Food, Photography and Bon Mots
It’s the season for gift giving. Here’s an idea: Gift a snacking cake. Your gift will be as unique as it will be delicious. This recipe is adapted from a recipe in Chetna Masan’s great cookbook, The Cardamom Trail. You can find the book at…
This is a beautiful little cake cookie whatever–delicious, white chocolatey, and just a wee bit cookie textured. This recipe is an adapted version of the Lemon Vanilla Dream Bars recipe from the great little book Pure Vanilla by Shauna Sever (Amazon). You will find recipe…
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.
