It Just Has To Be Delicious

Archive for April, 2026

Soft and Luscious Lemon Cake

I do love a lemon cake. Finding a good dairy free one can be tricky. Sometimes just substituting vegan butter for the regular butter gives it a greasy flavour and you often have to experiment and use a bit less vegan butter. The version here uses extra virgin olive oil with coconut yoghurt, and the flavour is lovely, not greasy at all. This is one of those recipes that I made on the off-chance and I wish I had taken more photos to show you. It’s ridiculously easy, you basically have your dry ingredients in a bowl, whisk your wet ingredients in another bowl, and stir the two together. A loaf tin is a really convenient size, but you could make a round version if you like.
Wash your lemons before zesting – sometimes they have a waxy coating to make them look nice and shiny in the supermarket. Rinse them in warm water and pat dry (or buy them from a farmers’ market where they don’t indulge in this trickery!)

So to start you need to line a regular sized loaf tin (21cm x 11cm) with baking parchment, and set your oven to 165 degrees fan (or 175 degrees non fan).

Now mix the dry ingredients in a bowl – I use Australian cup measures, the weights are a rough guide:
1 cup (250ml or 125g) of plain flour
Half a cup (125ml or 65g) of almond flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt

Now get the wet ingredients ready:
Half a cup (125ml or 106g) of caster sugar – place in a bowl
2 tablespoons of lemon zest – add to the sugar – this adds a lot of the flavour and is my ideal amount of lemoniness. If you like it more subtle you can use less.
Three quarters of a cup (185ml) of plain coconut yoghurt (if you can eat dairy you can use a lovely thick Greek yoghurt if you prefer)
Half a cup (125ml) of extra virgin olive oil
A third of a cup (80ml) of lemon juice
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Okay so you should have the lemon zest and sugar stirred together in your bowl. Add all of the other wet ingredients. You can whisk with a hand whisk, but if you have an electric whisk, use that instead. The mixture will be quite runny but whisk it for a few minutes until you see some bubbles on the top.

Now stir in the dry ingredients. This will thicken it up so that it’s more like a muffin mix. Don’t worry if it’s a bit lumpy – it’s better not to overwork it.
Pour the mixture into the lined loaf tin.
Tap the tin on the work top to make sure the mixture gets down to the corners.
Then pop it in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. It might take longer depending on your oven but have a listen. If the tin sounds very crackly, then the mixture is probably still cooking and needs longer, but try to see if a skewer comes out clean. If it does, then you can take the cake our of the oven. If it’s still making crackly noises, cool it in the tin as the residual heat will cook it a bit more, otherwise lift it out of the tin and onto a cooling rack.
If it needs longer in the oven, check it at 5 minute intervals and try the skewer again.

Make sure that cake is completely cool before icing. You can also use a lemon syrup to make it a drizzle cake if you don’t like icing. If you want it to be super lemony you can slice the cake in half horizontally and add a layer of lemon curd.

For the standard icing you need:
1 cup of icing sugar
2-3 teaspoons of lemon juice (add this very gradually – don’t let it get too runny)
Optional lemon zest (as much as you like but the zest of a small lemon should be about right)

Slowly add the lemon juice to the icing sugar and mix until you have a spreadable consistency that isn’t going to just slide off the cake. It needs to be fairly stiff, but not so stiff that you can’t spread it. Don’t worry if you get a few drips down the side of the cake – it all adds to the personality of your bake. If you are using lemon zest you can sprinkle some on top (you can also mix it into the icing – it doesn’t matter).

Try to leave it for an hour for the icing to settle, then put the kettle on for a cuppa and a slice. Leaving it will require a level of discipline as this super soft and tasty cake will be a firm favourite that you can’t wait to taste.

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Recipe, Vegan/Vegetarian

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Fireback, residency at Crown Perth

Fireback is at Perth Crown for a limited time, it’s an authentic Thai restaurant from EHV International. Fireback is curated by David Thompson, the well known Australian chef who lives and breathes Thai food, and runs the well established spicy set-up – Long Chim – at Perth’s State Buildings, previously having held a Michelin star with London’s Nahm. The residency is in the space that used to be occupied by Bistro Guillaume.

We were directed to our seats and given the menus. We chose a mocktail from the menu – Tropic Crush – containing mango puree, pineapple, lychee, and ginger beer, and topped with a nice large lychee – very refreshing.

The menu was full of delicious options and I really wanted all of them, so it was hard to choose. We asked the waiter how many dishes to select and he suggested two small and one large to share, but we actually chose three small and one large. I forgot to ask to have the dishes staggered, which was a shame because they all arrived together. This seems to be a theme lately with restaurants, there’s no starters any more, your food just comes up as and when it’s ready. I much prefer a dish or two at a time, then you can linger over each dish separately rather than being assaulted with too many flavours all at once.

The first dish to arrive was Miang Kham – a one-bite pomelo salad with jaggery, peanuts, chilli, galangal, and toasted coconut, served on a betel leaf. I have had a similar dish before and it was amazing. This didn’t disappoint – you wrap the betel leaf around the contents and just pop it in your mouth and it’s an explosion of everything good about Thai food. The only problem was that the serving size is 3, and you can’t really chop one in half. It would be nice if there was an option to have an extra portion so that the dish divided more easily. Anyhow, it was heavenly – a great start.

Next up was the Moo Grob, a dish suggested by our waiter – crispy pork belly served with charred cabbage and a rich chilli jam. Again a superb dish, really tasty pork, great chilli jam, and the cabbage – wow. How good can cabbage taste? Well try this dish because the cabbage had an incredibly fresh flavour with a lovely char on it.

Then came WA king prawns, served with a lime and chilli dipping sauce. The sauce was amazing and the prawns good quality, but again – three prawns between two of us, and at $29 that worked out at almost $10 a prawn. For that price I would have liked plumper prawns, or more of them, but they were very nice nonetheless.

Our large plate was the red curry with soft shell crab, served with jasmine rice. The sauce was rich and thick, quite heavy on the shrimp paste and a very bold flavour. I loved it and was glad that I ate this last because the taste stayed with me for quite a while.

We decided to finish off by sharing a mango sticky rice, always a good measure of a Thai restaurant. It was nice, perfectly ripe mango, but the coconut cream was cold. Traditionally the cream is heated up and salted, but ours was really cold, so this step had been missed. It was still a good dish.

So what did we think? Overall the food quality was very good and we enjoyed the meal, even though it was on the expensive side. The service was a bit lacking though. Our waiter was very nice, but the staff in general did not provide the attention that you usually get when you are paying top prices. Other tables were served ahead of us even though they arrived later. We seemed to wait a long time for our drinks, nobody topped up the table water, we had to ask, and nobody wiped down the table (which was fairly messy) between mains and dessert. It would have been good to be offered an extra portion of the dishes served in threes, and I would have liked the waiters to ask us which pace of food delivery we preferred i.e. all at once or slow and more sequential. I also noted that Crown now charge an extra 10% on a Sunday, whether it’s a public holiday weekend or not. I really object to that and assume that it is Crown-wide. It will definitely make me think twice about booking meals on Sundays. So – great food, lacklustre service, and quite expensive.

Last visit date – April 2026

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Restaurant review

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