I just love cake recipes that don’t require you to cream the butter and sugar. They always feel so much quicker to whip up and never seem to be dry.
I’ve been making this particular lemon cake for years and years, and it is always a hit. It’s quick, easy, and delicious – these cakes rarely last more than a day or two in our house!
Easy Lemon Cake Ingredients
- 1½ cup Self-Raising flour
- 1 cup Castor sugar (or granulated sugar if you’re in the U.S.)
- 2 Eggs
- 125g Butter, plus butter for greasing the cake tin
- ½ cup Milk
- 1 Lemon
Easy Yummy Lemon Cake Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 180ºC or 350ºF
- Use a pastry brush to coat the entire inside of your cake tin with butter, then put a small handful of flour in the tin and keep rotating and angling the cake tin so that the flour coats all of the butter. You’ll need to keep firmly tapping the side of the tin to dislodge any excess flour, and once all the butter is coated hold the tin over a bin and flip it over, give it a few more hard taps and then you’re left with the ultimate non-stick coating! I love old copper cake tins because they cook so evenly and there’s no nasty Teflon coating, which seems to be on so many modern cake tins!
- Place sifted flour and sugar into a large mixing bowl. Grate the rind off the whole lemon into the bowl, then melt the butter, and add it in as well, whisking in as much of the flour as the butter will easily take. Mostly we’re just cooling the butter enough that when you add the eggs the heat of the melted butter isn’t enough to cook the egg whites.
- Add eggs and milk and beat well for 5 minutes. The batter will get increasingly glossy and smooth as you beat the mixture. I accidentally deleted my photo of this but the batter looks so nice at this point!
- Pour into cake tin and bake until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out with little to no crumbs, 30 to 40 minutes, generally.
- Let the cake cool in the tin for 5 to 10 minutes, then loosen with a silicone spatula, and turn it out onto a wire rack to fully cool.
Do you struggle with cutting cakes in half evenly? Here’s a neat trick for you! Find a lid in your kitchen that’s about the thickness you want for your bottom half of the cake. Now lay the blade of a breadknife on the lid, next to the cake, and holding the lid and the handle, cut the cake, slowly turning it so you get all the way around! This method works for me every time.
How about some nice, fresh lemon curd as a filling? Yes, that’s definitely the order of the day!
Lemon curd filling
- 4tsp sugar* (white or raw is fine)
- 4tsp fresh lemon juice
- 1tsp fresh lemon zest
- 1 large egg
- 6 tsp butter
*Note: Australian tablespoons are 20ml, whilst American ones are 15ml, which is why I’ve cut them out and use tsp instead as they’re always 5ml.
- Place all the ingredients in a small saucepan and whisk them together thoroughly before putting them on a low heat and whisking continuously until the mixture thickens enough that the whisk marks will stay in the mix, about 7 minutes. After it’s cooled, you can spread it onto your cake. This batch is the perfect size for a single cake!
Lastly, I like to top this cake with simple lemon icing, just icing sugar (confectioner’s sugar for Americans), lemon juice, a couple of drops of yellow food dye, and a few teaspoons of boiling water.
I really hope you try this cake, it’s so delicious and fresh and the perfect thing to do with nice fresh lemons! I love that the combination of cake, curd, and icing uses just one whole lemon! We demolished the cake here in a single day, honestly, I’m already eyeing the other lemons in my kitchen for another cake!
Craving for More Cake Recipes?
Check out my Grandma’s Coffee Slice Cake Recipe for another cake recipe! Try this out, you and your family will definitely enjoy this one too!
