Recipe: Lemon cream cheese cake.

Since coming across the delight that is cream cheese frosting I've been incorporating it into most cakes I make these days because nothing else seems to compare. But I'm sure I'll eventually get sick of it and move on to fondant icing.

Recipe

You need to make two sponges so repeat this recipe twice.

Sponge Ingredients

9 oz sifted self raising flour (sifted, then measured)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

240mls buttermilk substitute

1/2 A Vanilla pod

1 splash distilled white vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 oz castor sugar

4 oz bertolli, room temperature

2 large eggs

Cream Cheese Frosting

150g light philadelphia 

1 teaspoon of bertolli

350g icing sugar

Method

-Mix double the amount of milk (to make the two half's of the cake) with the juice of one lemon and sit it aside for 5 minutes prior to getting the other ingredients ready. This is my substitution for butter milk, which is basically just acidy milk.  

-Mix all your dry ingredients together into one bowl.  
-Mix the vanilla extract and splash of white vinegar into the buttermilk.  
-Mix the bertolli and castor sugar with the vanilla pod extract. (this is done easiest by softening the pod with your fingers, cutting it in half and using the edge of a knife to scrape the oils from inside) and the juice of one lemon together in another bowl.  
-Beat the eggs together and add them slowly to the sugar and butter mixture. 
-Add the zest of 2 lemons to this mixture  
-Alternate adding 1/4 of the butter milk mixture and then 1/4 flour mixture until both are fully mixed. It's a strange recipe because it has a lot more liquid ingredients than a conventional sponge but it it much much better because if this, it's comes out incredibly moist and light.  
-Lightly grease and flour a cake tin.
I do one sponge at a time because my oven is not big enough to have two cooking up the top without having to open the over half way through cooking and rotating shelves, which unfortunately can sometimes make your sponge sink.My cake tin is pretty big, must be over 20cms in diameter but I'm not sure exactly, but a cake with two sponges this size can easily make 16 reasonably sized slices and feed 4 people over two or three days. I think that a tiny cake that can be eaten in one sitting is kinda wasted effort!  
-Cook each sponge on the top shelf of oven at gas mark 4 (350 degrees F) for 27 minutes until lightly golden on top -For the cream cheese icing simply mix all of the ingredients together until smooth and creamy. 
-A suggestion was made to me by Jamie and Jethro to put yellow Reece's pieces on top because they love them, I put them on in the shape of lemons and put lemon zest inside the lemons :)