When life gives you lemons, make cake.

Today wasn't the brightest day for my PhD. Nothing totally disastrous that will stop me from ever finishing but one of those days that means I left early and bought a bottle of wine from Waitrose and, of course, some eggs for baking!

I did have a massive craving for lemon polenta cake after a friend mentioned they were making something with polenta on facebook.  But I could not find polenta anywhere on my way home.  Sad times.  This made me want to open the wine whilst walking home, but it started to snow and I thought it might be a little impractical.  Don't want the snow to dilute the wine!

So with my lemons, I decided to bake lemon and almond cupcakes.  Kinda winged it again with the recipe.  The finished product was quite nice, very moist in the middle and super crumbly.  If I were to be eating gluten I think I might have put in a little flour to hold the bad boys together.  I topped them with some blueberry jam (which I made from some blueberries that were heading towards the bin with lemon juice and sugar) and rolled icing.  I had no inspiration for decorating them but then after I did a few random designs I realised that philosophically I had depicted how I feel about my PhD- lots of clocks denoting the running out of time!

Check out the recipe below:

Recipe
(makes 18 large cupcakes)
8oz butter (or dairy free sunflower spread)
8oz caster sugar
4 eggs
9.5oz ground almonds
1 tsp almond essence
2 lemons, both zest and juice
1/2 tsp baking powder
(if non-gluten free then add 1oz of flour)

Pre-heat the oven to 180C and place cupcake cases in the tin.  Cream together the sugar and butter, do this until very pale.  Add eggs whisking well (I almost always split my batter at this point so little bits at a time!).  Then fold in the almond along with the lemons, baking powder and the almond essence (this is when you can add the flour).  Fill the cupcake cases just over 2/3 full as it wont rise much.  Bake for about 18 mins but keep looking at them through the door as mine caught and browned quite well on the top.