Recipe! Earl grey and lemon cake

jen0revision (65)in #recipe • 3 days ago

I love earl grey tea, and was looking for a cake recipe for it for ages...

And I finally found one, this was an amazing recipe. I'm glad to say that it also came out perfectly.
You can find the recipe for yourself here.

This recipe was super easy and I only really needed one bowl (and one for doing the tea steeping in).

I've seen that earl grey tea is also referred to as bergamot in some countries. In the UK it's referred to as "Earl grey" tea as it is named after Charles Grey, who was the 2nd Earl Grey and a British Prime Minister in the 19th century. It was named after him due to him being the figure who popularised this type of tea!

The ingredients:

the ingredients

For the cake batter:

120 millilitres of milk (I used oat milk)
4 bags of earl grey tea
113 grams of unsalted butter
2 tablespoons of honey
2 eggs
190g of plain flour
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
zest of lemon (the cake I made does not include this)

One new thing for me was that this recipe actually had a syrup! This made the baked cake nice and moist, and brought out the flavour of lemon a bit more.
For the syrup you need:

3 tablespoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of honey
1/4 cup of water
3 tablespoons of lemon juice

The steps

This recipe was very easy to do, and I'd recommend it to even someone without much experience (just like me haha).

To start, I heated my oat milk in the microwave for about 30 seconds. I didn't have cow's milk, and honestly, it didn't affect the taste of it either.
In this heated bowl of milk, I added 2 (out of the 4) bags of earl grey tea. I left this to steep while I continued on with the recipe.

super exciting picture of the tea bags and milk

Next, I melted the butter in a bowl for about 30 seconds in the microwave. But I think that it was too high power, as it completely melted it! Luckily, this didn't affect the cake badly.

I added the melted butter (I didn't wait for it to cool), honey and sugar to a bowl. I was supposed to cream it together, but as the butter was so melted, it didn't do much while I mixed them.

mixed together (if you can tell)

Next, I added the two eggs one at a time, beating them in completely.

spot the difference?

The next step was to add the flour, salt, and baking powder. I ran out of plain flour at the last 20 grams! So I added in a bit of self-raising flour, and put a bit less baking powder. Of course, I made sure to sift in all these dry ingredients to avoid clumps. Then I mixed!

Added in the dry and mixed well

When it was completely combined, the next step was to add the now completely steeped milk (referred to as "infused milk" in the recipe) giving each tea bag a good squeeze, and ensuring to bin the teabags afterwards (don't add the teabags themself!).
I also added in the other 2 bags of tea. The way to do the other 2 bags was to cut them open, and pour into the batter the contents!

infused milk and tea grains

The above is how it looked before completely combined, I thought this was pretty cool.
After mixing it well, it was ready to pour.

ready to pour!

I lined a baking pan (usually used for loaves) with greaseproof paper.

ready for the oven

I liked the way you could see the grains of tea in the batter.

The instructions stated to put it in a 162 Celsius oven for an hour. I set timers for 30 minutes in, and 50 minutes in. It was ready at the 50 minute marker!

Whilst the cake was still in the oven, I prepared the syrup. I combined all the ingredients together in a cup, and it was done. Honestly I think it was quite watery? Maybe my cup was too big.

the syrup

Perhaps if I had used less water it would have been more of a syrup.

When the cake was done, I took it out of the oven and its case to cool. It's recommended to poke holes into the cake while it's cooling and "brushing" in the syrup while it's still warm.
I used a fork to gently make holes for this, and just used the fork to brush on the syrup. I think this worked quite well honestly.

done!

I could definitely tell that doing this with the syrup made it a lot more moist.

Review

I really liked this recipe, it was easy, and the ingredients I had, I just had to go out to buy the lemon juice and the earl grey. I like the flavour of earl grey paired with the lemon juice. Maybe if I had used less lemon juice in the syrup it wouldn't be so strong though. The original recipe also includes lemon zest, but I didn't use this, and I don't think it had any negative impact.

In terms of looks, it looks a bit boring... I think it could do well with some decorating, maybe water icing ? But I don't really have any icing sugar so oh well!