Lemon Madeira Birthday Cake

This week for my Bookmarked Recipes entry I decided to make a madeira cake, but not just for the fun of making a cake but because tomorrow is my birthday!!!!!!! I decided about a week ago to make a madeira for my birthday and I had a recipe bookmarked in Easy Food Magazine (I promise I'll use a different source soon!), but made a few changes to it and used lemon extract instead of vanilla extract and instead of using the buttercream on the top of the cake I used some premade icing (yeah it's cheating but it's my birthday tomorrow so who cares!) so I only made half the volume of the buttercream but ended up using about two thirds of that, but in making the buttercream added a little more icing sugar to the mix as well.

Well here it is - my lemon madeira birthday cake! It may not be very creatively or beautifully decorated but I'm looking forward to tasting it.

And happy birthday to Sio at Cake Creations for tomorrow too!!!



The recipe below is my slightly edited version:

Lemon Madeira Cake

Ingredients

Cake
150g margarine
150g sugar
4 eggs
drop of lemon extract
150g self raising flour

Buttercream
75g margarine
100g icing sugar
drop of lemon extract

3-4 tbsp strawberry jam
premade pre rolled icing

Recipe
1. Preheat oven to 180˚C and grease an 8" cake tin.
2. In a large mixing bowl cream the margarine and sugar together until light and fluffy.
3. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then beat in the lemon extract.
4. Fold in the flour until the batter is light and creamy.
5. Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until a skewer can be withdrawn cleanly.
6. Leave the cake to cool for 5-10 minutes before removing from the tin, then leave to cool on a wire rack.
7. In a mixing bowl, cream together the sugar, margarine and lemon extract until smooth.
8. Using a sharp knife carefully cut the cake into 2 sandwich cakes. Spread the jam on one of the sliced sandwiches then spread the buttercream on the other then replace the top.
9. Follow the directions of the premade icing pack to cover the cake and decorate as desired.