Pistachio and lemon streusel cake

Cake cake cake. I wanted to make a different cake and chose to do a combination of a couple of favourite flavours / techniques to create this bad boy:

Pistachio and lemon are good friends. Something about the buttery freshness of pistachio seems to get on well with lemon. Other nice combos could be maple and pecan, apple and oatmeal with ginger, coconut and lime, or if you're feeling decadent macadamia and vanilla?

Streusel cake is a cake made with a crunchy topping (and in some cases filling) made of something resembling crumble topping, or breadcrumb based if you're of a more traditional mindset. This gives a nice bit of textural contrast to a soft cake, and they're traditionally baked in a ring tin. I see no reason why this recipe couldn't be quite happy in a different shaped tin though :)

The base of this recipe is a Hummingbird bakery version, but I've (as usual) changed things about a bit... below is what I did. The streusel is layered through the cake batter, then a lemon syrup is poured over after baking, then finally a glacé icing is added with nuts (and I put crystallised lemon peel) for final prettification.

Streusel:
80g plain flour
50g marg or softened butter
50g demerera sugar
zest of 1 lemon
85g chopped pistachios

Rub butter into flour and sugar, then stir in the nuts and zest. Set aside. It should look kind of like this...

Cake:

170g softened butter or margarine

250g caster sugar

3 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

300ml soured cream

420g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarb

Pinch salt

Butter and flour a big (25-28cm diameter) ring tin (non stick is definitely best). Comme ça...

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in one egg at a time (use an electric mixer of sorts or prepare for a very sore arm...). Then stir in the sour cream and vanilla until all mixed completely together. Sift the flour, baking powder and bicarb into the wet ingredients, then stir in the salt and give it a good beat until all combined. Now layer streusel and cake mix... Half of the streusel goes into the tin first (to form the crunchy topping), then half the cake batter, then rest of streusel, then rest of batter...

  Streusel, then cake... then streusel...

 then ready to bake! 

Bake at 170 degrees C (fan) for 1 hour until a skewer comes out clean.

Syrup:
juice of 1 lemon made up to 50ml with water, boiled up with 50g sugar for a minute until all dissolved. Once cake is out of the oven, pop lots of skewer holes in and pour syrup gently in, then leave the cake to cool in the tin.

Then turn it out...

Then ice with the juice of a lemon made up to icing consistency with icing sugar and sprinkle with pretty stuff. Yummy!!!






JB x