TWD ~ Lemon Loaf Cake

The second recipe for April was Lemon Loaf Cake, you can find it on pages 252-253 in Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan.  If you would like the recipe for the cake go and visit this week's hosts Truc of Treats and Michelle of The Beauty of Life.  Even more fun, if you want to see how everybody did go here and check out the links to each participant's blog!  I love seeing how differently everyone makes the same recipe, I'm sure you will too :)

First things first, I prepared the loaf pan and gathered all of the ingredients.

Now the instructions were really simple and I probably didn't need to use my mixer, but I just upgraded my old mixer for a new one and I had to break it in.  So perhaps it was overkill and it may be responsible for the heavyness of my loaf cake by overmixing it.  I'm not sure, but I'm ok with it because I got to play with my new kitchen toy! 

After mixing all of the ingredients together I put it in the loaf pan and let the oven do it's thing for about an hour.  Here it is after removing it from the pan.  Looks good!

After reading the reviews of the recipe on the TWD site I saw that fellow baker's thought that it lacked the zing that you would expect a lemon cake to have.  So I made Meyer Lemon Curd to compliment it and add that additional lemon flavour I thought it might need.  I also decided to glaze it. I made a simple glaze using the juice from the lemon's that I took the zest from for the recipe.  It made a really nice bright sweet addition to the crust of the lemon loaf.

Simple Lemon Glaze

3/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

3 cups powdered sugar

2T butter

I served it with the lemon curd on top and the fam gobbled it up.  The hubs and I both agreed that it was a bit too dry for our taste and the lemon flavour was barely there, but that didn't stop us from each eating two pieces ;)  We really adore the lemon curd, so even if I never make the cake again it did give me the inspiration to make lemon curd and I will definitely make that again!