When Life Gives You Lemons
There are times when life gives you lemons and you are left to make the best of the situation. When that happens, it is up to you to dig down, find the strength to get out of the hole you have fallen into, and rally. Find a way back into the light. But if you are fortunate enough to be given lemons of the Meyer variety, then you simply must make something wonderful with them and share that gift with others.
Recently our amazing neighbor Anita sent a message 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 to Vancouver to visit my sister for a week,” Anita said as she deposited three golden beauties in my cupped hands. And 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 and time was a waste!
Hilah Johnson’s Meyer Lemon Olive Oil cake.
That was when I stumbled onto Hilah Johnson’s recipe for Meyer lemon-olive oil cake. http://hilahcooking.com/ I’d found the recipe on her cooking website in 2014 and saved it for the day when I could have a Meyer lemon tree as part of a kitchen garden. Now that we live in the foothills of the Sierra’s in California, that time was now. But first, it was time to juice Anita’s golden smooth-skinned Meyer lemons and blend them together with olive oil into a yummy cake.
Making this cake is far easier than assembling a Shaker lemon pie. Prep time: 10 minutes. Cooking time: 45 minutes. Total time: 55 minutes. Yield: 10 slices. Ready in under an hour and no time necessary for macerating the paper-thinly sliced lemons ahead of time.
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, I had a 9” springform pan and a professional, cobalt blue KitchenAid stand mixer that was a wedding gift in December 1982. Our small cottage up an urban canyon 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 for Kit and his children, Hayden and Heidi who became my new family over the decade that we lived there. And always, there were lemons for the recipes I loved preparing.
This Father’s Day weekend, Kit and I enjoyed pain chocolat and café lattes at Cake Bakery and Café located in a repurposed old Nevada County Bank in downtown Grass Valley. A three-tiered display of lemons in the bakery convinced me it was time to add a lemon tree to our lives once again. On the drive home, I stopped at Weiss’s nursery and bought a miniature Meyer lemon loaded with fruit that is now soaking up sunshine in a jade-colored ceramic pot on our deck where it will keep me in lemons until the next snow falls on our cedars and pines and I bring it indoors to winter over in my writing studio.
When life gives you lemons, you can always turn them into something delicious that can be shared with family and friends.