Maggie Beer

Yesterday I purchased Maggie's Harvest by Maggie Beer and today I made her Moist Buttermilk Cake with Strawberries. It was quite a success but it sank a lil bit in the middle. Nothing that couldn't be fixed with icing!








Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup buttermilk (which I made myself using 1 cup milk, 1 teaspoon white vinegar, set for 5 mins)
125g unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
5 eggs, room temperature
Rind of 2 lemons
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
strawberries!

Icing:
100g butter
Rind of 2 lemons
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 2/3 icing sugar

First I preheated the oven to 180C then greased my cake tin (24cm) with butter. I then sifted the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Leaving this for a moment, I added the vanilla to the buttermilk then moved onto creaming the butter. After the butter had become pale, I added sugar steadily until it was well combined with the butter.
I then added 2 whole eggs leaving 30 seconds between them. The other 3 eggs were separated into the yolk and white, and the white discarded. The yolks were added to the mixture leaving 30 seconds between each yolk. I added the lemon rind and oil, followed by half of the flour mix, which was folded into the mixture. Once combined, half of the buttermilk was added. This was mixed in, followed by the rest of the flour mix - again followed by the rest of the buttermilk.
Once all combined, the cake mix is ready to go into the cake tin! It was cooked for 35 minutes, after which the cake was set and had started to come apart from the edges of the tin. I left it for about 20 mins before taking out of the tin, and put it right side up on a cooling rack.
The icing was pretty easy - just combine the ingredients until smooth. Softening the butter in the microwave first helps a bit. I iced it after it was cool and luckily the icing covered the middle which had sunk a little. I then served it with fresh strawberries.