A book club Treat

Book club was at my house this week. I love my book club. We've got a fantastic group of girls, we have lots of fun and read some great books. The latest book I read was "still alice" by Lisa Genova. What a fabulous book! I thoroughly recommend it if you haven't read it.

We have our book club at a different member's house every 6 or 8 weeks, and one of the highlights (other than the great company and great books) is supper. We have a book club of fabulous cooks, so supper is always a treat. This time I turned to Julie le Clerc's cake book. If you haven't seen this book, you should track it down. It's a wonderful collection of delicious cakes and all the recipes I have tried so far have worked perfectly (fingers crossed!). For book club I chose the rhubarb and coconut citrus syrup cake. I hadn't made it before, but it looked like a nice, easy recipe that I would be able to make quickly after work, while getting Harry his dinner.

This was the perfect cake in all regards. Super easy to make, sliced like a dream and absolutely delicious with a dollop of whipped cream. I imagine it would keep well - I didn't get the opportunity to find out as the next day my husband ate what wasn't eaten at book club.

The trick with syrup cakes is to pour a hot syrup over a cold cake or a cold syrup over a hot cake. I knew my cake was going to be warm when I poured the syrup over it, so I just made my syrup warm and decided to make it more of a drizzle than a syrup. I actually heated it in the microwave while my cake was cooking, warming it enough to dissolve the sugar, but not enough to make it really syrupy. I also didn't add as much water to the drizzle as the recipe said.

I will definitely make this cake again. You could use other fruits if you didn't like rhubarb - blueberries or raspberries would be great, as would plums.