Spring in a cake: lemon loaf style

Baking with Julia’s Lemon Loaf Cake, as everyone noted, was simplicity itself.  However, no one mentioned how hard it would be to find cake flour, nor did the simple list of ingredients include a reminder NOT to forget to add the cooled melted butter (thankfully, the cake had only been in the oven for one minute when I discovered said cooled butter and added it, quickly, as the recipe instructs).

The minor details of my woes were nothing compared to the heavenly aroma of this cake baking.  Spring in a bottle, and if I could create an app that would let my readers smell my kitchen, I’d be wealthy. Gorilla Girl walked into the kitchen and exclaimed, “That smells so good! When can we eat it?” Gorilla Girl also insisted that the dandelions would look great with the lemon cake — thankfully, she didn’t want to eat them with the cake! Instead, we smeared our cake with lemon curd.

It must have been a permutation of spring house cleaning (or maybe it was that lemon scent forcing me to relive spring cleaning dramas of my youth), because I went on a baking and cooking spree that included making use of the foods of spring. I made asparagus and crab soup from Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, and used up the denuded lemons by incorporating their juice into Lemon Curd from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table.

Further evidence of spring can be found in Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl’s joyful play on our first beach trip of the season.

Lemon loaf cake is fragrant and sunny enough to remind us of the pure joys of spring.

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