Friday 1 March 2013

Lemon and blackcurrant drizzle cake

So no, I am not a crafty mummy, but I am a cake baking mummy.

It gives me a huge feeling of satisfaction to raise a proverbial 2 fingers to my children's school and the pronouncements that come out every year about what should or should not be in the packed lunches. I may have ranted a little about this before. Apparently it is fine for the school lunch to have a cake for pudding, for a school lunch is  carefully calibrated 1/3 of a child's nutritional needs. I am a mere parent and incapable of providing my own children with a carefully balanced diet. I should not be putting cake in my children's lunch boxes.

I know that the edicts from school are levelled at those who, for whatever reason, do not or cannot take much notice of what they put in their children's lunches. It just annoys me that rather than trying to help those families, we just get blanket missives addressed to all of us, attempting to ban cake from packed lunches.

Is it a mark of how unutterably sad I am that I feel a little thrill, sending my children into school with cake in their lunchboxes? Cake with fruit in it - just to prove that I know what I'm talking about?

With an eye to the new half term just starting again here (half way through the school year already - time is just flying by), this is one of those cakes. It's a lemon drizzle with blackcurrants (or raspberries) stirred through the batter before baking. We had some blackcurrrants in the freezer from the summer. I turned some of them into the blackcurrant jam that topped a cheesecake the other day, and this is what I did with the remaining 300g the other week, having blown the eggs to make dragon eggs...



The original recipe is a Mary Berry - you can find it here . It's a fantastic lemon drizzle traybake, and basically, once the batter is made (no hardship - it's a chuck it all in and beat it all up type of cake), stir through 300g frozen blackcurrants, and bake in a tray bake tin.



It's quite a tart kind of cake, with the lemon and the gorgeous berries, but that's no bad thing if you ask me. I've also made it with raspberries. Mmmmm. And it's also a good cake to cut up and freeze in individual portions - ideal, in fact, for packed lunches...

4 comments:

  1. I am a sucker for any cake with drizzle. This sounds awesome.

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  2. Love the idea of adding blackcurrant to the cake - I love their contrasting tartness. It's a good job I don't have children - I'd annoy me to death that I couldn't send them with cake. And besides which, who eats exactly 1/3 of their daily intake at lunch anyway - as a kid I didn't eat 1/3 at breakfast, lunch and tea. Really not that simple, I feel your annoyance!

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  3. Hi this sounds devine. Thanks for the idea. Did you still cook it for the same length of time? Have you made it with fresh blackcurrantstart?

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