Gin and lemon cakes

There’s a great cake shop in Cordoba called La Tarterie (on the way up from the Corredera) which has delicious cakes made there on the premises.  It’s a tiny little place but they supply the cakes at La Bicicleta too if you prefer your cake with a chair and a coffee.

A couple of weeks ago they had gin and tonic cake, which I found rather exciting as it is a marriage of 2 of my favourite things, so I bought a slice and it was glorious. Sadly I didn’t take a photo as I was too busy stuffing my face.  However, it inspired me to buy a piping bag and make some myself.  The sun has come back after Easter and a friend is visiting from Huelva so it seemed like a great excuse to make some myself.  I got the basic recipe here but there has been a recent trend for strawberry gin here (made in Andalucia) so I made 2 kinds: gin and lemon, and strawberry gin.

Ingredients (makes 12 cupcakes)

• 150g sugar
• 125g butter
• 60ml milk
• Juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons gin (I used Bombay Sapphire and Puerta de Indias)
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 180g plain flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon baking powder

Icing

• 100g butter
• 240g icing sugar
• 1-2 tbsp cream cheese
• 2 tablespoons gin
• 1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1-2 strawberries (chopped)

1. Preheat the oven to 180˚C.  Mix the butter and sugar until creamy.
2. Add the juice, zest, gin, milk and egg and mix well.
3. Fold in the flour, salt and baking powder
4. Put the mixture into cake cases and bake for 15-20 minutes (mine didn’t exactly go golden but I didn’t want them to dry out so I took them out after 20 minutes, maybe it’s my oven)
5. Get the cakes on a wire tray to cool and mix the icing.  First I tried making butter cream with strawberry instead of lemon but it was too sweet, so I added a little lemon juice.  For the Bombay cakes, I left the strawberry out and made lemon butter cream.  The first time I made the topping I found it kind of leaked a syrupy gin mix after a day or two, so I tried adding cream cheese and this not only makes a much nicer texture butter cream, but also stops the ingredients from separating.
6. Pipe or spread the icing onto the cakes and eat!  I garnished with lemon zest or strawberry slices too.

They went down very well and were pretty easy to make.  I also tried adding elderflower cordial to a batch of buttercream but no matter how much I added, it just didn’t give any flavour.  Eventually I gave up and stuck to lemon or strawberry, which are still yummy.