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Lemon Drizzle Cake
Year after year among Britain’s most-baked and most-searched cakes — a soft lemon sponge impregnated with a crackling citrus syrup.
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 45 min
- Total
- 65 min
- Yield
- Serves 8–10
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Era
- Modern classic
Ingredients
- 225g soft butter; 225g caster sugar; 4 eggs
- 225g self-raising flour; zest of 2 lemons
- Drizzle: juice of 2 lemons, 85g caster sugar
- Icing (optional): 100g icing sugar, 2 tbsp lemon juice
Method
Oven180°C350°FFan 160°CGas 4
- Heat the oven to 180°C / 350°F (fan 160°C, gas 4); line a 900g loaf tin.
- Beat the butter, sugar and zest until pale; add the eggs one by one, then fold in the flour.
- Bake 45–50 minutes until golden and a skewer comes out clean.
- While hot, stab all over with a skewer and slowly spoon over the lemon juice and sugar.
- Cool in the tin so every drop of syrup is absorbed. Ice if you like, slice thickly, watch it vanish.
Oven temperatures are given in Celsius, Fahrenheit, fan and gas mark throughout. Quantities are metric, as cooked and written in the UK.