Tim's lemon trickle mash cake from River Cottage

 

Regular readers will know that (a) cakes are my favourite thing to make; and (b) I cannot resist the unusual in a recipe.  These traits recently brought me face to face with the Lemon Potato Cake, which contains mashed potato.  How weird is that?  I first saw a lemon potato cake on someone's blog, then couldn't find that recipe when I went to make the cake. Accoridngly, I made Tim's Lemon Trickle Mash Cake via River Cottage instead.  The recipe is online here.   I have no idea who Tim is, or why the cake is a trickle cake, but I'll put the latter down to the charming way that the English have with language - read the chapter on place names and the glossary in Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island to get the gist of what I mean. 

I heeded the warning in the recipe and made up potato mash especially for this cake, and didn't add anything to the mash (except salt to the cooking water).  This is so that no foreign savoury flavours find their way into your cake.

The end result is a rather lovely, pudding-like, lemon-scented cake: 

It's a little like lemon delicious in cake form, and you'd never know there were mashed potatoes in there.  Curiosity satiated, I really liked this cake.  Serve it on its own, or with e little warm custard - mmmm.