A Good Appetite
A Lemon Cake That Cuts to the Pith
This recipe, using the whole fruit, is full of deep citrus flavor and may just be worth baking right away.
I can shrug off chocolate and ignore caramel, but when it comes to lemon, I can never resist. If there’s a lemon dessert on the menu, I order it. If I see a lemon cake recipe I’ve never tried, I’ll bake it as soon as is humanly possible.
This is why I found myself rushing home from work one day to bake a lemon cake recipe a friend had sent. It didn’t matter that it was a weeknight, and that I had no reason to bake a cake. A new lemon cake recipe is its own best excuse.
What makes this cake so unusual is the way the lemons are treated. Instead of being zested and juiced, they are boiled and puréed, using the whole fruit, pith and all. Boiling brings out a deeper, muskier side of a lemon, making it taste a little like marmalade, with a bitter edge. The lemon purée also gives the cake a dense texture that’s lightened by beaten egg, and enriched with ground almonds. Separating and beating eggs made it a little more work than I wanted for a weeknight, but it was a fine cake nonetheless.
What it was missing, at least for me, was that characteristic zippy brightness I love about lemon — the pucker factor. The boiling had brought out some lemony characteristics but muted others. So the next time I made the cake, I some grated fresh lemon zest to the batter.
Then as a final touch, I drizzled on a simple confectioners’ sugar glaze spiked with lots of lemon juice. It made the cake more intensely sweet and tart, and it looked pretty, too, with its frosty white icing.
Once I had tweaked the recipe to my liking, I made the cake all summer long, sometimes topping it with fresh berries, sometimes leaving it plain. I made it with regular lemons, Meyer lemons, a combination of lemon and lime. All were good, but my favorite was the Meyer lemon version. Meyer lemons have a more rounded and complex citrus flavor than regular lemons, and less of the bitter pith. But you can use whatever lemons you have.
You will still need to separate and beat the eggs, which might make the cake too much for any given Tuesday. But if you can’t resist lemon, the recipe will be here when the weekend comes. It’s worth the wait.
Melissa Clark has been a columnist for the Food section since 2007. She reports on food trends, creates recipes and appears in cooking videos linked to her column, A Good Appetite. She has also written dozens of cookbooks. @MelissaClark • Facebook
A Good Appetite
Melissa Clark’s weekly cooking column.
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