Cherry’s Cranberry & Lemon Cake Recipe

I am finding myself baking more and more towards the end of each week nowadays. Traditionally you are meant to have fish on a Friday but my household is finding itself with a fridge full of cakes to consume over the weekend. This is great. I am far more prone to something sweet at the end of a long week than baked Salmon. I’ll have the Salmon on Monday as penance!

This particular cake was baked for my mother as a Mothering Sunday gift.We were not going to be with my mum on the day itself  as Robert and I were traveling so I felt the need to send her a little something. That something is this…….

Serves 6/8 and you can find a weight conversion chart here!

• Pre-heat your oven to 170 degrees centigrade
• Place the butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, lemon & cranberries and pop them into your food processor with the blade attachment. Whiz, whiz and then whiz some more. Making the mixture light and fluffy and chopping the cranberries into tiny speckles in the process. This is a much more desirable state for the cranberry to be in if it’s going into a sponge cake.
• Pour the mixture into two 8 inch cake tins and place in the oven for approximately 50 mins.
• When they are baked right through and golden in colour take the tins out of the oven and transfer the cakes to a wire cooling rack.
• When they are cool you can begin to decorate. I spread lashings of Strawberry jam on to one of the sponges, placed the other on top to make a jam sandwich cake and then made some vanilla frosting for the top. After much trial and error I manged to get my frosting to a beautiful duck egg blue colour although I doubt very much if I will ever manage it again!

For the butter-cream frosting

• Blend the sugar, butter , vanilla & milk together using the paddle attachment on your food processor. The lighter you are able to get the frosting the better but don’t mistake lightness for it being too runny. You don’t want runny! If it’s too drippy keep adding the icing sugar.