I have a lovely lot of lemons here at the moment, and limes – gifts from friends and family. I decided to trial a recipe for a lemon cake that would incorporate leftover sour cream. I wanted especially to use a recipe of New Zealand chef Annabel White. I’d met her during the Restaurant Australia event last year. She is an amazing lady – full of fun, calls herself the cuddly cook – how cool is that!

I followed her instructions, messing only slightly with the content, changing light sour cream for regular sour cream, adding a bit of lemon juice. However, I decided to bake it in my old Bundt tin instead of her recommended 24cm springform round. Bad idea. It stuck like glue, so I had to scrape it out, in bits, with a knife.

I hate defeat, so piled it into a cling-wrap lined bowl, made a triple batch of the glaze she recommended (lemon juice and sugar), poured it over and then weighted it down. I hoped the glaze would bind it together.

Next, quite carried away by now, I made some lemon curd to cover once it was turned out, and finally coated the whole lot with meringue mixture and baked it.

Did it work? Oh yes indeed. (I love it when a plan comes together). Just as well, because I needed to serve it to guests for dessert at dinner. It was said to be very good, though so rich that you could only eat a small portion. I think it would serve about 12 people quite adequately. With vanilla ice cream I think.
That richness might have been the duck eggs I’d used in it – there were 8 in all, along with a couple of chook eggs.

If anyone would like to try it, I could put the recipe together. I could leave out the steps where the cake stuck to the tin mind you, and give an alternative of a lemon curd meringue cake…. a slightly smaller version.