Gluten free and dairy free lemon cake recipe

The other day Chef Frank was out and we had guests checking in who don’t eat wheat or dairy (you might already know that at Exmoor House we specialise in catering for special dietary requirements). So I adapted a recipe from the back of a packet of Dove’s Farm gluten & wheat-free white self-raising flour blend, in order to offer our guests something to eat with a cup of tea when they arrived. As an aside: interestingly, many ‘free from’ recipes are either wheat free / gluten free or dairy free, but not both.

Here’s what I did.

Ingredients:
125g gluten/wheat-free self raising flour
100g dairy-free margarine (we like the PURE sunflower one)
125g caster sugar (granulated also works fine)
2 eggs
zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp poppy seeds
for the topping: juice of half a lemon; icing sugar

Method:
Put all the ingredients (except those for the topping) into a large bowl and beat or whisk really well. Pour into an oiled/greased and lined 500g loaf tin.
Bake at 170-190°C (according to your oven) for 45 minutes, or until the cake is springy to the touch and a skewer comes out clean. Leave the cake in the tin, on a cooling rack.
Now for the topping. Add some icing sugar, bit by bit, to the juice of half a lemon, mixing all the time, until you get a light syrupy consistency and it tastes sweetish but still nice and lemony. Make lots of little holes in the top of the cake with a cocktail stick and pour the syrup over it; leave the cake to cool completely before turning it out of the tin.

Of course, for quality control purposes I had to try a piece, and then had to resist the temptation to scoff the lot…

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