Pink lemon cake: or, A new year begins!

A new year is starting for us at A Book of Cookrye! We have moved into our domicile for the impending school year and are as ready as we'll ever be. Since this year will be full of coding and math classes, we decided we wanted to have something good for us at the beginning of the year. And it's pink!

Yes, that's a bowl of tea. My cup was stolen.

Pink Lemon Cake ½ c butter 1 c sugar ¼ c + 2 tbsp (⅜ c) maraschino cherry juice Juice and rind of 2 small lemons 2 eggs 1½ c flour 1 tsp baking powder Heat oven to 350°. Grease and flour a round cake pan. Combine the lemon and cherry juice. Mix the lemon rind and sugar, pinching it so the sugar grates at the rind, until the sugar is tinted yellow and has a lemon flavor. Cream the butter and sugar. Thoroughly beat in the eggs. Alternately add the flour in three portions and the lemon/cherry juice in two, beginning with the flour, mixing thoroughly each time. Add the baking powder with the last addition of flour. Pour into the pan and bake until it springs back when lightly pressed in the center, about 20 minutes.

We had leftover maraschino cherries from Our First Lady's Salad, extra lemons from Mary's Snow Pudding, and we wanted cake!

Butter is dairy, so cake gives you strong bones!

We read in a Maida Heatter (author of The Holy Bible) recipe that if you rub citrus rinds and sugar between your fingers, it releases the oils and gives a much stronger flavor to the cake than if you just drop the rind in. It appears she was right; this smelled so nice and lemony, and tasted divoon when we tried a pinch. Don't you just love when you find recipe tips that not only work, but also are really easy, make your food come out a lot better, and don't involve buying expensive, specialized kitchen tools?

This tasted amazing.

As a new year dawns, we at A Book of Cookrye wonder what it holds for us. Well, aside from the math class. We're not looking forward to that at all. But will we get to do anything as fun as showing drag queens to engineering students again?

All right, it's time to add the lemon juice and that syrupy stuff the cherries were floating in. My inner nine-year-old who loves dumping lots of food coloring into cakes was unbecomingly ecstatic at this.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

OH MY GOD LOOK AT IT IT'S PINK IT'S PINK IT'S PINK EEEEEEE!!!

The batter tasted like pink lemonade- only not artificial and weird. The cherry flavor was surprisingly subtle- you could tell there was something in there besides lemon, but it wasn't quite so obvious what. Given what shade of pink the batter ended up, you could easily have thought it was strawberry and not cherry.

It's pink!!!!!

This cake could either go to a baby shower with for an impending daughter or to a breast cancer event. Although I'd sooner bring it to a baby shower under blue icing with IT'S A BOY written on top. This is why no one ever asks me to bring the cake to a baby shower.

While we did like the kitchen where we lived in the summer, we had really missed having a built-in cake cooler.

We thought about putting some cinnamon icing on top, but decided that this already had cherry and lemon in it. Adding cinnamon on top seemed like it would be too many different flavors all at once. We soon after decided icing was too much unnecessary bother. However, the top did turn out an odd color. It turns out bright pink doesn't look good after getting browned.

However, it was as bright as ever once cut. Look at it! The browned top makes the inside look more festive and pink than ever.

If anything, the camera desaturated the picture.

We gave a lot of this cake away, and it went over a lot better than we thought it was. Two people gave us a hug and one a salute. The best part: giving away cake inspired one of our neighbors from India to share some leftovers.

Truly a feast.

I don't know if it's going to be a good year, but it's off to a decent start.