Lemon tray bake

This week, I decided to build on the sponge tray bake recipe that I tried out a few weeks ago by adding a lemon twist. This is another Mary Berry classic (same book as the sponge tray bake, p.76) and one which looks fantastic in her book. The whole thing was very simple to make and I enjoyed it immensely. The only addition to the sponge tray bake recipe was (in my case) a squeeze of lemon juice (approx. 1 tablespoon) in the sponge mixture and then 3 tablespoons of lemon juice in the icing which tops the tray bake. You will need 175g of icing sugar, which gives a good thick consistency.

I left the cake in the oven at 180 degrees centigrade for 35 minutes, gave it about 15 minutes to cool, then spread the thick icing over the cake with a knife. I then left the cake for another 15 minutes before cutting it into around 24 small slices. My tip would be to leave this for as long as possible (as tempting as it might be to take the cakes out of the tin) as the icing was still slightly sticky around the edges when I moved the pieces from the tin, which smudged the icing somewhat. 

The icing does, though, add a lovely sweetness to the cake which the plain sponge recipe lacks. I'll hopefully experiment more with tray bakes in the future as they seem to be a brilliant way of creating lots of cake very quickly! I found that I needed two separate cake tins for this recipe, as the icing prevents the possibility of piling the cakes on top of each other.

Et voici les résultats:

Easily the two best slices!