For the Love of Lemon Cake - Part 1

I never really knew how much I loved lemon cake until I noticed that I had chosen it for my wedding cake. At the top of my blog page is my famous fabulous lemon pound cake covered with a pucker your puss lemon glaze - YUMMMM! That was my choice for my birthday cake last year - please don't count the candles. If you had asked me what my favorite cake was, I would have said pound, or carrot. But when I think about it, I truly do love a good lemon cake.

On this past Saturday I happened upon an episode of the Barefoot Contessa which featured a lemon cake that caught my attention. Since I had all the ingredients, I decided to try my hand at Ina Gartens' lemon yogurt cake. Lemon is what this cake truly is. The fresh lemon flavor is awesome. However, I do have a number of complaints about it. First of all, the texture is like a brand new sponge that has been used to soak up an oil spill. The word unanimously used to describe this cakes texture was "weird". The cake also browned too fast on the outside while leaving the inside somewhat undercooked. It ended up looking more like a loaf of cornbread than a lemon cake. By the way, I refuse to take credit for the problems with this cake, since I noticed comments on the food network website with the exact complaints that I had.



Needless to say I won't be using this recipe again. However, this leads me to revisit an unfinished pursuit of an awesome lemon cake to add to my cake list to satisfy customer request -Hmm, my birthday is coming up. Maybe I'll be my first lemon cake customer. I guess this means "For the Love of Lemon Cake" will be continued.

Happy Healthy New Year

After all of the chocolate cake binging in December my body is craving something more sensible. Instead of the traditional black eyed peas and collards, I made black eyed pea and collard green soup - and we loved it! Now on to the sweet stuff... I made a half hearted attempt at a refined sugar free refined flour free dessert - some sort of zucchini carrot raisin pineapple bread that turned out to be a near miss.


Due to not wanting to follow a recipe or measure, it was too wet and absolutely not sweet enough. I used whole wheat pastry flour, flaxseed, applesauce, molasses, and agave nectar. All of those were good choices, but too much wet and not enough dry. Of course I had to salvage as much of it as I could. So I turned it into a bread pudding by adding whole wheat bread, more raisins, a handful of walnuts, a half cup of brown sugar, and 2 tablespoons of butter - ok 3. Anyway, I love it.



Honesly, at first glance I wanted to call the final outcome Yuck Bread. My husband took one look at it and walked away. But with a bit of creativity and a nice serving dish, it actually turned out to look almost as good as it tasted. So I guess I'll call it Z'Bread Pudding. With a dollop of cream on top (preferably ice cream), it's the best thing for keeping a resolution of good healthy eating and endulging in some sweet tooth therapy at the same time.