Dessert recipes that include lemons are a favourite of mine. Having perilously made a 15-minute easy lemon cheesecake and a delicious two-minute lemon mug cake, I decided to give a lemon and blueberry loaf cake a go.
Bursting with juicy blueberries and bright lemon flavour, this lemon blueberry pound cake is the perfect brunch treat or sweet pick-me-up any time of day.
It has a tender, delicate crumb, and the flavour is extra bright thanks to lots of lemon zest.
The recipe I followed for this lemon and blueberry loaf cake was from Chef Shane Smith.
This loaf cake recipe serves six and takes less than 20 minutes to prep and around 70 minutes to bake.
Ingredients
For the cake
225g butter, softened
200g caster sugar
Four large eggs
One teaspoon vanilla essence
One lemon, zest
250g plain flour
One and a half teaspoons baking powder
One teaspoon salt
300g fresh blueberries
For the icing
125g icing sugar
Two tablespoons lemon juice
Method
I started by weighing out all of my ingredients, zesting and juicing a lemon and preheating my oven to 160C Fan/180C/Gas Mark 4.
I then lined a 2lb loaf tin with parchment and set it aside. However, softened butter dusted with flour, or oil dusted with flour, are alternatives, according to the baking pros at BBC Good Food.
In a bowl, I creamed together the butter and sugar until soft which took around three minutes.
Next, I added the eggs one at a time and gave them a mix between each addition.
To this mixture, I added the vanilla and lemon zest before giving it another mix.
After, it was time to add in the dry ingredients. I sieved in the flour, baking powder and salt and folded it through.
Keeping a handful of blueberries back to sprinkle on top of the loaf, I added the rest of the blueberries to the cake batter.
However, I made the mistake of not coating the blueberries in a tablespoon of flour before adding it to the mixture.
The light coating of flour around the berries is essential for absorbing some of the fruit’s liquid, making them less likely to sink.
Having made this error, it did result in the majority of blueberries sinking to the bottom of the cake.
After, I spooned the cake mix into the prepared tin and sprinkled the reserved blueberries on top before putting it in the oven to bake.
While the recipe called for baking the cake for 70 minutes I found that the cake needed an extra 10 minutes in the oven. Make sure to use a skewer to test if the cake is ready – it will come out clean if it is ready.
Once baked, I removed the cake from the oven and left it to cool for 10 minutes in the tin before transferring it to a cooling rack to cool completely.
In the meantime, I made the icing by simply mixing the icing sugar with lemon juice before drizzling it over the loaf once cooled.
Despite the majority of the blueberries sinking to the bottom, the cake tasted incredible – the sponge was perfectly moist and it had just the right amount of lemon.
