Lemon Drizzle Cake

During my final year at university, around exam time, I had a major, major breakdown. To the point where I faked an illness to get out of an exam (diarrhea: a great excuse because no one wants to know) and found myself crying, HOWLING, in a public toilet cubicle at 7am.

Feeling like there was no where else to turn, I located the University counselling service and went down to make an appointment. When I got there, they handed me a little survey so that they could assess exactly how unhinged I was. It was all very straightforward: “Do you feel like you have no where else to turn?” etc. etc. and I woefully filled it in, reducing my muddled thoughts to “yes” and “no” answers.

And then came the final question: “Do you ever think about killing yourself?”. I ticked yes. I thought about it almost every day and I sometimes still do. I didn’t know that people didn’t. What a silly question, I thought! Everyone does!

I handed in the survey and got a bit of a worried glance back. “Right”, the calm voice said, “I think we will need to book you in straight away”.

They obviously thought that this was a code red situation. They didn’t differentiate between “thinking” and “doing” in the survey (I suppose if they did, some people would be dead and so the survey would be pointless). I mean, I think about it all the time as some kind of freedom and salvation but even at my lowest, I knew that I would never actually do it.

From the worry on her face, I realised that not everyone must always think about killing themselves. Some people in this world must think “Yeah, everything seems to be going ok and what I’m doing makes total sense”.

And that was that. More recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of colleagues who had never thought about killing themselves. The person most shocked about my thoughts, decided to build up a team of happy people (those who, as far as I can fathom, buy loads of things from achica.com on their lunchbreaks) by asking everyone that came into the room what they thought.

I was still alone on my miserable team, being sympathetically stared at by the team on drugs until this lovely pregnant lady came in and completed the death-survey. She answered: “Yeah, I do actually. Sometimes when I’m driving home, I just feel as if I could drive straight into the central reservation at high speed and end it all”. And I thought “I love you”.

There is one other thing that can get me out of this suicide-slump though and it’s not something that the University councillor advised because she would probably have created another problem. She was very good by the way, psyching me out within two minutes and sending me away with a book on anxieties. And I thought I was complex!

Baking something delicious will, without a doubt, make me feel MUCH better (until I’ve eaten it all, at which point I become depressed). In honour of my dark mood, I couldn’t bake something too sweet; it needed an edge. So I decided on something known for its sour flavour: Lemon Drizzle Cake!

I didn't use ALL of these - my mum was also cooking something citrusy.

 I have since read that Mary Berry’s drizzle cake is the best there is but this one came via the BBC from Tana Ramsay and it was delicious, moist and beautiful.

The recipe is here and I did everything it told me to, apart from the fact I used a lot more lemons (which according to my boyfriend was too much but I thought worked perfectly…I’m very sour, you see).

The sugar in the ‘drizzle’ on top didn’t quite crystallise like the photo but this didn’t matter because everything worked and it was good. Very good. One of my favourites and a super mood improver. Try it!

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