MOTHERS DAY | LEMON AND RASPBERRY CAKES
February 28, 2016
Mothers day is just next Sunday and what's better than treating her to something beautifully baked than you can both enjoy together? These are perfect little cakes to share with your mum and make her day extra special.
They were a big hit with our Mum, and she even said they were one of our best recipes yet!
The lemon sponge is light and just the right amount of lemon which goes perfectly with the sweet raspberry buttercream. The whole thing is set off by the sharp hit of raspberry puree in the middle which helps to cut into the sweetness of the cake and the buttercream.
The recipe for the lemon cake is another one inherited from our Nana and we have no idea where it originally came from again!
Here's how we made them:
Ingredients:
115g/4oz Margarine/Butter
225g/8oz Caster Sugar
Small tub of Natural Yoghurt
2 Eggs
Juice and Zest of 1 Lemon
225g/8oz Flour
Before starting preheat your oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/Gas mark 6. Now, you're ready to start!
The first thing you need to do is cream together the butter and sugar. Once it is pale and fluffy, you can then beat in the natural yoghurt and the eggs to get a smooth mixture. Next, fold in the lemon zest, lemon juice and the flour until combined.
The easiest way to bake this recipe would be in one of these mini sandwich tins, so if you have one of these definitely use it! We used a 12 x 8 inch baking tray and then used a circle cutter to cut out the cakes. The only problem with this method is that you end up with quite a lot of waste, we got 12 circles out of this baking tray (so 6 cakes) but you'd probably get another 2 cakes out of the mixture if you were using a tin like mentioned above. On the other hand, having waste bits of cake means you get to test it... so its never really going to waste is it?
Anyway, back to baking! Line your baking tray with a sheet of greaseproof paper and then pour in the mixture, making sure that it's as flat as possible before putting into your preheated oven. Bake this for 25 minutes or until light golden and springy to the touch. You can test if its done by inserting a cocktail stick and if it comes out clean then its done!
Whilst your cake is baking you can start to prepare the buttercream.
Buttercream Ingredients:
1 tbsp Caster Sugar
Approx. 225g/8oz Icing Sugar
55g/2oz Butter/Margarine
Large pack of Raspberries
Keep a handful of raspberries to one side to use for decoration
The first thing you need to do is make a raspberry puree which will go into the buttercream. To do this, put the raspberries into a small pan with a tablespoon of sugar. (Don't forget to save some raspberries to put on top!)
Keep the raspberries on a low heat and leave to simmer for around 15 minutes until it thickens a little and starts to look a little bit like a jam. Then you need to take it off the heat and leave to cool completely. We transferred our puree into a bowl and put it into the fridge to cool to speed up the process. It's really important that you leave this to cool completely before making the buttercream or the butter will melt and it won't work.
To make the buttercream we just made a normal buttercream by mixing together 2oz of butter and around 4oz of icing sugar. We then added around half of the raspberry puree and mixed. You will need to add more icing sugar at this point to get it back to the correct consistency. Just keep adding as much or as little as you want until you're happy. We probably added around another 4oz of icing sugar.
By now your sponge should be just out of the oven, you can leave it to cool on a wire rack.
Once your sponge is cool you can transfer it to a chopping board and start to cut out the circles. We managed to get 12 circles altogether.
Now you can take your buttercream and spread it onto half of the circles.
We didn't actually plan to do this step, but we had half of the raspberry puree left over and decided that we might as well use it as a jam in the middle of the cakes! You can skip this step if you'd like but we think the jam adds a really nice tartness to a very sweet cake. So just take a spoonful of the jam and spread a nice thin layer on top of the buttercream.
Once you have filled half of your cakes, you can take the remaining half and place them on top. Next we filled a piping bag with a star nozzle attached, with all of the remaining buttercream and piped a swirl onto the cakes. Now you can take the raspberries that you saved earlier, and decorate the top!
We are so happy with how these turned out, they tasted amazing and are so pretty! We were so impressed by the intense pink colour of the buttercream! The raspberry comes through quite strongly and really compliments the lemon flavour of the cake which makes these incredibly delicious!
We hope you enjoyed this post and hope we didn't make you to hungry. Please leave us a comment and feel free to tag us on Twitter or Instagram if you decide to do some Mothers Day baking next weekend! Don't forget to follow us on Bloglovin'!
Love, Antonia and Imogen
