Lemon Drizzle Loaf

Inspired by seeing a tweet from @utterlyscrummy about her baking and looking at her blogpost, we decided to give the recipe she posted a try with gluten free flour.

The recipe calls for the following ingredients -
200g softened butter
200g caster sugar
200g self raising flour, sifted (we used Dove's Farm Gluten Free Self Raising flour)
3 free range eggs (we used medium eggs)
finely grated zest of 1 lemon
for the lemon drizzle:
Juice of the zested lemon
50g of sugar  (add 5g more if you used a rather large lemon)

After gathering the above ingredients, Sous Chef J set about creaming the butter and sugar... for once, he was happy to give it a go with our electric hand mixer (this may have something to do with the promise of "cook's reward" of licking the beaters at the end of mixing).  He made a good effort and managed to handle the mixer quite well.

He then grated the zest of the lemon and mixed this into the creamed butter and sugar.

Next we added in the flour - about one third at a time, with one of the eggs - and mixed some more.  By the end of this time, the mix was quite firm so Sous Chef J had swapped back to being photographer.





Finally, the cake mix was dolloped into a pre-lined (we use the ready made loaf tin liners) tin. the mix was evened out before the loaf was put into a warm oven (170C fan) for 40 minutes. It was checked with a knife at this point but was still very batter-like so it was left in the oven for a further 10minutes (obviously this stage depends on your cooker and the ingredients/tin you've used so you need to keep an eye on it).  After this time, we turned the oven off but left the loaf in for a further five minutes.  It was then removed to cool slightly in the tin.

The lemon drizzle mix was prepared using the juice of the lemon and sugar.  It was poured over the warm cake which we'd 'stabbed' all over.  Then we had to be patient and let it cool a little more before we could eat it!

Having waited as long as we could, we cut a slice of cake each and were delighted at the light, lemony lusciousness we were rewarded with!  Sous Chef J did comment that "we've used too much baking powder" having seen that the middle had sunk... however, this will have been the result of our frugal oven use as we also cooked 2 pizzas and a tray of coconut biscuits so the oven door was opened a few times.  Anyway, to use a favourite phrase of Sous Chef J ""it all goes the same in your tummy; YUM." So we weren't put off by the saggy bit... in fact it absorbed the drizzle very well indeed.