Lemon Cake

This old-fashioned lemon cake recipe has a charm that defies the years.

Bake it now and bring some sweet, lemon-y loveliness to your day. 

Lemon Cake Recipe

This recipe comes from the pages of Nana Ling‘s handwritten recipe books.

You can check out the entire collection of her handwritten recipes here.

And please keep scrolling through this post for additional advice on making this recipe plus the tested and tweaked quantities and instructions in the recipe card at the bottom of the post.

Lemon Cake Ingredients

The first thing you’ll need is, of course, lemons!

Lemons: always in season and always useful

While lemons are more plentiful in winter, they’re generally available year round. Which is a good thing, since they’re just so handy in the kitchen. 

I have a lemon tree in the garden, and when it’s not producing fruit I’ll pick up some local lemons at my farmers market. My kitchen feels incomplete without some lemons sitting around.

Of course, I shouldn’t let the lemons sit around like decorations. 

The best way to store lemons is in a zip lock bag in the fridge, leaking out as much air from the bag as possible before sealing.

If you use the zest, take an extra step to protect the lemon and wrap in plastic kitchen wrap before placing the lemon in the fridge.

The other ingredients

You’ll also need:

• plain flour (all purpose flour)
• caster sugar
• butter
• eggs
• milk
• cream of tartar
• bicarb soda
• salt
• thickened cream
• icing sugar.

Making old-fashioned Lemon Cake

Start by preheating the oven to 180 degrees celsius (fan-forced).

Grease two round cake pans, about 20cm in diameter.

Beat the butter and sugar on high speed for 5 minutes.

Add eggs and beat on med-high speed for 2 minutes.

Finely grate the lemon rind from both lemons.

Keep 1 teaspoon of the rind aside for the filling. Add the remaining rind and milk and mix on low-med speed to combine.

Slowly add sifted dry ingredients, stirring well to combine.

Pour half of the batter into each of the greased pans and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.

Once removed from the oven, allow to cool for 10 minutes and then gently ease the cakes from the pans.

Filling and Icing your Lemon Cake

Beat the thickened cream until stiff and then mix in the remaining rind.

Sandwich the cakes together (once completely cooled) with the cream.

Sift the icing sugar and add enough juice from one of the lemons to make an icing that is just thick enough to gently spread as you add it to the top of the cake.

Let the icing drip down the sides of the cake and decorate with lemon slices.

Too many lemons?

If you’ve got plenty of lemons, there are many ways to use them.

In the Cooking with Nana Ling collection, you can find lemon curd, lemon delicious, lemon meringue tarts, lemon muffins, banana cake with lemon frosting, and canary pudding.

You can also freeze both the juice and zest.

But why would you do that when you have this lemon cake recipe?