The Lemon Cake Trials

I've been carrying a lemon cake craving for a while now. It started a while back when, one day at Starbucks, I wondered why I was paying $2-something for a slice of lemon poppyseed loaf. Surely I could make my own at home for a fraction of the cost (plus I'd get a whole loaf of it to myself). So I started to search for recipes - though only half heartedly. There's only one thing I like less in baking than cutting cold butter into flour: zesting lemons. It's not that it's a hard task, but it's tedious when you don't have the right tool. Growing up in my Mom's kitchen (a woman who really loves her lemons in baking) our zester was this hand held tool with a wavy metal tip, with holes in it. It was bent a certain way so that it would score the skin of a citrus fruit and produce zest. Unfortunately I was never any good at using this tool and that didn't change with time. It took me probably thirty minutes to zest a single lemon (or approximately 1 Tbsp) with this thing and it was never very clean. After I started watching Martha Stewart on TV (haha) I badly longed for a zester that resembled a fine grater. So I went to my local IKEA and picked something up that looked very similar. Woohoo!

Anyway, onto the cakes. I found a recipe for lemon poppyseed on Canadian Living online and decided to give it a shot. I wanted to make it in my Mom's new kitchen since she'd promised I could be the first to bake there. I was really excited but honestly... I should have waited. Of course I had to choose the weekend she left for a trip so she wasn't even around to tell me where she'd put all her baking equipment. It took me a while to go through all the cabinets and drawers of her newly renovated kitchen to find the pans and mixing bowls; unfortunately all her measuring cups and spoons were still in a box somewhere in the living room. That took me much longer to find.

If the lack of proper equipment wasn't bad enough, there were some ingredients missing from my Mom's pantry: baking powder and baking soda. Luckily she had extra baking soda in the basement, but I couldn't find the baking powder for the life of me. I checked online for substitutions and thankfully, found a helpful chart on Joy of Baking. With all the substitutions I had to use (I also had to do a substitution for sour cream which was tricky), I was really worried about how the cake itself would turn out. Well, my concerns weren't unwarranted because the results were a flat, dense, tasteless cake.

Bad Lemon Poppyseed

Part of me blames the recipe and part of me blames the circumstances. I followed all the directions and did my best with the subs but it was still disappointing to end up with a cake like this. I fed it to my husband and a friend, and they were both kind enough to say that it was still "edible", but there was no fooling that it was a failed cake.

"Edible" doesn't mean good...

This is getting lengthy so I'll wrap up quickly (I promise):
After the bad turnout with the Lemon Poppyseed loaf, I sought redemption. I knew I could do better and so I turned to Martha Stewart again. (She too loves lemon desserts.) I found this recipe for a lemon cake and set about to make it myself. The results were phenomenal.

Mmmm. Lemon Cake

 

Up close and personal 

What a difference from the flat, dense, and tasteless cake I'd made before! Anyway, I ate nearly half of the entire cake (if not a little more) all by myself over the course of two days: It was cake for dessert, cake for breakfast, cake with lunch, and cake for afternoon tea. Life was good.