59. A Recipe for Lemon Drizzle Cake

for Jeff Hilson, who asked for the recipe several years ago at the Sunday at the Oto poetry & music performances at Café Oto, Dalston, and for all the regulars who may have ate it there

– And why do we act?

nothing strange, but fear & desire

to put food in our mouths or

because we accustom to act so and

just carry on or to fix a marker

even though that will vanish; or

to establish companionship in our voyaging together

- sometimes something like that

Anyway let’s not worry about such origins

- here is the cake I made for the Oto events

and you asked for the recipe & here it is then at last:

Seen in clarity these we need to set up:

           225 g self-raising flour

           225 g butter (not straight from the fridge!)

           4 medium eggs

           325 g fairtrade caster sugar

           (to tell all – as 225 + 100 g)

           and 1 good, juicy lemon

                 (like a jewelled & golden head of guiltless pleasure)

The tin you need is a smallish loaf tin

7 or 8 cm x >20 for a good shape

which you will line with buttered baking paper

leaving at the long ends little lengths to pull it out complete

(a simple trick that will give you mastery over this tin)

then set the oven’s heat purely at gas mark 4

                                   180 or 160°

                                   unfalteringly

Grate off the peel or zest from your lemon & gather it

cream with a fork the butter & its weight of sugar

until pale & creamy as clear yellow sky underneath cloud

then mix in the eggs gently one by one adding

finally the lemon peel and then the slow soft spurt of sifted flour

mixing it into all one fresh golden world, glowing

as if with the warm creative light of a star in heaven

At the tin, spoon in this viscous mess

smooth it at the top to resist the gusts of heat

let them gently blow in & raise it up

like a race of heroes building this new city

You choose now to place it in the centre of the oven

where it coheres & articulates itself, raises up as I said

a rugged crust of beginning complexity – but cover

w/ foil or paper if it looks like spoiling – check

its insides with a long skewer until done

40 minutes, 45 – these things depend on the precision of your oven

and the singularity of the newly established cake

We can now take out the cake & let it stand a little

these are desperate times but not so bad yet

we can’t eat our cake and enjoy it occasionally

                                                - so

squeeze the juice out of the two halves of your lemon

not till you hear the pips squeak

                                  - save that

for all our rulers one day soon we hope & plan – but

so all the expressed juice drips into the remaining sugar

blend it in

            - then pierce the cake with your skewer repeatedly

its top anyway should be raised up like roughened bark

beginning to split as if with cancer

                              - which is the wild excess of life after all

Pour over this mush as if it were the cure

and the sharp discrete liquor will infuse

& the sugar mash crust into a healthy scab

this mulch slowly acquiring its nature

let it rest & cool, to join our common world

Then raise it by the ends of the paper, cut, & eat

or wash the tin, dry, and replace a long strip of paper lengthwise

& you can transport or keep the cake in its tin somehow as I did

taking it to enliven whatever joint free enterprise you wish

- good luck & appetite!

[This recipe is from BBC Good Food - & therefore belonging to a common shared enterprise. I have heightened the lemon! Sicilian lemons would be best. This cake goes well with music & poetry, as you know.]