The Royal Indian Mounted Police celebrated a birthday last week and I was motivated to make the lemon cake that I’ve been making with much success recently. Well at least one person I know (my sister) likes them. I do too, come to that.
I was unable to access the recipes that I used because, Germany, I dunno, the links I’d embedded in my blog didn’t work here anyway. And I couldn’t find them and I could not, for the life of me, find a lemon curd recipe similar to the one I’d used. I think I found a white cake that was pretty much the same. I just went with it.
In the end the curd was really sour and the cake was leaden. I mean super-dense. Like drop-on-your-foot-and-lose-a-toe dense. And then when I went to make the frosting I discovered that I had no powdered sugar so I decided to melt the sugar in lemon juice—I had 60 lemons I’d had to zest for the curd and the leftover naked lemons—they do not keep well or long. So, you know, I thought I was being pretty clever, I’ll use the lemons to melt the sugar. It will all go into the frosting. (In case you are unaware, if you use granulated sugar, frosting will be grainy.) Although I do not use lemon juice when I make frosting, I was just winging it here. Instead of being grainy, the frosting was sour. Like eye-popping sour. Ashish ate a piece the size of one of the samples he uses in his electron microscope and took the rest to work.
I feel vaguely sorry for his unsuspecting co-workers. I hope they don’t drop any.
