The Trouble with Multi-Tasking

The Co-operative’s Food Magazine can be a source for the odd good recipe. I say odd, because either what they have doesn’t work with the whole low-residue thing, or is just not of interest. But’s it’s free, so I’m not complaining!

The most recent edition featured a lemon loaf recipe that I thought looked pretty good. So seeing as the weather is completely foul out today as Britain is hit with the tail-end of Hurricane Bertha, what else is a Crohnie girl going to do but stay in and bake (amongst other things).

So the recipe goes like this -

175g of sugar
110g of butter or margarine
2 eggs
4tbsp of milk
175g of self-raising flour
Zest of one or two lemons

The British like to cook by weight, Canadians by volume, so I’m always a little thrown by measuring weight. So I put the bowl on the scale, zeroed it off and started adding margarine. At first I thought it was asking for a lot, because I was pretty sure 110g of margarine was about ½ cup (ish) and it seemed like more. And then I realised it was set to ounces, not grams.

Thankfully, I hadn’t added anything yet, so I just scooped it back into the container and started again. Then I added the sugar, and beat it until fluffy.

Then I added the eggs one at a time. The first one turned out to a be a double-yolk egg. I’ve never sure what to do when that happens, but figured I would just work with it, and added the second egg once I had mixed it up. As I was making this a dairy-free recipe, I used 4tbsp of rice milk instead of milk and stirred it in.

I shredded the outside of a lemon on my cheese grater for the zest, and added that to the mix. Then I measured and folded in the flour.

I poured it into a greased 1lb loaf tin and baked it on 180C/350F for 45 minutes until my cake tester came out clean.

For the icing it said -

Juice of one or two lemons
3 tbsp of icing sugar.

I finally got around to buying a little juicer and used that to squeeze the above said lemon.

Isn't it cute?!

 Then I mixed in the icing sugar. It seemed very thin, so I added another tbsp of icing sugar.

It then said to poke holes in the loaf and then pour the glaze over top. So I used the back of a kebab skewer and poked holes and poured it over.

The icing seemed really really runny, and hadn’t mixed as well as I thought so there were sugar lumps in it.

While finishing with de-frosting the freezer (which I was doing at the same time, multi-tasking, you know!) I had the thought that if I let that glaze harden in the pan, I would never get the loaf out. So I wedged it out onto a wire rack.

Something didn’t look right. I used the right sized tin, why is it so flat?

Something's not right here

And then when checking something on my tablet, I noticed the web page that was open on converting 175g of self-raising flour to plain flour. What did I forget? Baking powder.

Crap. This is what I get for multi-tasking.

‘Tis, um, rather dense. And although nice and lemony, a bit too sweet with that glaze. I suspect this one isn’t coming on my camping trip later this week . . ..