Avery’s Straw­ber­ry Lemon Sour Cream Cake

2 cups all-pur­pose flour
1 tsp. bak­ing soda
1/2 tsp. bak­ing powder
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 sticks but­ter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 cup sour(ed) cream
2 tsps. vanil­la extract
2 tsps. lemon extract
the grat­ed peel of one lemon
2 large eggs
6 straw­ber­ries, coarse­ly chopped
3 tbsps. extra sugar

Stir togeth­er the flour, bak­ing soda, bak­ing pow­der and salt in a medi­um bowl. In anoth­er bowl, cream togeth­er the but­ter and sug­ar. Of course, at this point all recipes will tell you about what speed set­ting to use on your elec­tric beat­er. Well, try plug­ging an Amer­i­can beat­er into an Eng­lish sock­et, and once the smoke has cleared and you’ve replaced all the fus­es in your flat, you can go back to stir­ring by hand like in the old days. It just does­n’t mat­ter. Just stir until the but­ter and sug­ar are glossy. Then add the sour cream, the extracts and the eggs and the lemon peel, which will smell glo­ri­ous. Stir real­ly well until the bat­ter starts to come away from the bowl as you move the spoon. Dump in the flour mix­ture and stir very, very well. You’ll notice that a bit of bub­bli­ness appears from the bak­ing soda, when you’ve stirred enough. Gen­tly fold in the straw­ber­ries, tak­ing care not to mash them up. Tip into a pan that you’ve sprayed with Pam. I wish I had a Bundt pan but I do not. It would be very pret­ty like that. How­ev­er, it is much more Eng­lish to have a sim­ple square or round cake that will fit in one of the tins with lids, so de rigeur in the Eng­lish kitchen, to have on hand in the larder when some­one comes to tea.

Sprin­kle the extra sug­ar over the bat­ter and bake at about 350 for about 45 min­utes, or until the cen­ter does not jig­gle and a knife insert­ed in the cen­ter comes out clean. Yes­ter­day I burned mine, which was prob­a­bly a com­bi­na­tion of not pay­ing atten­tion (hey, some­one has to blog!) and not real­ly hav­ing a pre­cise han­dle on the rela­tion­ship between cel­sius and fahren­heit. Oh well, I’ll get it right before I pub­lish my cook­book! I guar­an­tee you it will not take longer than 10 min­utes to put this cake togeth­er, and oth­er than the straw­ber­ries, you’ll have every­thing on your shelves already.