Ginger St Clement's Pudding Cake

When I saw the recipe for Helen Goh's Ginger St Clement's Pudding Cake, I knew that I had to make it.  I didn't see the recipe until a month after it had been published, and it has been on the backburner for a couple of weeks.  However, I finally got around to making it last night.  And by a happy coincidence, I discovered that today, 15 November, is International Bundt Day!  So without exerting any extra effort, I can participate in this event.

This cake is called St Clements Cake after the Old English Nursery rhyme starting "Orange and lemons say the bells of St Clements".  This is because the cake contains both orange and lemon flavours, as well as ginger, and is topped with a lemon yoghurt cream.

In the cake itself, I subbed out the lemon zest for orange zest, meaning the only lemon is from the lemon cream.  I did this because I had zested the orange before chopping up the rest of the orange for the cake, and did not want to waste the zest or the flesh of a lemon when I could just use the orange zest in the cake and solve both problems at once.  I upped the ante on the orange flavour by rubbing the orange zest into the sugar before creaming it with the butter, a step that is not in the original recipe.

This cake is really good.  I could not taste the ginger that much, but the orange flavour shone through brightly.  The cake is not overly sweet, and while I definitely feel that the lemon yoghurt cream added to the enjoyment of the cake, this is a cake that stands well on its own.  And it's a bundt cake - perfect for International Bundt Day!

If I have tempted you to try this cake, you will need:

150ml milk
100g plain Greek style yoghurt
280g self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
120g crystallised ginger (I didn't find any in syrup so just used the regular kind)
1 orange ~150g, peeled, cut into chunks and seeds removed
50g toasted flaked almonds
125g unsalted butter
200g sugar
zest of 1 lemon (I used the zest of the orange)
2 large eggs

Mix the milk and yoghurt together in a bowl and set aside.

Sift the flour and salt together and set aside.

Put the ginger and orange chunks into a food processor and blitz until chopped (but not pureed).  Add the almonds to the processor bowl and pulse until combined.

Preheat your oven to 190 degrees Celsius and grease and flour a 3 litre bundt pan.

Rub the zest into the sugar in the bowl of the stand mixer.  Add the butter to the bowl and beat together until smooth and creamy.Beat in the eggs, one at a time.  Add the ginger and orange mixture to the bowl and beat on low to just combine.

Add one third of the flour mixture to the bowl and mix in, then one third of the milk and yoghurt mixture.  Repeat twice more until all of the flour and all of the milk and yoghurt have been mixed in.

Scrape the batter into the prepared bundt tin and bake in the oven for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Remove the cake from the oven and allow it to cool in the tin for 30 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack to cool completely.

To serve, make the lemon yoghurt cream by combining 150ml of Greek yoghurt with 150ml of lemon curd in a bowl and spreading over the cake (I served it on the side instead).