I always think you can’t go wrong with a loaf cake. Some of the best and most classic of cakes lend themselves brilliantly to this bread-like shaped bar of deliciousness. Lemon drizzle loaf anyone? Slice of banana bread? Perhaps a carrot cake loaf? I’ll take all three.

The great Nigel Slater was not wrong when he said ‘There is something elegant and timeless about a slice of plain cake’, but sometimes you want to mix things up. Starting with a classic lemon drizzle loaf, I wanted something equally as moist and lemony, but perhaps with more fruit, and why not throw in some chocolate while we’re at it…

Low and behold the Lemon Yogurt Poppyseed Loaf, with summer berries and a white chocolate drizzle.

It is a real beauty, and pretty darn simple to make too. I’ve adapted the recipe from Red Magazine’s website and you can see the original here. My version uses more ground almonds and less flour, and more yogurt instead of oil – this is the trick for a really sumptuous moist bake in my opinion. You don’t have to buy expensive fresh berries, and I was very pleased to find some of these hiding in my freezer…

For £2 you get about twice as many berries frozen as you do fresh and after 20 seconds at full whack in the microwave they defrost pretty perfectly (careful though, too long and you end up with berry sauce – a mistake I’ve previously made).

For this loaf of loveliness, you will need:

Lemon Yogurt Poppyseed loaf

Ingredients:

– 150g plain flour
– 2 tsp baking powder
– 90 ground almonds
– 175g caster sugar
– 200ml natural yogurt
– 50ml sunflower oil
– 3 medium eggs
– Zest and juice of 2 lemons
– 25g poppy seeds
– 75g white chocolate
– 150g berries

Method:

1) Mix the flour, almonds, baking powder, caster sugar, poppy seeds and lemon zest in a bowl.

2) Separately, in a large jug (or blender if your lazy like me) combine the yogurt, eggs, oil and lemon juice.

3) Now combine the dry ingredients mixed in your bowl well into the wet mixture in your jug and pour into your loaf tin (which you will have greased already, naturally).

4) Pop this into the oven for 40 minutes at 180 degrees celsius.

5) Once out of the oven, leave out to cool in the tin for 5-10 minutes, then take out of the tin and leave for a further 10 minutes. Now comes the fun bit – berry placing and white chocolate drizzling!

6) Melt your white chocolate in the microwave and then…drizzle away. I like using a small dessert fork as you instantly get three little drizzles going on at once, but a knife does pretty much the same job.

7) After one layer of drizzle, pop on your berries- the melted white chocolate should help them stick. Then, just because it’s so much fun, drizzle again!

And there you have it. A very simple recipe for a stunning cake which is sure to be a hit with everyone…


So much so it hardly lasted a second in my home!