The Particular Joy of Lemon Drizzle Cake

On baking for mindfulness.

Welcome to The Autumn Chronicles, a place to shine a light on all the wonder around us as we navigate the seasons. I hope these writings allow you to sit quietly with a cup of something warm and comforting and take a few moments for yourself away from the rush and hurry. If you would like to make sure you get all newsletters directly to your inbox, please subscribe below. Thank you for being here. All photos © The Autumn Chronicles except where noted.

"There’s something about seeing such elemental change, that flour, butter, eggs, sugar could become this...that’s so satisfying" - Nigella Lawson

My earliest memories of baking are of standing on a stool in the kitchen of our first house while my mother creamed butter and sugar together with an old fashioned electric whisk. She would let me help mix the ingredients together and, if I was very lucky, I would be allowed to lick one of the beaters. I remember the feeling of comfort, of taking raw ingredients and combining them into something remarkable and totally different from their natural form. I remember spending those magical, wonderful, innocent moments with my mum, doing something that countless mothers and daughters (and fathers, sons, grandparents, uncles, aunts, godparents, friends…) have done and will continue to do for generations.

After my childhood, I don’t remember baking much until I met my husband. In my early 20s, I had too many other things to focus on and cooking from scratch was not high on my agenda; I was too busy relishing my independence and trying to carve out the kind of life I thought every adult should have. There were countless nights I would get a sandwich after work from the Tesco Express underneath my dingy little shared flat and eat it sat in front of the TV in my room, desperate for an escape from the dejection of living with flatmates who were nice enough but not necessarily on the same wavelength.

Before we were married, when my husband and I first moved in together and were learning how to navigate life while sharing personal space, baking became a way to experiment with that new situation. I had never properly lived with a boyfriend before and I loved the competing sense of domesticity and freedom it gave me. I had the chance to try new things and a reason to cook from scratch because I had someone else to nourish. My husband is wonderful at sharing chores - and he does most of the cooking these days - but baking is something that is exclusively mine, something into which I can pour love, hope, joy, sympathy, comfort and celebration for those dear to me.

The Mindfulness of Baking

Julia Ponsonby, in her brilliant book, Mindfulness in Baking: Meditations on Bakes and Calm says:

Successful baking requires us to be mindful. It needs us to be fully present with our activity, engaged in a flow that is impervious to distractions.

There is something innately comforting about shutting the world out and focusing on one task. Following step after step after step - measuring, mixing, pouring - to concoct an end result that teeters on the threshold of magic can often feel like a treat and a well deserved reward. There is great achievement in creating something from scratch and allowing our minds to be free of the chatter of daily life in the process, centring ourselves instead in creativity and imagination, patience and concentration.

Baking gained in popularity in the UK with the start of the Great British Bake Off series while others also turned to baking during lockdown. Unable to leave the house for weeks on end and against a backdrop of uncertainty and fear, baking became a way for people to use their time, focus on a positive and express their emotions. It was a way to connect with others who lived locally as baking a cake and leaving it on the doorstep for a loved one took the place of time spent together in person (obviously delivered during your one hour of permitted exercise per day and not baked while anyone in the household was sick!) Baking became a way to cope with overwhelm, to adjust to a new situation that felt fraught and unsure and to make something joyful out of a less-than-ideal reality.

I am not someone who finds it easy to switch off. Following a recipe is, for me, a meditative, mindful process because it forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing and ensure I am present in the moment to achieve a successful outcome. I have a very process-driven job and, while following a recipe can also be described as a process, there is an element of creativity that I relish. One of my favourite things to do is to switch up ingredients, substituting new flavours and attempting to make it ‘mine’. This act of experimentation is my favourite thing about baking. I don’t have the talent, or the patience, to write a recipe from scratch but adding a hit of zesty yuzu to a meringue or the unexpected earthiness of sage to a chocolate chip cookie encourages me to tap into my creativity and is, honestly, a form of self care, challenging me to do things a bit differently, think outside of the box and to try something new.

Simple Pleasures

Is there anything more comforting than the familiar tang of a lemon drizzle cake? The origins of this British classic are unclear but the first recorded recipe was written by a woman named Evelyn Rose and published in The Jewish Chronicle, a London-based newspaper, in July 1967. It is an iteration of a simple sponge cake, for which the earliest English-language recipe was recorded in 1615 by Gervase Markham in The English Huswife, and which had become a tea-time staple. The addition of lemons, available in Britain since the 1400s (but mostly to the upper classes as they were very expensive), is a way of transforming something plain into something more exciting and of giving a new lease of life to an old friend.

Lemon drizzle cake, to me, speaks of the promise of spring. While appropriate at any time of year, there is something about the fresh hit and bite of citrus, generally considered to be a winter crop, that is so compelling as the days begin to stretch out before us. It is liminal space in cake form; not quite one thing or the other but with the beauty of both and a quiet encouragement to shake off the shroud of hibernation and allow our senses to reawaken alongside the natural world as the dull skies and muted overtones of winter begin to ease.

In this vein, one of my favourite ways to elevate a lemon drizzle cake is by adding elderflower. The subtle, sweet flavour adds a whisper of summer to the crispness of the lemon cake; elderflowers, with their frothy white blossom, most often bloom in the warm, sunny days of June here in the UK and a homemade elderflower cordial on a boiling hot day is an experienced unmatched. Adding the honeyed, lightly floral notes of elderflower to the cake softens the edges of the tang of citrus and the flavours marry beautifully - just be careful not to add too much as elderflower can become a bit ‘soapy’ if it is too strong.

Most recently, lemon and elderflower cakes became du jour when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had one as the centrepiece at their wedding. As it happens, my husband and I chose lemon and elderflower as one of the flavours for our wedding cake back in June 2016 - a month before Prince Harry reportedly even met his future bride. I’ll leave it to you to decide who the trendsetter really was.

My love of elderflower is legendary in my family and so, for my 40th birthday earlier this year, my husband bought me this gorgeous print of a purple elderflower, similar to one we have in our garden. It is painted by

Elisabeth Luard

, one of my favourite food writers and the author of

Elisabeth Luard's Cookstory

here on Substack, which is well worth a read.

Tips for Mindful Baking

• Choose good quality ingredients that are nourishing and that feel special or plan to make something you wouldn’t eat every day;

• Clear your kitchen counters of clutter and lay out all your ingredients to check you have what you need. Weighing them out before you start combining often helps too;

• Read the recipe beforehand. It sounds silly but the number of times I have got halfway through a recipe and realised I’ve jumped the gun or done things the wrong way round is many more than zero;

• Visualise how you would like the end result to look before you begin;

• Choose a time when you can focus your attention on this particular task, this particular bake, free of distractions or other obligations;

• Put on background music or a podcast, or just listen to the noises of the kitchen around you as you work and relish the moments of stillness;

• Enjoy the process, experiment, allow your own creativity free rein;

• If something goes wrong, keep calm and persevere;

• Make eating what you have baked a ritual. Sit down somewhere comfortable with your bake on a pretty plate and use a linen napkin. Taste each flavour and savour the moment, rather than eating purely to consume. Alternatively, invite your family and friends over and enjoy sharing something you have made, with love, with those closest to you.

I’d love to know: which recipes do you return to over and over again and what is it about them that you love?

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