So this is midsummer. Whichever of the newspapers was bleating on at the end of May about how we could have a blistering June has gone very quiet. Yesterday was the summer solstice, but apart from the fact that the hens wouldn't go back into their run until nearly eight o'clock you wouldn't have noticed. It keeps blowing half a gale, and today kept being interrupted by pulses of rain, not enough to do the garden any good but just enough to send me scuttling to put my tools under cover.
Still, we are making progress. The sound of a vacuum cleaner came from the Systems Administrator's workshop for much of the day, while every so often an unwanted cardboard box or piece of expanded foam packaging was cast out of the door. I was relieved that one of the things to come to light in the workshop was my number 4 Felco secateurs, which I hadn't seen for ages. Once I'd tidied up the garage and the pot shed and still not found them I was beginning to wonder what had become of them. I knew they weren't in the compost heap, because I've turned all the piles recently, which left the nasty possibility that I might have left them in a flowerbed and would stumble upon their rusted remains years hence, or worse still dropped them by mistake in a bag of stuff going to the dump. Instead of which they have been restored to me, and in remarkably good nick, rather as if I might have had them serviced not long before they disappeared.
As the rain kept driving me indoors before lunch I thought I'd make a cake, and give Julie Duff's recipe for lemon drizzle cake another go. The Mark I version was more of a lemon drizzle biscuit, because it never rose like a cake should, merely crawling over the edges of a too small sandwich tin and depositing some of itself on the floor of the oven, while what remained in the tin was distinctly flat. Since then I have bought a larger and better tin, so armed with that and the decision in the light of experience to crank up the effective oven temperature, I tried again. I like lemon drizzle cake, I like baking, and when things don't work I want to know why.
The mixture did look jolly solid as I spooned it in lumps around my new tin, not what cookery books would describe as a soft dropping consistency (which sounds revolting when you think about it. A good thing in cake mix, perhaps, but scarcely anything else). Still, I had followed the recipe and everything else in the book had worked. The guide cooking time was twenty-five minutes at 180 degrees celsius, so I set the timer for twenty-two minutes intending to see how things were going at that point. Once a cake has had ninety per cent of its indicated cooking time I reckon you ought to be able to take a quick look without it collapsing, so long as you don't slam the oven door. The all round heat of the Aga ovens sometimes cooks things surprisingly quickly, so I tend not to leave things for the full time in the book before checking them.
After twenty-two minutes the cake did not have a nice, gently domed top like the photograph in the book. It was at best level, with a slightly uneven surface. I touched it very gently with one finger and didn't get the amount of resistance you'd expect from a cake that was done, so left it for another three minutes, by which time the edges were dark gold and starting to pull away from the tin. They were clearly done, even if the middle wasn't, but a skewer inserted into the centre came out clean. I took the cake out of the oven, and as it cooled it began to sink, until the top was a gently inverted dome. The drizzling syrup I made with icing sugar and lemon juice turned out to have lumps of undissolved sugar in it, which only became visible as the rest of the syrup soaked into the cake. So that was the Mark II lemon drizzle cake, AKA lemon drizzle biscuit, sunken and covered in small white lumps as if a bar of soap had exploded nearby.
The SA was consoling, saying that he liked biscuits. We tried some with cups of tea in the conservatory, and it tasted perfectly nice and was not particularly heavy, though very sticky. The SA suggested getting some cream, and treating the rest of it as pudding. In line with this week's PM food challenge I am sure that none of it will be wasted. This time round I'm less inclined to blame myself, though. I know it wasn't the flour, because everything else I've made from the same bag of self raising has been absolutely fine. The raw mixture did seem very stiff, with just one egg to four ounces of each of butter, sugar and flour. I looked up the quantities for Victoria sandwich, which does fine in the bottom of the lower Aga oven, and that contains two eggs for the same quantity of dry ingredients. Out of curiosity I looked up lemon drizzle cake in Geraldene Holt's Cakes, and she simply used a Victoria sandwich base with lemon syrup poured over it, including the zest in the syrup and not evening bothering to flavour the cake base with lemon.
The internet has all sorts of variants, with extra ingredients like ground almonds and even white rum. I'm not after anything that complicated, just wanting a risen sponge that is slightly and gratifyingly sticky and tastes of lemon. I might run to a sprinkling of poppy seeds, like the one they used to do in Pret a Manger, but nothing more, though I can imagine the Julie Duff version morphing into quite a good pudding with the addition of some ground almonds. But I am not convinced that the ratio of ingredients she gives are capable of turning into a well risen cake. I shall have to try the Victoria sandwich route and see how it goes, once we've eaten the Mark II version.
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