As I mentioned before in my previous blog post, I am a huge fan of Jo Wheatley and I love her book, ” A Passion For Baking” As I too have a passion for baking like Jo, this book is absolutely fantastic and I am steadily trying out lots of different things in it as I go along.

Jo mentions in her book that she likes traybakes like Mary Berry.  I too associate Mary Berry with traybakes as I love using the traybake recipes in her Baking Bible.  They are useful for many occasions, such as a Coffee Morning like I baked some traybake recipes for.

It was a Thursday night about a couple of weeks ago and I had promised to bake some extra things to go on our cake stall at our school’s World’s Biggest Coffee Morning in aid of Macmillan.  I know that homemade cakes always go down well and the children in the class I work in had been extremely busy the previous two mornings baking with me in class.  The children love cooking with me (whatever we make) and I really enjoy it too, I just hope they remember all the little tips I tell them so that they can recreate things at home with their parents.  On the Wednesday we made cookies but on this particular Thursday we made two traybakes from Mary Berry’s book- a vanilla one with vanilla buttercream and a chocolate one.  Unfortunately I was in such a rush I forgot to take pictures of them but I was so impressed with what the children had created.  I wasn’t alone.

When I got home I was thinking about what would have a different flavour to go alongside all the other things we would be selling and remembered that I had two lemons to use up.  Jo’s lemon drizzle traybake recipe really appealed to me because when I have sold anything like lemon drizzle cake in the past, it flies off the stall.

The recipe was a quick one; I simply mixed all the ingredients together- sugar, flour, butter, eggs, lemon zest, baking powder and a little milk in my KitchenAid and poured it into a greased traybake tin. This is my trusty Alan Silverwood tin that always gets used for traybakes and works perfectly every time.

The cake baked for about an hour in the centre of the oven and I was craving lemon cake all along as I could smell it baking.  The aroma wafted around the house and you could smell it everywhere, which made me feel even worse.

Once the traybake came out of the oven and was left on a cooling rack, I quickly mixed up lemon juice and sugar to make a syrup.  This got poured over the top of the cake but I did not remove the cake out of the tin until the sugar had set, I’ve found if you want it to stay on the top it won’t drip down the sides if it’s in the tin!

Then, last of all, I cut the cake up into 16 large rectangles and hoped that they would go down well at the coffee morning.

I was glad that they did sell well, I did buy back a couple of pieces back home for my hubby and the kids as they love lemon drizzle and they always complain I never bake for them.  One of the ladies who bought a slice said it was lovely and moist, and the sponge was light.  I was so relieved and I’m definitely going to make it again for another coffee morning or occasion.

Lemon Drizzle Traybake from Jo Wheatley’s book- “A Passion For Baking”

Happy Baking!