So, the big book club event went off fine. I prepared for many days so it wouldn't be a problem-- cooking up a big batch of spaghetti ahead of time, buying veggies, etc. All I had to do on the big day was to cut up some veggies for salad and crudités (love the way that word makes cut-up vegetables sound so elegant) and to make a lemon cake.
For some reason, I had it in my mind to make a lemon cake. It's one of the few things that I get a craving for and can't quite get the same thing over here. Now I guess I know why. It's a pain in the butt to make. Lemons aren't that expensive (compared to most produce around here), but it's still a hassle, and then I don't really have a zester or a juicer, so I have to make do. No buttermilk either, but I can use lemon juice and milk and fake it. Butter itself is super expensive, and cakes take a lot of it-- once you convert all your recipe stuff into metric and try to get the right measurements....
Anyway, I'm making a bigger deal of it. The real fun was putting it into the aluminium pans I bought from the 100-Yen shop. The package of tins came with 3, but the recipe said to divide it into two 8-inch loaf pans. (There's that darn U.S./non-metric stuff again.) So I filled the batter to the top of each. Can't fit both in my oven, so only one goes in for now. The recipe didn't say that the darn thing would rise, and rise and RISE, and keep on RISING! I thought I had created a slowly dripping volcano of lemon cake batter. The top was getting browned nicely, but batter still kept creeping forth from the side until a little mound of mutant side-cake grew next to it. Luckily, the oven uses a inner plate (like those mini-lazy-susans in a microwave), so the batter didn't go all over the oven itself. But it was funny, and made the first cake come out deformed.
Thank goodness there WAS three tins in the package, so I could divide the remaining batter between the two remaining tins in the mean time.
The cakes did taste amazing, I have to admit. Even the mutant one.
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