Madeira Cake – Nigella Domestic Goddess

Despite Madeira cake being the first recipe in Nigella’s Domestic Goddess book I’d never baked one. I think because I always associated it with the boring basic cake wrapped in cellophane that old people seem fond of. It really is a very easy cake to mix up and anything that just needs to be dolloped into a loaf tin is a good thing to make on a Saturday morning when I really ought to be doing something more useful.

I modified Nigella’s recipe to make it easier.. For a start she calls for 240g butter, butter comes in 250g packs! I’m really not going to waste time shaving off 10g. She also calls for a mix of plain and self raising flour. I can see why people use self raising flour in a recipe. If the mix of baking powder to plain flour in self raising flour is exactly what is needed for that recipe it saves a little effort. But if you need a mix of both why not use plain and baking powder ? I had to look up the ratio of baking powder to plain flour and went with 1/2 tsp baking powder to 100g plain. I also only used about half the quantity of sugar Nigella does for sprinkling on top before baking. The quantities below are what I used.

Ingredients

• 250g butter
• 200g caster sugar plus extra for sprinkling
• grated zest and juice of one lemon
• 3 large eggs
• 300g plain flour
• 1.5 tsp baking powder

Instructions 

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees C
2. Cream butter and sugar and add lemon zest
3. Add eggs one at a time with a little of the flour between each egg
4. Then gently mix in rest of flour followed by lemon juice
5. Dollop into a loaf tin and sprinkle with tbsp caster sugar
6. Bake for 1hr to 1.25hrs (until a cake tester comes out clean)

Cake is melt in the mouth soft.

Nigella mentions a few possible variants, it would be very easy to come up with your own.