I found this lemon cake recipe in my mother's book. I don't remember her ever making it but she must have meant to, one day. It's slightly different from a lemon drizzle cake as it uses ground almonds and it is topped with a creamy icing made with mascarpone and lemon curd. Looking at the ingredients, I think this came from a supermarket magazine! It's a good one for the summer months ...
200g unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
grated zest of 3 lemons
4 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
50g lemon curd (about a tablespoon)
250g plain flour
200g ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
Icing
2 x 250g tubs of mascarpone cheese
125g lemon curd
4 tbsp icing sugar
Preheat the oven to 180ºC and line the bottom of two 20cm sandwich tins with greaseproof paper.
Sieve the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate into a bowl and stir in the ground almonds.
In a separate large bowl, cream the butter and caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Zest the lemons directly into the bowl and stir in. Next, add the eggs one at a time alternating with a spoonful of the flour mixture and beat well. Stir in the vanilla extract and the lemon curd, and then add the dry ingredients, beating well to combine. Put half of the mix into each cake tin and level with a knife. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.
While your cakes are cooling, make the icing. Simply mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and put into the fridge to keep cool until you’re ready to use it.
If your cakes have risen in the middle, level them off with a knife before icing. Then spread a quarter of the icing onto the first cake, top with the second one, and spread the remainder of the icing over the top and sides. Use a palette knife to smooth it down and decorate as you wish - I drizzled lines of chocolate across the top to create a simple geometric pattern.
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