My Gin & Tonic cake. Mine!

Right so, I’ve seen a recipe for a G&T cake doing the rounds a while back but I wasn’t too enthused as it seemed so very lemony. My friend Aiofe sent me a recipe for something similar last week and it looked a lot more up my alley. I also happen to have a bottle of the most wonderful Scottish Gin which I opened recently and thought, sure, why not?!

The measures in the recipe Aoife gave me were all a bit funky so today I worked from scratch. I’ve never made a cake with no recipe before. I just used what I had done with other cakes and tried to fix it up with a loose look at the other recipes for a quick sanity check!

So for the cake you will need:

200 g of self rising flour; 200 g of caster sugar; 200 g of butter; 4 large eggs; the juice of 1 ripe lemon; 4 shots of your favourite gin and finally a peeled and chopped granny smith apple.

And for the drizzle:

4 shots of gin, juice of 1 lemon, a splash of tonic and 150 g of caster sugar.

I used this beauty of a Gin. It’s a small batch made in Scotland and is best served, not with cucumber, but with some sliced apples, a few ice cubes and a splash of tonic. Really really good!

Now. Stop looking at my gin. It’s mine.

Pre-heat your oven to 180C.

Get a bowl and add 200 g of butter (if you’re clever and not like me you will have cubed it and left it to soften out of the fridge for a good while. The softer the better, but not melted mind!) and 200g of sugar. Mix until nice and incorporated. It makes for a quite firm mixture. You want to now add your 4 eggs and mix well until fully smooth. You really will need to work out all the little lumps as you don’t want to add flour to a lumpy mix. It would be a royal pain you know where!

Now that your mixture is nice and smooth and shiny, add your flour and work it in. It should be nice and easy. Add the juice of 1 lemon and 4 shots of gin.

I went for this kind of shot glass. Nice and standard. No funny business.

Peel and chop your apple like so:

Add it to your cake batter and mix well. Pour into your cake tin (buttered and floured or whatever you use to prevent stickage) and place in the bottom of the oven for about 45 min. It should look like this:

Get your cake out of the tin and place it on a cooling tray over a baking tray. In a bowl mix the gin, lemon, sugar and tonic water until most of the sugar is melted down. Fork the cake all over and pour the drizzle over. Let it rest. Maybe 30 minutes.

Then tuck in! Cheers! Oh yeah… don’t eat and drive!