9. Gin and Tonic Cake
Long time no posting, but things are just busy at the moment & without a working laptop, getting around to posting is difficult. Anyway I realised it was nearly a year since I posted anything under things I'd made, which is a long time & certainly in that time, many things have been made, so I thought it was time to try and get back into it.
It was world gin day on Saturday, a gem of a fact I found out on Friday, thanks to my Emerald Street daily email, which had a little feature on gin. A whole day devoted to gin, sounded like a day for me! As it was, I didn’t get a chance to do anything about it for most of the day as we were visiting the in-laws, but when we got back in the evening, there was time for a pint of GnT with a late night film. Which it has to be said is a nice way to round off a day.
On Sunday I decided to make the cake which Emerald Street linked to in their email Gin and Tonic Cake It’s basically a lemon drizzle, with added GnT, so what’s not to like? It’s gone down very well here at work, though I think if I made it again I’d try to increase the gin flavour, as at the moment it’s very subtle. I think if you didn’t tell someone it had GnT in it, they possibly wouldn’t be able to tell. I wonder about infusing the sugar for the cake with juniper berries first and or infusing them in the drizzle. It would be a fine balance, as I wouldn’t want the juniper flavour to overpower it & it could also taste medicinal but one of the reasons I like a nice GnT is the crisp, clean juniper taste. I also may try this again with a base of limes rather than lemons, as I do like my gin with lime.
Additional cooking notes from me in regard to making this: I have a fan oven, so put it on 180 rather than 190, I also checked the cake for doneness after 40 minutes and it was cooked through. I ran out of golden caster sugar, so used half soft brown sugar for the cake and all soft brown sugar for the drizzle, it seems to have made no difference. Possibly I should have checked my sugar stores before using up most of the last of the caster for a body scrub after a hot afternoon of gardening, earlier on in the day...
No pictures of my cake I’m afraid, sadly the lack of a laptop and restrictions on what I can do on a work computer prevent that. But it looks pretty similar to the one on the blog :-)