Long time no see! But I’m back and ready to write and bake once more!
These ‘teacakes’ caught my eye when I was bored and flicking through ‘Sweet’ to find something yummy to bake, they looked absolutely delicious, I dont know what caught my eye, maybe it was the white icing set against the tan cakes that looked amazing or maybe the glazed blueberries set upon the top (the glazed blueberries that I’m slightly salty about as they did not include how to glaze them in the recipe…) this tasty treat definitely wasn’t the hardest hill I’ve climbed in my Ottolenghi journey but it did have its moments!
The first step is to grease all 12 moulds of a regular muffin tin using butter -to do this I cut off some butter and used my fingers to spread it around the tin- and then lightly dust over them with flour and turn it over (if you are going to do this I would strongly advise you do to this over the sink) to tap away the excess flour so it’s only lightly coated and then set aside, this was all rather simple, but very messy!
The second step says to beat together the butter, sugar and lemon zest, which involved me using my best pal the micro plane (note sarcasm!!) which was rather painful but I lived…just. Once everything had been beaten until ‘light’ I added the eggs and ground almonds -which is something I really like about these ‘cakes’ they’re made almost entirely from ground almonds instead of primarily using flour as the base, as it only has 45g of plain flour but 190g of ground almonds which adds to the taste and also makes the texture of the cakes more light and moist-.
After everything was combined I sifted the flour, salt and baking powder and added this to the mixture while mixing on a low speed and finally added the lemon juice -which shamefully was not freshly squeezed as I needed 95ml in total so I cheated and bought a bottle of pre-squeezed lemon juice-. After everything was well incorporated I spooned the mixture into the moulds (relatively) evenly and divided the 100g of blueberries between the cakes (which allowed 6 blueberries per cake) and pushed them down but only slightly so they sink into the cake mix. The reason they say to do this rather than stirring them into the cake mix directly is to ensure each cake gets an equal amount of blueberries (only Yotam Ottolenghi!).
I cooked them for around 25 minutes (instead of the recommended 30-35) and left them to cool for 20 minutes in their tins before removing them to cool on a wire rack. Now here’s where the challenging part comes in, in order for the cakes to stand like an ‘upside down cupcake’ I cut off the tops of the cakes but had to avoid removing any blueberries or cutting to close to them so they’d have no support and fall out -which was the case for quite a few of them-, to remove the cakes from their moulds the recipe calls for the cakes to be ‘gently tapped out’ which worked for about two out of the twelve of them…I ended up having to run a knife around the edges of the cakes in order to get them out which caused me to cut into a few and having to stick them back together with the icing when it was time to assemble them.
To make the icing I combined the icing sugar and lemon juice in a bowl and stirred it until it had a thick pouring consistency. The icing was something I was completely determined to get right! I decided I should use a teaspoon to plop a large dollop of icing on the top of the cakes and move it in a circular motion around the top so it’d drip down the sides (often with some encouragement from me and the spoon) but I was happy with the results I ended up with! To finish off I added 3 (unglazed..) blueberries on the top of each teacake and ventured into my mothers (rather extensive) crockery collection to present them on! As well as sending some off to England for my dad (along with meringues and lemon drizzle cake!) which apparently he enjoyed a lot!
All in all, this was a very enjoyable stress-free recipe to make! They’d be perfect for summer get-togethers and something I’m definitely going to making again in the future! I would like to try and be able to master the icing, the colouring of the cakes and to be able to make them without the blueberries falling out the bottom! I would highly recommend making these, they go down an absolute storm!
3 recipes down, 109 more to go!
I’ve attached a visual step by step of my process below!
Goodies By Gu 