Loaf Cakes

L-R: Lemon Gin Cake, Lemon Drizzle Cake, Spiced Courgette Cake.

I was trying to keep myself busy a few weeks back to distract from feeling sad (one of my friends had died and we had been to his funeral). This resulted in me spending a Saturday afternoon in the kitchen baking up some random loaf-cakes. I didn’t originally plan on making three cakes, I just got carried away again.

Lemon Gin Cake

The first cake I made was a lemon + gin pound cake. This is made using equal weights of egg, sugar, butter and flour, and then adding gin and lemon juice to the mixture. Normally you can really taste the gin, but on this occasion I must have gone too easy. It’s topped with a gin + lemon soak.

Spiced Courgette Cake

The second cake I made was a vegan cake: spiced courgette cake with a lemon glaze. This was made following a recipe from Domestic Gothess that turned out so well I made the cake again the weekend after!

Vegan Lemon Drizzle

The third cake I made this day was a vegan lemon drizzle cake; again made with a recipe from Domestic Gothess

Again, this turned out really well and was very tasty!

As I wasn’t ever going to eat 3 loaf cakes to myself, I ended up slicing them all up and packaging them into cellophane wrappers to send to some people in the post as a pick-me-up / thank you for their help over recent weeks. It was a LOT of cake:

Chocolate Courgette Cake

We have a big garden and last year my husband started to grow our own vegetables. This year it seems that the courgettes are taking over & growing into giants so I have been trying to find recipes to use them all up.

The bottom one would usually be considered a “large” courgette – just to give an idea of the size of them

Last year, I used a recipe from Shugary Sweets for a Chocolate Courgette Cake. I decided to do this again this year to use up one of the behemoth vegetables!

As I was making the cake, I realised I didn’t have the full amount of cocoa powder in my store cupboards (I ALWAYS have this in so no idea how that escaped me). I tried to make do with some ginger chocolate morsels from Hotel Chocolat, but it wasn’t quite right so was slightly less chocolaty than the last time I made this.

Also, I should have let it cool in the pan a bit more. Due to the moistness of the cake, it didn’t hold shape when I turned it out.

It was a bit moist when I removed it from the pan

Inside of the cake

I had spare batter too, so I made some cupcake sized cakes too