Food, Photography and Bon Mots
Every month, Blue Cayenne features one post from our archive of more than 350 recipes. Here is a Pasta Alla Vecchia Bettola recipe you won’t want to miss…again. Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top…
I’ve got a problem with dark green leafy vegetables. (There. I said it.) I can “do” spinach. But…just mention the word kale and I…er… turn green. Collard greens? Don’t even go there. Ever. Chard, however, has always been a leafy green vegetable that straddles the…
Here is a belated valentine from Blue Cayenne’s Chief Quality Officer, Juliet, and a delightfully-simple Lemon Cake recipe you should consider adding to your repertoire. (Forgive the lateness of our good wishes. Blue Cayenne’s editorial staff–that would be me–was laid up on Valentine’s Day by a nasty reaction to the second dose of Moderna’s Covid19 vaccine.)
This Lemon Cake is pound cake-ish. It’s texture is dense and moist like a traditional pound cake, but there are interesting variations to the simple one pound of butter, one pound of flour, one pound of eggs, one pound of sugar formula for pound cake that has been kicking around since the 18th Century.
Making pound cakes used to be a real chore, but this cake is a cinch to whip up, even with its additions.
In the old days, eggs were the only leavening in the traditional pound cake and the cakes tended to be pretty heavy. Commercial baking powder wasn’t invented until 1843.
The mixing of the cake was tough, too. Mechanical mixers didn’t make their appearance until 1856. (The first kitchen mixers with electric motors came on the market in 1885, and the game-changing KitchenAid mixer wasn’t introduced by the Hobart Company until 1919.) This meant that cooks had to struggle to mix the heavy batter. Toni Tipton Martin, in a Southern Living piece, described the process of laboriously “rubbing the butter to a cream” and then struggling to mix the ingredients with a wooden paddle. (My fifty-year-old KitchenAid mixer is one of the most treasured and most used pieces of equipment in my kitchen. Like a Le Creuset cast iron pan, a KitchenAid is a lifetime purchase. (Below is a photo of one of the original KitchenAid mixers and a photo of one similar to the one in my kitchen. Fortunately, the design of the mixer has changed quite a bit over the years.)
Here’s the Lemon Cake recipe.
This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the Yellow Bliss Road site here.
Ahhh, potatoes! Let me count the ways. Today’s potato is the upmarket Yukon Gold. The history of these potatoes is interesting. Yukon Gold potatoes have only been available commercially since 1980. Developed at Canada’s University of Guelph by legendary potato breeder Gary…
So…if polenta and lasagna had a baby… …it would be this glorious polenta lasagna. (Or, is it lasagna polenta?) What’s not to love here? There is gooey mozzarella, creamy ricotta, piquant marinara and the delightful texture (and flavor) of Parmesan-infused buttery polenta. Did I mention…
