Hazelnut cake

Valerie and James are coming over for dinner tonight, so decided it would be a good opportunity to bake a cake that I'd been wanting to try out for a while now. It's from The Silver Spoon, which is an absolutely gorgeous book - translated from Italian into English only in 2005, but originally printed back in 1950. It's wonderful just to flick through - I use it mainly to get ideas. Anyway, this is actually the first recipe from it that I've actually followed, despite having had the book for about two years now.

Hazelnut Cake
Ingredients

• 200g Hazelnuts
• 200g Self-raising flour
• 200g Caster sugar
• Zest from one lemon
  
• 100g Butter
• 2 Eggs
• 50ml Milk
• 2tbsp Icing sugar
• 250g Mascarpone
  

Method

1. Toast the hazelnuts (either in the oven or in a dry frying pan) and allow to cool.
2. Chop the hazelnuts finely (crushing them first in a pestle and mortar or just with the flat of a chef's knife saves a lot of time!).
3. Mix the chopped hazelnuts, flour, caster sugar and lemon zest in a bowl.
4. Melt the butter and add to the dry ingredients along with the eggs and milk.
5. Pour into a greased and floured (or lined) cake tin and bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 30 minutes.
6. Combine the icing sugar with the mascarpone. Serve the cake with the sweetened mascarpone.
   

The main reason I wanted to bake this cake (other than the fact that it sounds utterly delicious) is that the photo in the cookbook just looks unbelieveably gorgeous. Hopefully mine will turn out that well!