Light and fresh apple and lemon cake

We went away for the weekend with a whole group of students and 20’s, which was great fun.  At the end there was left over food and after the students had pinched all the tea, cereal, and chocolate spread I was left with a near bushel of apples.  I also came home to a bag of slightly past their best lemons, so why not apple and lemon cake?

There wasn’t much of it left after I served it up at my book group last night…

Double glazed top

Recipe:

For the cake:

4 eating apples (peeled and cored, 3 diced into 1 cm pieces, and 1 sliced)

Zest of 1 lemon

350g self-raising flour

200g caster sugar

2 eggs

200ml sunflower oil

50ml milk

Glaze 1:

40g butter, melted

2 heaped tsp light brown sugar

Glaze 2:

Juice of 1 lemon

3 heaped dessert spoons icing sugar

I love it when the apples shrink during baking revealing the yummy sponge in inside!

Preheat the oven to 170°C and grease and line a 9inch tin.

Just mix all the cake ingredients except the apple together in a large bowl until combined.  Add a spot more milk if it looks stiff, it should be a dropping consistency.  Stir in the diced apple.  Pour into the tin and smooth the top.  Arrange the apple slices on top.

For the first glaze mix the sugar into the butter and then drizzled evenly over the cake.  This is to make the apples all brown and lovely.

Put the cake in the oven and bake for 1hr 20mins, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Mix the ingredients for the second glaze together and pour evenly over the cake as soon as it is out of the oven.  This is to add extra lemony flavour and make it shiny and sticky on top.

Cool for 10-15 mins before turning onto a wire rack to cool.

Not much leftover!