Caramelised Lemon Cake

I only made part of this recipe, the (very impressive looking) topping, and used the recipe of a friend for the rest of the cake. And as I had quite some problems with the instructions for the topping, I was actually quite glad I could rely on my recipe for the rest of the cake.

The biggest problem was that you're supposed to heat 200g sugar and juice of one lemon in a saucepan until the sugar just begins to caramelise. However, given the quantities, in reality the sugar will never caramelise, only dissolve in the juice. I ended up doing the whole thing again, only this time adding only a few drops every now and then, adding the rest of the juice only once the sugar did begin to caramelise, and this worked so much better!

However, if, as instructed, you start out with this step and only after that begin to peel and slice the lemons, you might run into trouble again, as you will be busy for a while and the caramel will cool down and harden; luckily not too much in my case, but why risk it? It's so easy to just turn around the order in which you're doing things.

Then the caramel started leaking out of the springform tin I was using; not so bad while I was preparing the batter, but a lot worse while it was in the oven - I was glad I had placed a baking tray below, just in case. Just something you should realise, use another type of tin if you can.

Last, in the end I wasn't able to see the lemon slices at all - which for me had been the whole reason to make the topping. Perhaps it would help to not let the sugar caramelise at all (mine was a light brown before and after baking), but it would probably work even better if you used oranges (or clementines for size) or blood oranges instead. That said, even if invisible the topping was very delicious on top of an excellent cake, which is whyI'll give it 3 stars.

I had to use double the recipe my friend gave me to be able to fill the 23cm springform tin, but apart from longer baking times this wasn't a problem at all.

Served together with Nigels Slater's Chocolate Brownies, a perfect combination of sweet and sweet-sour, chocolate and fruit.