Lemon drizzle cake: how to bring out the zing

Call it nominative determinism, but a lemon drizzle cake is perfect for disappointing, drizzly weather. It’s cheering: brightly flavoured, and packed with zest, but still comforting, filling your home with a warm citrus scent as it bakes. It’s also a more enjoyable food-based activity than picnics or barbecues when winds are high.

A lemon drizzle cake is really just a pound cake – equal quantities of butter, sugar, eggs and flour – that’s then spritzed up with zest and juice. But it’s a pretty glorious one, managing to be both zingy and sweet, light and sticky. The key to a superlative lemon drizzle is packing in as much citrus as possible: mixing the sugar and lemon zest together before adding other ingredients bashes up the zest a bit, helping to release the fragrant oils and, once baked, the cake should be drizzled with the lemon syrup while still warm – and pierced with a chopstick or skewer to let the tart syrup penetrate. It might take a couple of goes for all the syrup to be absorbed, but it’s worth the time to get a real lemony slap in the face; lemon drizzle is not the place for subtlety. Using a chunkier sugar (Demerara, or granulated) than in the sponge means that you’ll end up with a crystally crunchy crust on the top of the cake, which I love.