My favorite lemon cake

I’ve been baking cakes since I was ten years old and, as you can imagine, have amassed quite a collection of recipes.

I made this Lemon Sour Cream Cake for the first time just last year—but it has already become one of my very favorites. (And my family and friends like it, too!)

 

Lemon Sour Cream Cake – my new favorite cake

 

It’s a fabulous cake with a wonderful texture and flavor. I just love pine nuts, but before baking this cake I’d only ever used them in savory dishes.

I serve the cake with vanilla-bean yogurt and blueberries—though it tastes great just on its own.

This is quite a big cake and I usually freeze half of it for later. It freezes beautifully, with or without the honey drizzled on top.

 

Fresh from the oven

 

The recipe is from a marvelous Australian cookbook: Bake: Celebrating the time-Honoured Tradition of Home Baking by The Australian Women’s Weekly, published by ACP Books.

My well-used copy of BAKE

I spoke to the publisher, Pamela Clark, who is one of the doyennes of cooking in Australia, about this cake. She advised me to follow the recipe exactly, use the correct size cake pan, not to be tempted to use a higher oven temperature, and to leave the cake in the oven for the full hour.

Her advice was spot on because the cake has turned out perfectly every time I’ve baked it!

Here’s the recipe.

LEMON SOUR CREAM CAKE

Preparation time 15 minutes

Cooking time  1 hour (plus cooling time)

Serves 16

250g butter, softened

1 tablespoon finely grated lemon rind

2 cups (440g) caster sugar

6 eggs

¾ cup (180g) sour cream

2 cups (300g) plain flour

¼ cup (35g) self-raising flour

½ cup (80g) pine nuts

1 tablespoon demerara sugar

¼ cup (90g) honey

1 Preheat oven to 170˚/150˚ fan-forced. Grease deep 23-cm square cake pan; line base and sides with baking paper, extending paper 5cm over sides.

2 Beat butter, rind and caster sugar in medium bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. Stir in sour cream and sifted flours, in two batches. Spread mixture into pan; bake 15 minutes.

3 Meanwhile, combine pine nuts and demerara sugar in small bowl.

4 Carefully remove cake from oven; working quickly, sprinkle evenly with nut mixture, pressing gently into cake. Return cake to oven; bake further 45 minutes. Stand cake in pan 5 minutes; turn, top-side up, onto wire rack.

5 Heat honey in small saucepan; drizzle hot honey evenly over hot cake. Cool.

BAKING TIPS

NOTE Australian standard measuring cups are used in this recipe. An Australian standard measuring cup is 250ml, an American one is 240ml so there isn’t much difference in a recipe like this.

One Australian metric tablespoon holds 20mls; a tablespoon in the US, the UK and New Zealand holds 15mls.

100 grams is approximately 4 oz

170 degrees C oven heat is approximately  340 degrees F

• You can use light brown sugar instead of demerara sugar  • Caster sugar is also known as superfine sugar  • Regular rather than light sour cream works best  • Plain flour is also known as all-purpose flour  • Self-raising flour can be made by mixing  1 cup of plain/all-purpose flour with 2 teaspoons of baking powder  • Baking paper is also known as parchment paper  • A metric sized 23-cm square cake pan is equivalent to a 9-inch square pan.

For an excellent resource in converting baking measures and ingredients from other countries, visit Joy of Baking.

MY NEW RELEASE ON SALE!

Reinventing Rose is an e-book special at Amazon for the bargain price of just $US0.99 until May 31.

Kandy Shepherd writes fun, feel-good fiction. Her new release is the contemporary women’s fiction (aka chicklit!) Reinventing Rose, where the characters don’t get much of a chance to eat cake let alone bake it…

Kandy’s romances include The Castaway Bride, Something About Joe, Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is

Chocolate on tap

What is it about writers and chocolate? With a name like Kandy, I was predestined to have a sweet tooth, and chocolate is my favorite sweet treat by far. But I don’t have to look far among my author colleagues to find an abundance of writerly chocoholics.

Is there a link between creativity and chocolate consumption? It’s said eating chocolate releases endorphins—feel good hormones—in the brain, so that might help kick along the creative process. Chocolate is also said to affect serotonin levels in the brain, which could help relieve stress (deadlines?) and depression (writer’s block and deadlines?)

Who knows? I’m not really looking for an explanation—more likely an excuse for the scatterings of chocolate wrappers around my desk!

Lindt chocolatiers’ taste experiments – I loved the strawberry and pistachio the best from this delectable array

Being a self-confessed chocoholic, I didn’t hesitate to accept an invitation to the “chocolate carpet” launch of the Lindt Chocolate Café concept at the site of the original Martin Place site in the heart of the city of Sydney, Australia.

Okay, so the carpet was actually red, not chocolate, but the second my “plus one” daughter and I got inside we were surrounded by chocolate, chocolate, chocolate!

Lindt Master Chocolatiers at the Maître Station

I’ve visited the Lindt Café before (what self-respecting Sydney chocoholic hasn’t!) but  now it looks quite different. The most prominent new feature is the Maître Station where you can watch the Lindt Master Chocolatiers at work creating their delectable creations. The scent of so much chocolate so close is intoxicating!

The Mocha Macchiato were a hit

There’s also the Chocolate Tap, an outsized metal tap from which Lindt Chocolate copiously flows. I nearly swooned! On the launch night, the baristas made use of the chocolate tap to create potent chocolate shots, as well as Mocha Macchiato comprising dark chocolate, milk and espresso coffee topped with a chocolate shard.

Lindt Australia Master Chocolatier, Thomas Schnetzler, tempting me with the best macarons I’ve ever tasted

Highlights of the evening? Meeting Lindt Australia’s charming Swiss-born Master Chocolatier, Thomas Schnetzler; taste-testing experimental new chocolates; and eating the best-ever macarons, which Lindt calls délice. I also watched, amazed, as a fellow guest emptied out some of the abundant displays of Lindor Balls to fill a bucket to take home. Who could blame him!

We took home lots of treats

We went home with a goodie bag which kept the Lindt experience going for several days afterwards. I didn’t need to be persuaded  to “Surrender to Indulgence”!

Oh, and my beautiful university student daughter had her photo taken for a foodie blog and the Sunday newspaper social pages—she was beyond thrilled!

Visit the Lindt Chocolate Café, 53 Martin Place, Sydney, NSW, 2000. (What a great place for a writers’ meeting!)

Kandy Shepherd writes fun, feel-good fiction. Her new release is the contemporary women’s fiction (aka chicklit!) Reinventing Rose, where the main character indulges in chocolate at the merest hint of feeling down!

Kandy’s romances include The Castaway Bride, Something About Joe, Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is.

Reinventing Rose—my new story

I don’t know when “chicklit” became a no-no word. “Contemporary women’s fiction” is now the description of choice for contemporary, sometimes humorous novels about a young (or not-so-young) woman’s journey to that may or may not include romance but usually includes friendship, family and career.

I’m putting my hand up to say I love reading chicklit, however you label it. And I like writing it, too!

My new release Reinventing Rose falls under the chicklit banner. When 28-year-old Californian schoolteacher Rose Butler flies to Sydney, Australia, to meet an internet lover, the reunion doesn’t go quite to plan. Rose finds herself alone in a foreign country, too embarrassed to tell the folks back home what happened. Rose decides to stay and reinvent herself with a total “me makeover.”

Three new female roommates turn out to be the perfect people to aid and abet her—one is a beauty editor on a womens magazine with access to all sorts of image-changing freebies. But Rose discovers real change doesn’t come from new hair and makeup. As she throws herself headlong into her new life, she gets tripped up by a painful family secret and unresolved problems from her past. She’s forced to question her beliefs about love and loyalty, old mistakes and new choices, and the bonds of both family and friendship.

3 QUICK QUESTIONS

Q. You’re published in romance—why write womens fiction/chicklit?

A. I love writing romance where the focus is on two people falling in love against the odds. But I also like writing about the other aspects of my characters’ lives—family, friends, career challenges—and womens fiction gives me that opportunity. I enjoyed creating the secondary characters of Sasha, Carla and Kelly in Reinventing Rose. Female friendship is so important in my life—and I give Rose three amazing new friends. Of course Rose meets men, the sexy, bad-boy photographer Elliot and the handsome doctor Luke. Which of those gorgeous guys will she end up with?

Q. Doesn’t chicklit concentrate on shoes and shopping?

A. There’s a fun pair of shoes in Reinventing Rose but wearing them leads Rose somewhere she really shouldn’t have gone! Chicklit also deals with deeper issues and as Rose’s story unfurls she experiences them, too—eating disorders, divorce, miscarriage are all touched on. The tone is sassy but the subject matter is sometimes serious.

Q. What inspired you to write Reinventing Rose?

A. When I was working as an editor in womens magazines, I particularly enjoyed working on reader makeovers—coordinating with hairdressers, makeup artists, fashion stylists and photographers to transform everyday women into their look-best selves. I had the idea for a chick-lit type story about a young woman who decides a makeover will solve all her problems. Of course it doesn’t, and Rose has quite a journey before she realizes that. I had such fun taking Rose into the studio for her makeover—a location so familiar to me.

P.S.  There aren’t any dogs in Reinventing Rose—there was a gorgeous Border Collie in an earlier version but the chapter he appeared in was slashed in the editing process. There are two cats, though, a tuxedo kitty named Socks who stays off-stage but very much in the heroine Rose’s thoughts, and a beautiful brown Burmese named Nina who is modeled on one of my own cats (sadly departed.)

Reinventing Rose is available as a e-book (print coming soon) from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other on line e-retailers.

Kandy Shepherd writes fun, feel-good fiction. Her new release is the contemporary women’s fiction (aka chicklit!) Reinventing Rose. Her romances include The Castaway Bride, Something About Joe, Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is.