Simple and Citrusy!

Happy New Year to all of you! For everyone who left messages for us, thanks so much for remembering us! We've been away for a long long time now, and its been a difficult time. Job search during recession sucks is what I've learned in the past 4 months and decided to plunge into academics all over again after a good 5 years! And it did not help that I was on diet after diet to try to do something about my 2008 resolutions :P Of course, I have almost the same resolutions for 2009 also. Hopefully, this will be a lighter year on everything, literally ;)

A loves to have a dessert after every meal if possible. And especially after dinner. Thanks to our baking obsession, we bake something almost every single day. Lately, we stopped doing so thanks to a change in the weighing scales for me. It did not seem to affect him, strangely! However, we still have our days when we go crazy and bake at 10 PM in the night. This is one such lemony cake that we came up with two hours ago. It is now 12.56 AM! Thankfully, we baked an XS cake - super small in size but huge in flavour and the zing :) I love citrusy flavours and can never tire of them. A is not too fond of them, but then :P who is the life of our family? Me! So, we baked this cake for me and here you go, here is the recipe for a simple lemon cake!

Ingredients:

1 egg
1/4 cup +2 tbsp All-purpose flour or Cake flour
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup + 2 tbsp sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp lemon essence
Pinch of salt

1. Beat the egg. Cream melted butter and sugar. Add this mixture to the beaten egg.

2. Add the baking powder and the baking soda

3. Add sour cream and beat one more time

4. Fold in lemon zest and the lemon essence

5. Fold in the flour little by little. Sift the flour if it is AP flour. Cake flour can be added as it is. Do NOT overbeat/mix.

We poured it into a 4 inch (1 inch deep) ramekin making the cake small, just enough for the two of us- a late night lemon-sweet craving :) This cake is fairly light too because it needs just 1tbsp butter and we used fat-free sour cream! So, there! Keeping up with the resolutions and all that ;)

It is quite citrusy and comes out beautifully moist and a fresh yellow in colour. We had ours with some warm blackberry sauce. We had some blackberry-raspberry preserve that we added some hot water to, and thinned it to bring it to a sauce-like consistency. While the cake was mildly sweet, the sweetness of the blackberry sauce added a new dimension to the cake. I loved the mild sweetness and preferred the lemony zing in the cake. You could add more sugar if you wish!

This piece of cake specifically goes out to Nags :) for encouraging to come back to blog all over again. Thanks man!