madeira cake?

I've had a bit of a craving for madeira cake for quite a while now. Every so often while grocery shopping in my local Tesco I would oh so casually find myself in the aisle that stocked cakes, so how could I not wander over to the madeira cake and gaze slightly longingly at it just sitting there, looking so deliciously moist and dense and sweet? I always somehow managed to resist the temptation to buy it though. Even with J on numerous occasions catching me red-handed and then exclaiming "why don't you just buy it??". I think it helped that I expected that one day, I would be able to satisfy my craving on my own and not have to rely on the supermarket version full of unwanted preservatives and other unknown substances. It is a little strange that I have been craving madeira cake at all, given that I despise butter on its own, but stranger things have happened.

Since my failed attempt a few months ago I was beginning to wonder if it was actually possible for me to bake a satisfactory madeira cake, especially since most madeira cake recipes online talked about adding lemon. I decided that this was a big no no - if I want a lemon cake, I'll make my own lemony lemon cake. So then I thought that maybe I should be looking for pound cake recipes. I was going to try Martha Stewart's recipe, but I had buttermilk to use and I figured could find a recipe that used buttermilk. I settled on this, and decided to make just half the quantity. But while I was halfway through measuring all the ingredients (having already put the sugar and butter in the bowl) I realised that I had halved the sugar, but not halved the butter. And then I realised that the recipe in its current proportions would most likely not have yielded me a moist, dense madeira cake at all! So I set about modifying it and hoping for the best. Surprisingly, the end result was a decent madeira cake - it actually tasted fantastic to me when I ate it freshly baked (but then what baked good freshly removed from an oven doesn't?). However when I ate it the next day, I found the taste of butter to be rather overpowering. But J assured me that it was perfect just the way it was, so here is the recipe.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/8 tsp baking soda
225g butter
1 3/4 cups caster sugar
3 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla essence

Method
Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius
In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between after each addition.
Mix in the vanilla essence
Gently mix in flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk.

I found this was enough mixture for 1 loaf tin (approx 9 x 11 inch) and 1 round 18 inch tin.

Bake for 40 minutes.

And something I discovered as a result of baking this cake, and the chocolate cake (not yet blogged) - buttermilk makes the tops of cakes very crusty.