First Bake!

First baking session of the new year resulted in testing out a Madeira cake.

I know this is often viewed as an old lady's cake, bland and simple, but I have been buying this regularly from our village shop and loving it.

The recipe is based upon Nigella's with a few tweeks, taken from the inspirational blog 100 Cook Books. A straight forward lift of the adapted recipe is:

Ingredients

• 250g butter
• 200g caster sugar plus extra for sprinkling
• grated zest and juice of one lemon
• 3 large eggs
• 300g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder

Instructions 

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees C (I reduced the temperature after 30 minutes by 10 degrees as I have a fan oven, I should have reduced it from the start as the edges of the cake were slightly dry)
2. Cream butter and sugar and add lemon zest
3. Add eggs one at a time with a little of the flour between each egg
4. Then gently mix in rest of flour followed by lemon juice
5. Dollop into a loaf tin and sprinkle with tbsp caster sugar
6. Bake for 1hr to 1.25hrs (until a cake tester comes out clean) - I baked mine for 55 minutes, which was enough.

I used a 2lb loaf tin without a liner, next time I'll line the tin and bake for the entire time at 160 deg C.