Gin and tonic cake
Revisiting the recipe that went viral, 12 years later
Hello and happy new year.
I’m writing fresh from a two week break from work and, while the neatly dovetailed two week nursery closure has meant one full time job has largely been replaced with another, it’s been a happy and restful time - for which I feel very lucky.
The dying embers of the year, marked routinely by the cliché confusion of Twixmas - What day is it? When did I last eat something that wasn’t largely made of cheese? Yes Netflix, I am still watching! - offer a welcome slowness.
Just as advent is guaranteed to overwhelm me, the final days of December offer the headspace for reflection. My true introversion, so often masked by the dogged glimmer of extroversion in my personality, gets a rare chance to marinade.
To think back quietly on the year gone by, to compare everything to how it was this time last year and benchmark how life has moved on. And with that, to think more acutely about what I’d like to work on in the year that’s about to dawn.
Looking forward and back
While not one for resolutions as such, I do relish the neat opportunity a new year brings to hone and polish my goals. Call it a personal annual review, if you will.
This year, it’s pretty simple. I plan to continue what I started in the twilight of 2025 - putting my own oxygen mask on, and making more time for the things that make me feel like me.
Baking and writing are two of the things that centre me the most and, thankfully, are two things I can do at home in the small pockets of freedom I have to play with.
I guess all of that is to say that this space is integral to my plans for 2026. So thank you for being here with me.
As well as thinking a lot about the baking and writing I want to do in 2026, I found my mind wondering back to the years that have passed. To the many first weeks of January that now only exist as memories.
To baking with my mum and my grannies as a kid.
To the many different kitchens this baking adventure has tiptoed through in the last few decades.
To the moments that, like little kitchen step up stools, allowed me to reach the latch and open windows of opportunity.
Starting my blog Pudding Lane on 1st January 2014.
Going to blogger events (I miss those days!) and meeting so many incredibly talented and generous creators who all loved baking as much as me.
Getting to work with brands whose names are as familiar to me as members of my family.
Taking 18 months out from my comfy PR career to work for Claire Ptak at Violet Cakes where I learnt about seasonality, food styling, cookbook writing and so much more.
Making my friend’s sisters wedding cake, with all the naive confidence of a 23 year old that it would just work out (thankfully, it did). Thank you for trusting me, Charley.
Building a wedding cake business, kind of by accident.
Building a postal bakes business in lockdown, definitely by accident.
Pitching a cookbook which got pulled at the eleventh hour.
Pitching another cookbook and getting a deal to write it.
Making that cookbook and becoming a published author.
Bringing my two work worlds together to PR my own book and seeing my recipes (and my face!) in most of the national papers and monthly magazines.
Writing it all out like this romanticises things and omits the parts that didn’t go so well. The (many) moments I’ve totally overstretched myself. The (many, sadly) parties, holidays and other lovely things I missed because of wedding cake bookings or book deadlines. The fact that that the work to earnings ratio of baking is simply nowhere near what it should be, and that without a familial financial cushion available to me, I’ve never been able to make it work as a full time job.
My personal relationship with baking has waxed and waned, too - I’ve had great chunks of time where I’ve questioned how good it is for me. And other times when I’ve lost my love for it. Thankfully, we always find our way back to each other, and I hope that never changes.
I guess that’s what gives the highs their shine. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, and continues to challenge me all these years in.
More often than not, the successes haven’t been the things I’ve expected. And nowhere is that truer than this, my gin and tonic cake recipe that went viral.
The recipe that changed everything
I wrote and shared this recipe for a citrusy, soft and potent gin and tonic loaf cake six months into starting my blog. It was a fun idea that I put together quickly and without much thought. I liked the frivolity of it and, at a time when the cupcake craze was still riding high, the fact that something so delicious could look so simple.
I tested the cake one Sunday, wrote it up, published it, and then promptly went on holiday to rural France the next day.
Three days into the holiday, we went to the market in a local town and I picked up phone signal for the first time. Idly, I checked my Blogger notifications.
Initially I thought there must be some kind of glitch.
My modest little blog, which previously had been read by well under 100 people a day, was getting thousands and thousands of views. Hundreds of comments. I was being tagged in Instagram posts by people I didn’t know who’d made the cake. My inbox suddenly had emails in it from journalists wanting to feature the recipe, and from gin brands wanting to send me their products.
Amazingly, the post I’d thrown together had gone viral - in 2014 terms, anyway.
It took my blog from something only my friends and family were reading to new levels, which opened up so many doors on this winding baking journey.
And even now, 12 years later, I still get emails about the recipe. My blog - which I haven’t written for five years, but still exists as an archive of recipes - still has a healthy stream of monthly traffic.
And yet, while I featured a traybake version of this cake in my cookbook, it’s been well over a decade since I last made the original recipe. So today, I did just that - about eight kitchens on from the funny little space in Stockwell that this was first born, and now with my 17 month old daughter standing in her toddler tower along for the ride.
I changed nothing, save for using a lime in place of a lemon that I was short of. And it came out completely and utterly, perfect.
As I think ahead to 2026 and what comes next for me and baking, it feels only right to celebrate the recipe that kind of got everything going. To make it again and share it here, in my new creative space.
If you’ve been reading along since 2014, thank you. If this is your first time in these parts, thank you too! I hope you might stick around but even more than that, I hope you make this cake. It’s a belter.
Gin and tonic cake
Serves: 6-8
Equipment: x1 1kg loaf tin
INGREDIENTS & METHOD
The full recipe originally appeared on Pudding Lane Blog, and is still available there, along with my full archive of recipes from 2014-2020.
Im not even going to tell my husband about this 😂 what an amazing idea ,sounds great on a menu 🤗