Who's the Happy Hippie?

I have a friend who used to lived in Perth and she was absolutely fabulous at baking. Not only was she technically adept at the art but she was just so bake-happy. I love baking but laziness (argh, cleaning my KitchenAid) often puts me off spending time being a domestic goddess.

Anyway, she and her (then) partner, being from Switzerland, had a deep appreciation for all things sweet. I think they are the only people who smuggle more food back into Perth than I do - although their booty primarily comprised chocolate!

These two facts meant that most visits to her place would end up involving a cheeky piece of Swiss chocolate (I blame them for introducing me to Camille Bloch chocolate... omg) or a fresly baked cake.

My favourite offering though, was her Soaked Lemon Cake. It was so moist and lemony (without being sour) and... happy. I don't know what it was, but there was something about that cake that was all sunshine and rainbows and it would just perk me up instantly. Hence, we named the cake the Happy Lemon cake... and so began the tradition of her randomly bringing slices of lemony lusciousness whenever we met up at dance socials.

I was lucky enough to score the recipe off her so that I can now make it myself. I do, however, do it with a slight twist.

I can't remember how exactly it happened but I think it started when I felt like making a marble cake. I felt like being artistic but I couldn't be arsed to make a marble cake because the tried and tested recipe I have for marble cake involves more eggs than I had at the time. Plus, I was probably (not so secretly) hankering for the flavours of Happy Lemon Cake.

So I compromised - I made a Happy Lemon cake but decided to divide and colour a few portions so that I could play with the marbling effect. Of course, me being me, I couldn't stop at just two colours for my cake - in went pink, blue, yellow and orange.

When I cut into the cake, I was confronted by a mish mash of colours. How psychedelic, I thought.

And so the Happy Hippie Lemon Cake was born.

And I dare you to NOT feel happy when you see and eat this cake :)

Happy Hippie Lemon Cake

250g unsalted butter
250g sugar
250g plain flour
4 eggs
zest of 2 lemons
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
200ml lemon juice
200g icing sugar/icing sugar mix

Method: 

1. Beat the butter and sugar until soft, pale and creamy
2. Add the eggs and beat until the mixture is foamy 
3. Add the lemon zest, flour, salt and baking powder. Mix well. 
4. Divide the batter into as many portions as you want (depending on how many colours you decide to use) and colour them as desired. 
5. Spread alternating batches of batter on to each other. Ideally, you want multiple "bullseyes" in your pan. 
6. Once you've used all your batter, take a skewer (or butter knife) and run it in parallel lines across your pan. That said, you also want to alternate the direction you run the skewer. So if your first line goes from left to right, you want the second line to go from right to left... and so on. 
7. Bake for approximately 45 minutes at 180 degrees (non-fan forced oven)
8. While the cake is baking, make a lemon syrup by combining the lemon juice and icing sugar. 
9. Once the cake is baked and cooled, douse the cake with the lemon juice syrup and leave it to soak in the pan (*see extra notes).
10. Carefully unmould the cake, slice it and serve!   

Extra notes:

• I would STRONGLY recommend using a silicon baking pan for this cake. The cake (depending on how soaked it is) can be quite tricky to remove. Alternatively, you may want to use a springform pan (I've not used one for this recipe before but it might work as well as a silicon mould). 
• You can probably unmould the cake first before soaking it but I prefer soaking it while it's in the pan so that the syrup stays in the mould instead of seeping out onto a serving plate. Why waste all that lovely syrup on the plate when it can be packed into your cake?
• When dousing the cake, I prefer doing it in batches, to let the syrup seep into it slowly. I find that submerging the cake in syrup tends to leave it with a very brittle and mushy surface. 
• When dousing in batches, always pour the syrup to the centre of the cake - the edges of the cake tend to absorb the most liquid because most of the excess syrup will flow to the sides.
• You can douse it all in one go - which makes the coverage more even but like I said in my previous bullet points, I prefer not to risk having the mushy top layer. It's all about personal preferences :)
• This cake is best made in advance - I like to do it the night before. 
• Be very careful when spreading the layers - the batter is quite thick and won't spread as easily. You might find it easier to pat each layer down gently as opposed to spreading the batter.