recipe testing – Cardamon or Thyme Cake?

This is my first attempt at a cardamon or Thyme cake, I love eating all kinds of cake but have never made one of these savory ingredients before! I have chosen to use a simple lemon cake recipe since as though its my first time, gently does it! But which is going to be the best – Lemon and Cardamon, or Lemon and Thyme???

This recipe is adapted from BBC The Good Food Lemon Poppy Seed Cake, a trusted website, and this recipe was voted 4/5.

Ingredients

175g butter
175g golden caster sugar
200g self-raising flour
4 lemons, zested and 2 juiced
3 eggs
20 green cardamon pods – seeds removed and crushed ( this works out to be about a teaspoon of crushed cardamon)
125g pot natural yoghurt

For the icing

200g icing sugar
3 tbsp lemon juice (from the lemons above)

Method

Heat oven to 180C/160C fan. Grease and line either a 20cm square tin, or two smaller loaf tins if doing both cakes.
Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add all the rest of the ingredients and beat until combined. Spoon into the tin and smooth over the top.
Bake for 40-45 mins. Or 35 – 40 if doing two smaller cakes. Cool in the tin for 10 mins, then turn out, remove the parchment and leave to completely cool.
Sift the icing sugar into a bowl. Mix in the lemon juice to make the icing, double cream thickness, and pour, generously, over the cake and leave to set.

The Verdict

Well…..even though I divided this mixture into two smaller cakes, they still required the same cooking time! The batter was very light and airy, so I was surprised they took the 40 mins to cook. These little cakes looked fluffy, light and smelt of lovey light lemony aromas, the inside was actually a little squishy, this must be from the amount of yogurt and lemon juice in the recipe. The flavors were delicious, really strong lemon with a hint of thyme, I would actually increase the amount of thyme next time. The cardamon really came through, so depends how much you like it, I might do 15 pods instead of 20. I think both cakes needed the icing drizzle however, the brightness of this brought out the zesty flavours.