A Crowd-Pleasing Recipe: Lemon and Lavender Drizzle Cake

The Lemon and Lavender Drizzle Cake is a thing of beauty. The first cake I ever baked successfully when I moved out was a lemon drizzle cake. Since then, I have been experimenting with different lemon cake recipes. This is my current favourite. Lemon and lavender are surprisingly complementary flavours, and I love the look of the scattered lavender flowers. It's a slightly more grown up take on a family staple, and is sure to be a crowd pleaser if you bring it out at a coffee morning. I personally love it as a late night snack - all the delight of a sugary treat, with the added sleep benefits of lavender.

I frequently forget to do this step, so for me of the future: Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. You also need to remember to pre-grease your baking tin! First, let's make lavender sugar. You will need a food processor for this. 

Whizz up the sugar and lavender together until the lavender has broken down. Now add the baking powder and flour. Add the Stevia at this point too if you’re using it. I'm going to take this time now to warn you that you MUST NOT add essential oils to this or any bake. 

Essential oils are not for ingesting, no matter how delicious they smell. In a separate bowl, combine the yoghurt and Stork. You could use butter, but in our house we prefer Stork for bakes. The butter and yoghurt may form a slightly lumpy mixture, which doesn't look the most appetising. Don't worry, though, this is just because of the temperature of the ingredients, and it will sort itself out in the bake. 

Always be prepared for something to go wrong with a bake - much like life. My own attempt did go lumpy because I can never remember to leave the Stork to warm up. Make a well in the bowl of dry ingredients, and pour the wet mix in gradually.

Finally, crack the eggs in to a separate bowl, or your food processor, and beat them well. Then add them to the mix. Eggs have to be last as they can start to cook in the sugar, and you absolutely do not want your eggs to cook too soon. Once the mixture is fully combined, and just looks like normal cake mix, pour into a cake tin that looks like it will fit it with some space left at the top (this should be around 20cm diameter). Cook for 30 minutes, or until you can stick a skewer in it and it comes out clean. Then you have to leave it to cool. While that’s happening, you can get started on the drizzle! This is another one where it’s going to be a little bit up to your judgement, sorry. The drizzle is an interesting thing – it needs to not be so thick that it can’t get into the cake, but not so thin that it just all comes out the bottom. No soggy bottoms allowed! 

For the delicious lemon and sugar-syrup drizzle, mix the juice of 1 large lemon with 100g caster sugar, stirring until the sugar is mostly dissolved. Prick a bunch of holes in the cake with a skewer. Once the mixture has combined, pour all over your now cool to the touch cake. Now you have to leave it to cool again. For some extra decoration, why not add sugared lavender? Dip lavender in egg white, then dust with caster sugar, then leave to set. Pretty!