Lemon Drizzle Cake

From The Guardian; even though it's from the US edition it's a little challenging because it uses ingredients not all that common in the US. Also, the Brits write recipes differently.

Ingredients

175g butter, softened, plus a little extra to grease
2 unwaxed lemons
175g caster sugar (appears to be the same as superfine sugar)
Fine salt
3 eggs
100g self-raising flour
75g ground almonds
A little milk
100g demerara sugar

Instructions

1. Prepare the tin - Grease a 2lb loaf tin (ie, one measuring about 23cm x 13cm x 7cm [9in x 5in x 2.75in]) with butter or oil, and line with greaseproof paper. Heat the oven to 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4. Zest the lemons – if you haven’t got unwaxed (or organic) ones, give them a good scrub with hot water to remove some of the wax first, because this will give a better flavour.

2. Soften the butter - If you’ve forgotten to take the butter out of the fridge, cut it into cubes and leave it near the warm oven or give it a few good whacks with a rolling pin to help it on its way. (Microwaving will just melt the outside, which isn’t ideal.) Put the cubed butter in a large bowl, or in the bowl of a food mixer, with the caster sugar, a pinch of fine salt and half the lemon zest.

3. Cream the butter and sugar - Use electric beaters to beat the butter and sugar mix until it’s really light and fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary; this should take about five minutes. You can do this with a wooden spoon, but it will take a while, because you want to get as much air into the mix as possible. Cream the butter, sugar, the rest of the zest and a pinch of salt; get as much air in the mix as you can.

4. Add the eggs - Beat together the eggs in a jug, then beat them into the butter and sugar mixture a little at a time, making sure each addition is thoroughly incorporated before adding any more. If the mixture threatens to curdle at any point, add a little of the flour to bring it back to a smooth consistency.

5. Incorporate the flour - Tip the flour into a sieve and sift it on top of the butter and sugar mixture – though this is not vital, it will help to give a lighter, fluffier result, so I’d recommend it. Use a large metal spoon gently to fold in the flour with a slow, figure-of-eight motion, being careful to knock as little air out of the mix as possible.

6. … and the ground almonds and milk - Put the ground almonds in a bowl, give them a quick whisk to break up any lumps, then fold into the batter in the same way as the flour. Gradually mix in just enough milk to thin down the batter to a consistency that will reluctantly drop off a spoon.

7. Pour into the tin and bake - Pour the batter into the prepared tin and gently level the top. Put in the hot oven and bake for about 50-55 minutes, or until the top is golden and risen, and a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean, or at least without any wet batter clinging to it; a few crumbs are fine.

8. Now for the drizzle - Juice both lemons and mix this with the demerara sugar and the remaining lemon zest. Leave the cake in the tin, and poke small holes evenly all over the top, then pour over the drizzle bit by bit, waiting for it be absorbed before adding any more. Leave the cake to cool in its tin before turning out.

 

More notes - just for fun and because I feel like typing, here's some of the interesting differences between Brit-style recipe and American:

1) Somewhat rarer ingredients - Caster sugar and demarara sugar don't show up often in US recipes. Majority of American recipes use regular flour, self-raising is rare. I've never seen ground almonds in a store so any American recipe that uses ground almonds would also include instructions on how to grind them; perhaps they're easier to find in Great Britain or perhaps they're used so commonly that it's assumed the home cook knows how to make them.

2) Obvious differences in units of measurement, although metric weights for ingredients actually aren't all that strange. Brit recipes always include three different oven settings (centigrade, farenheit, and some kind of gas number), so they obviously have different types of ovens; in America all recipes simply use farenheit. I was amused by the recipe insisting on providing metric sizes for the loaf pan of "about" 23cm x 13cm x 7cm which are odd numbers, when the pan is clearly a standard imperial size of 9in x 5in.

3) Different ways to reference equipment - Americans never use the word "tins", we would simply call it a pan. Probably wouldn't refer to paper as "greaseproof" paper and probably would specify parchment paper. Beat the eggs in a "jug", we'd say small bowl.

4) And simply the way the instructions are written is slightly different. Instructions are slightly wordier, and giving instructions on how to soften butter is a little odd.