TWD: Lemon Loaf Cake

Eh....

Let me just put it out there. This Lemon Loaf Cake is not half as good as Ina's Lemon Cake. (Which you may recall that I made back in March.) Which is sort of funny, as Ina always talks about how Julia had a huge influence in Ina's own culinary adventures.

Though when looking at the two recipes side-by-side, it's pretty obvious as to why Ina's is better. Ina's recipe contains more than double the amount of butter. There's an additional cup of sugar. It includes actual lemon juice, it includes buttermilk (as opposed to Julia's use of heavy cream), and it calls for a lemony sugar glaze. One might say that Ina's recipe is overindulgence at its finest.

Overindulging on this guy is impossible

Regardless, I approached Julia's recipe with an open mind. I don't need all that extra butter, sugar and stuff. And I certainly appreciated that I was not juicing a million lemons.

Of course as simple as the recipe was, it was almost destined to go wrong from the beginning. My cake flour was well past its prime. (Is that gross?)

This reads, "Best if used by Jul 05 2011," in case you can't see the white print

My melted butter solidified, and when I attempted to re-melt it, it exploded all over my microwave.

A couple other things happened, but photographs of letting cake batter sit in my fridge as I suddenly got too busy to bake it are not too exciting.

To compensate for what I knew would be a damaged cake, I made an amazing blueberry sauce. Seriously, add this sauce to your repertoire asap. The slight flavoring of orange (juice) and almond totally makes the sauce.

(Apologies for the completely un-styled and half-topped cake photo. It was served at a friend's house, and I knew that 1) it wouldn't be eaten in its entirety, and 2) we'd be wrapping it up and taking it home.)

In the end, the Lemon Loaf Cake did not taste all that awful - it just didn't taste that great. It was dense (perhaps due to my expired cake flour?), lacking in flavor, and even the blueberry sauce couldn't save it. I will happily go back to my sinfully delicious Lemon Cake recipe from Ina, and just suck up all the work required in juicing 14-16 lemons.

I much preferred this half of a cookies and cream cupcake over the lemon cake

If you think you can improve upon Julia's recipe and are not totally turned off by my review, you can view the recipe on the blogs of this week's TWD hosts - Treats and The Beauty of Life.