lemon drizzle

yesterday's guardian on line had an article about the perfect recipe for a lemon drizzle cake. they had tested various recipes by several well known and other less well known cooks and concluded that the best recipe was a basic victoria sponge for the cake but with some lemon zest added at the beginning with the sugar and butter and with some ground almonds replacing some of the flour. this should be cooked in a loaf tin and once out of the oven pierced with a skewer all over so that the syrup of 100g Demerara sugar mixed with the juice of two lemons can be spooned over.

flicking through the comments I noticed that a good number of people were complaining about the fact that the testing hadn't included Nigella's lemon cake, which, many commenters reckoned, was in fact, the best.

with a free half hour this afternoon, a lack of something to blip today and 5 hungry mouths demanding something more than yoghurt or fruit for dessert there was only one thing for it. a lemon drizzle cake off. nigella v the guardian.

the one featured in the photo is the nigella cake. I think it looks good but I am not sure about the icing - in my view lemon drizzle doesn't have or need icing (nigella, I think, calls it a glaze...!). and contrary to what you might think by it being featured this cake wasn't the winner in our house. not by a long shot. but I couldn't photograph the other because there were only crumbs left.