Lemon butter cake

You need about - roughly- 4 lemons for this recipe.
I used 250g butter
2 cake tins
400g castor sugar (about 2 and a quarter cups)
4 eggs
3 cups self raising flour
A drop of vanilla essence. Or about a small teaspoon.
160ml of lemon juice
1.5 table spoons of fresh fine cut lemon rind. The finer the better.
Step 1.
Beat the butter and castor sugar together, preferably using an electrical food mixer. I like to slice up the butter into smaller cubes and manually mix it with the sugar before I switch on the machine. It will take the machine about 15 minutes or so to cream the butter and sugar together until it becomes light and creamy. You can also now add a drop of vanilla essence as the machine is mixing it up.
Step2
While the machine is busy at work. Grease the tins - with the butter wrapper- then line the tins with baking paper.
Step3
Add the eggs. One at a time. If you add them all in at the same time they glug up and look an awful looking mess. Beat the mixture using the machine.
Step 4
Add the lemon rind and juice and stir. I sieve the lemon juice to prevent seeds and the pulp from getting inside.
Step 5 Nearly done. Switch off the machine
Add in the flour one cup at a time - but only manually stir the mix. Don't try and handle the flour too much.
Pour the mix into the 2 tins. They should both weight about 2 pounds each.
Bake for 40 - 50 minutes at 170C.
Use a skewer to see if its done inside only at the 40 minute mark.
If so, pull them both out of the oven and their baking tins. Leave the baking paper on til they cool.

Orange Cake

The Ingriedients below make one 2 pound cake.

125g Butter
1/4 cup Milk
1/4 cupOrange Juice
2 eggs
3/4 cup Caster Sugar
1.5 cups Self Raising Flour
Orange Zest - from 2 Oranges
One Pinch of Salt
One Drop of Vanilla Essence

Preliminary
Put the Waxing/Baking Paper into the tin. Lightly butter the insides of paper/tin by using the wrapping paper of the butter.
Turn on and Preheat the Oven to 180C.

Make sure the ingredients are at room temperature - otherwise they don't gel so well. This applies esp to the butter. If the butter is stone cold - a problem in Melbourne's colder months - it will take forever for it to be mixed in with sugar.

Step 1.Make sure Butter is at room temp - soft to the touch; if not microwave it for 5 seconds. Cream the Butter and the Sugar ONLY. Stir them around til the Sugar is fully mixed in with the butter and you get that lovely yellow texture look. Don't stir for too long (like 30 minutes) to avoid the butter changing back to oil. Throw in a pinch of salt too.

Step 2.Add Eggs and Stir that in well. Turn on and Preheat the Oven to 180C.

Step 3.Add half a cup of Milk now. Stir well. You can also add in a small teardrop of vanilla essence. Or if you want you can do this when you pour the flour in.

Step 4 Sift the SR Flour and add it in. Once you have added the flour don't stir it around too much. Do this manually by hand and not by machine. As you stir it - add in the *half cup of orange juice (OJ) and the orange zest (taken from 2 Oranges). I like to add in chopped sliced mandarin skin.
Do not mix the milk and the orange juice simultaneously because the OJ makes the milk curdle.

Note on Orange Zest - do yourself a favor and get a nice hand held Orange Zester that can really scrub away at the orange skin. I bought mine from Kmart - a Swiss made one that cost $10. Its fantastic! The trick is to remove the orange part of the skin without getting the white stuff, which like the seed, makes it bitter.

I also like to throw in one Mandarin skin as well but I make sure I remove as much of the white part of the skin as possible. Remove all seeds - they make it bitter.)

(Note on OJ - I don't like adding the milk together with the OJ on account of the juice causing the milk to curdle. So I like to add the OJ and rind last as I'm stiring the flour in.

Step 5: Pour the cake mix into the baking tins. Then place them into the oven.

Step 6: Wait 40 minutes. Open the Oven door and use a small skewer (like a satay stick) to poke into the cake's interior. Examine the skewer - if wet soggy lumps of unbaked cake mix cling to it then close the oven door and bake it for another few minutes. If its done, the skewer should pull out fairly cleanly.

Step 7: Once its done - take the cake out of the oven and take out the cake from the tin immediately to prevent residual baking. And let it cool. Warning. If your cake did not bake properly - it will disintegrate as you dump it out of the tin. That's why you need to use that wooden skewer to test it.

If you don't have Orange Juice or Oranges - I guess you can use Orange Marmalade. Perhaps 4? tablespoons of OM should be ok (I'm really not sure). You should need to be careful adding that sort of stuff as the more liquid/sugar you put inside - the wetter the cake will be etc..)

Generally I prefer to double up on this recipe because butter is usually sold in 250g blocks - its also easier to measure half cups rather than quarter cups. But you will get two 2 pound cakes out of this. So you need two separate cake tins.

So if you use a 250g block. You need

Two baking tins
250g butter
1.5 cups Sugar
4 eggs
0.5 cups Milk
0.5 cups Orange Juice
2 tablespoons Orange Zest (or the zest from two Oranges)
3 cups Self Raising Flour, Sifted
1 small teaspoon Vanilla and salt

Note: Make sure you do not add extra flour.