Sweet Pea and Lemon Cake

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Although St. Patrick’s Day isn’t celebrated in the UK to the same extent as it is in Canada, the US, and presumably in Ireland, I still wanted to bake something special (green) for today. I’ve had my eye on this recipe from Veggie Desserts, and thought I would bake this cake as a surprise and make my partner guess what is in it. She eventually guessed peas, but I had to tell her the icing is lemon.

I opted to halve the recipe and make only one tier since it’s just the two of us eating my baking, but you can easily double the recipe for two tiers. The icing quantities should work for a two layer cake since I did some superfluous decorating and had leftovers. My artistic skills scream “5-year-old’s finger painting”, especially as I was literally down to the last-minute before I had to dash off to work, but the design is supposed to be a glade with vines and shamrocks. The cake is moist and fairly dense, and the lemon icing balances it well. And no, you can’t taste the peas, but they do give it a nice natural green colour!

Ingredients:

makes 1 layer

Note: The original recipe didn’t convert the cups and grams properly, so I stuck with grams, except for the peas.

1 cup frozen peas
100g. unsalted butter, softened
75g. granulated sugar
1 1/2 eggs (I whisked one and poured half out before adding the second)
1 tsp. vanilla
zest and juice of 1/2 lemon
125g. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Ingredients for the Lemon Buttercream:

150g. unsalted butter, softened
300g. icing sugar
zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon
green gel food colouring
green sprinkles

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 160C. Grease and line one 9″ cake tin.
Microwave the frozen peas in water for 4-5 minutes and refresh under cold water.
Purée the peas, lemon juice, and zest with a hand blender, or in your NutriBullet. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, then beat in the cooled pea/lemon mix and the vanilla.
Sift in the flour, baking powder, and salt and stir to gently combine.
Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and make sure the batter is level. Bake for 25 minutes and then cool slightly before inverting on a wire rack to cool completely.

For the icing, cream the butter until fluffy. Add the icing sugar and beat. Beat in the zest and lemon juice. Decorate as desired.

I iced the cake in white and then added some green food colouring to the icing and piped stars using a closed star tip. I then added a bit more food colouring (can’t really see the difference) to the remaining icing and used a small round tip to design the shamrocks and vines.
I added some green sprinkles to finish.