A plain butter cake, skewered while warm and soaked with cordial. Keeps for days and improves overnight.
A drizzle cake is the easiest way to get real flavour into a plain sponge, because the syrup goes in after baking rather than being cooked away. The result is dense and moist, it slices well, it travels well, and it proves the cordial is not only a drink.
Method
Heat the oven to 180°C (160°C fan). Grease and line a 20 cm round tin or a large loaf tin.
Beat the butter and sugar for a full 4 minutes until pale and noticeably lighter. This is the step people cut short and the one that matters.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. If it looks curdled, add a spoonful of the flour and keep going.
Fold in the flour and lime zest, then the milk. Stop as soon as it comes together.
Spoon into the tin, level the top, and bake 45–50 minutes (55 for a loaf tin) until a skewer comes out clean.
Meanwhile warm the cordial and lime juice in a small pan until just steaming. Do not boil.
As soon as the cake is out, prick it all over with a skewer — right to the base, thirty or forty holes — then spoon the warm drizzle over slowly, letting each spoonful soak in before the next.
Cool completely in the tin so it reabsorbs everything that runs to the bottom.
Tips
Both cake and syrup need to be warm. Cold syrup on a cold cake sits on the surface and goes sticky.
Keeps four days in an airtight tin and is better on day two.
For an iced version, use half the drizzle and beat the rest into 150 g icing sugar for a thin glaze.
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