A Gift of Meyer Lemons
May is a month when everything tastes better with lemons. Squeezed, zested, sliced, slivered, sipped or preserved, lemons bring life to every dish they meet. Last week our amazing neighbor Anita sent a text asking if I’d like some Meyer lemons from her uncle Johnny’s tree. “Absolutely,” I responded, and before I could say “lemons” she was at our door. “I’m off Baja for a month,” Anita said as she deposited a box of golden beauties in my hands. Then, off she dashed.
Wanting to make something super lemony with these treasures, I searched my recipe folders and cookbooks for ideas. Since I had promised Anita that her lemons might well end up in a pie, I turned first to a cookbook from the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill near Lexington, KY. At a Shaker table in the 1800s, meals were to be eaten mindfully and without murmuring, and your plate was to be cleaned of every last crumb. The Shaker Lemon Pie recipe adopted in the Pleasant Hill cookbook book is an example of how this frugal 19th-century culture made simplicity into an art.
But as I read the recipe, I realized that the lemons needed to macerate—a process that requires them to be sliced paper thin before being mixed in a bowl with two cups of sugar, after which they sit at room temperature for 24 hours or up to two to three days to offset the lemons’ bitterness. The problem was, I was ready to turn Anita’s Meyer lemons into something delicious that day, and time was a wasting!
After perusing my recipe files, I settled on Hilah Johnson’s Meyer lemon-olive oil cake. http://hilahcooking.com/ and before long, I was juicing a couple of Anita’s smooth-skinned Meyer lemons and blending them together with olive oil into a yummy cake.
Prep time: 10 minutes.
Cooking time: 45 minutes.
Yield: 10 slices.
Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
½ cup olive oil
½ cup Meyer lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
Directions:
1. Oil a 9-10” springform pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. Set oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Whip eggs and sugar together on high speed until fluffy and very pale. About 5 minutes.
3. Turn speed to low and stream in oil, lemon juice and zest and vanilla. (Mix together in measuring cup with spout and pour them in).
4. Whisk flour and dry ingredients together and fold them in by hand. Mixture will be very fluffy and foamy.
5. Pour into prepared springform pan and bake for 45 minutes. The top and edges will become quite brown.
6. Cool 30 minutes in the pan, then release the sides of the pan and continue to cool on a rack.
7. Cake keeps at room temperature, covered, for up to a week.
Amazingly, after downsizing for our move from Missouri to northern CA three years ago, I still have my 9” springform pan and a professional, cobalt blue KitchenAid stand mixer that was a wedding gift in December 1982. Our small canyon cottage in West Los Angeles had a backyard with a rose garden and two mature lemon and orange trees. Armed with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and two early Martha Stewart cookbooks with seasonal recipes for four, I learned to cook in its tiny kitchen for Kit, Hayden and Heidi during the decade that we lived there. And always, there were lemons for the recipes I loved preparing.
Hayden has now lived in Madrid for the past three decades and loves to cook from his own garden. When I described a gluten free recipe with almond flour and lemon zest to him recently during a Facetime call with his Dad, he recognized as a traditional Spanish almond cake called tarta de Santiago. “Don’t over bake it,” Hayden counseled. “It should be light and moist.”
Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 cup granulated or castor sugar
2 cups almond flour or ground almonds
zest of 1 lemon
½ teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
Directions:
Preheat 350-degree oven. Baking time 30-35 minutes.
Line an 8-inch round cake pan with parchment on the bottom after rubbing sides and bottom with butter.
Whisk eggs and sugar until they become light in color with air in the mixture.
Add dry ingredients and lemon zest, trying not to overmix so you retain air in the mixture.
Pour in prepared cake pan and bake 30 minutes.
Cool 15 minutes before removing the cake and dusting with confectioners’ sugar on top.
Serve with strawberries and whipped cream.
This Mothers’ Day I’ll share a memory of Kit from his early parenting days in Los Angeles. Of all the awards he received during his extraordinary career as a professional geographer, Kit is proudest of the “Mother of the Year” plaque that he received from the moms at Hayden and Heidi’s Encino Parents Nursery School. And I’ll bake something Meyer lemony for the wonderful staff that cares for Kit at the Lodge. When life gives you wonderful neighbors who give you Meyer lemons, it is a joy to turn that gift into something delicious that can be shared with family and friends.
