 minutes. Next time I will make about 6 cupcakes and use the rest for the cake and see how that goes.

I think this cake would be lovely with a little bit of lemon flavoured custard. Just make the custard using the auto recipe on the TM5, but before you start grate some lemon zest as i have described above, scrape down the bowl and then start the custard recipe.

We actually have quite a lot of oranges on our orange tree at the moment, and i would love to try making this with oranges. I will give that a go next week perhaps.

Lemon cake

Happy thermomixing!