A zesty lemon cake for march

I wanted to bake a special cake for my lovely friend Helen's birthday a few days ago (Helen is a marketing whizz who helped redesign both the Halsbeer Farm and Blackdown Yurts websites for me) so I googled 'March birthday cakes' for inspiration. Up popped a gorgeous lemon and primrose cake - it seemed appropriate as I'd only just been sharing pictures of the gorgeous primrose bank along the drive here at Halsbeer in the stunning early Spring sunshine a few days earlier. This cake is perfect for March birthdays, Mother's Day (this year 30th March) and for Easter, any excuse really!

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The original recipe was a Great British Bake Off one, featured on the Great British Food Awards website. Theirs was a monster 4-layer cake - bit overkill for my purposes - so I halved the recipe to make a standard 2-layer cake and I also reduced the time it took by cheating on a couple of steps. Much as I would have loved to make my own lemon and primrose curd and syrup I simply didn't have time so instead I bought a jar of good quality lemon curd and skipped the syrup. The cake didn't suffer for it, it was still moist and zingy. I did decorate it with some primroses and violas (edible) and celandine (not edible) flowers and a few sprigs of herbs that were starting to shoot in the herb garden, specifically a trailing rosemary that was already flowering, lavender and chamomile.    

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