I love pistachio and they give cakes such a wonderful colour, texture and of course flavour!

I used lemon in this cake as well and the combination is to die for.

For this recipe I made a loaf, but you can easily make this into a round Victoria sandwich style cake, you will need to make more cream cheese icing though and to finish raspberries make an amazing addition.

You Will Need:

• 230g Butter
• 230g Caster Sugar
• 4 Eggs
• 200g Self Raising Flour
• 1tsp Baking Powder
• Zest of 1 Lemon
• 70g Pistachio Ground (without shells and unsalted)

Cream Cheese Icing:

• 30g Butter
• 30g Cream Cheese
• 100g Icing Sugar
• Juice of half a lemon
• 20g Ground Pistachio (without shells and unsalted)

Method:

• Line and grease a 1lb loaf tin and pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees C.
• Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
• Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
• Sift in the flour and baking power.
• Add the ground pistachio and lemon zest and fold this all though until incorporated and evenly distributed.
• Transfer into your prepared tin
• Bake for between 50mins and 1hour or until golden on top and a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the middle.

Tip: A loaf cake always takes longer then you think to cook though into the middle, if you cake needs longer but is already golden on top, just turn the temperature down a little and continue baking for another 5mins and test again.

• Turn out on to a cooling rack and ice when completely cooled.

Icing and Decoration:

• Mix all (except the ground pistachio) of the icing ingredients together until smooth and creamy.
• This should be quite thick and easily spread. If it is a bit runny, then you may have go a particularly large or juicy lemon, just add a little more icing sugar.
• Spread or pipe the icing onto your cake and sprinkle the pistachio over the top.

Enjoy!