Grapefruit Cup Cakes and a Sticky Loaf

Last weekend's grapefruit celebration culminated in a spot of baking. My cookbooks and magazines were pretty quiet on recipes involving grapefruit, but there was one in Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home, and it was high time I cooked something from this wonderful book. I have used it many times while learning to joint a chicken--it has fabulous instructions for such useful kitchen skills--but this is the first recipe I've used from it.

I'm always pleased to avoid creaming butter and sugar, cracking too many eggs, and fiddling around with too many bowls, and still getting a great cake at the end. This recipe delivers all that, and enough batter for a big loaf and some cupcakes.

HOW TO

Beat with a mixer until thick and creamy:

• 1 2/3 cups sugar
• 2 eggs

Beat gently into the eggs and sugar:

• 1 cup milk
• 3/4 cup oil (recipe called for canola, I used olive)
• 1 tsp vanilla (essence or paste)
• grapefruit zest

Sift then stir into the wet ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 tsp baking power
• 1 tsp salt (which I'm sure I omitted)

Pour the mixture into a loaf pan and/or baking cups. I got a bit excited at this point and added in some of the grapefruit and saffron confit I'd just made, but you don't need to do this.

Bake at 180 degrees. The loaf will take about 40 mins and the cupcakes... 25 - 30 minutes. Do the usual stabbing-with-a-skewer test... and keep the skewer out, because you're going to need it again shortly.

The icing on these cupcakes was translucent slithers of grapefruits from the confit. They were bitter sweet, chewy, and quirky.

I stabbed the hot loaf all over with the skewer, then drizzled quite a lot of hot grapefruit syrup over it.

Thomas Keller makes grapefruit syrup by boiling up a cup of grapefruit juice with 2/3 cup of sugar. Just scoop it up with a spoon and slowly drizzle it over the hot cake. It will take patience to wait for it soak into the skewer holes, but the lovely sticky loaf you end up with is absolutely worth it.