Lemon & Elderflower Drizzle Cake/Pudding By Nigella Lawson

Heat the oven to 180 C (160 C fan-forced). Line the bottom and sides of a 20 cm square (or round) cake tin with baking parchment, making sure the paper comes up the sides. If you’re using a springform cake tin, just line the bottom and butter the side.

Put the butter, sugar, rice flour, ground almonds, salt, baking powder and eggs into a processor. Finely grate over the zest of the lemon and blitz until you have a thick batter. Pour the 2 tbsps of elderflower cordial through the funnel of the processor, with the motor still going, until combined.

If you don’t have a processor, cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest together until smooth, light and aerated. Mix the flour, ground almonds and salt together, add just 1 tsp of baking powder; you don’t need as much for the non-processor variant, as you’re whipping more air into the batter. Beat 1 egg into the butter mixture, and when that’s combined, beat in a third of your dry ingredients, and carry on in like manner until eggs and dry ingredients are used up. Finally, beat in the 2 tbsps of elderflower cordial.

Pour and scrape this fragrant, slightly nubbly and quite delicious batter in to your prepared tin and bake for approx. 25 mins, by which time the top of the cake should have turned a deep golden brown, and the edges–themselves a darker bronze by this stage–will have started coming away from the sides of the tin and a cake tester should come out clean. Check on it at around 20 mins and loosely cover with foil if it’s getting too dark.

While the cake is in the oven, prepare the drizzle. Mix 3 tbsps of juice from the zested lemon and 100 ml of elderflower cordial in a jug. Ignore the granulated sugar for now.

When the cake is cooked, put it in its tin on a wire rack and prick all over with your cake tester, though a stick of spaghetti would do (it’s a wonderful stand-in cake tester as it is), and then very gradually pour the syrup over the cake so that it sinks in slowly and doesn’t pool

Once the syrup is soaked in, sprinkle over the tablespoon of granulated sugar in an even layer on top of the cake, and leave to cool completely. When cold either lift the cake out of the tin using the paper, or just unspring if you’re using a springform tin.