Day: March 11, 2017

Vintage Cakes: Lemon and Almond Streamliner Cake

I forgot to take my traditional cake-with-Vintage-Cakes picture, but this one is more fun.

As you might guess, it was Deborah’s birthday.  I offered to make a cake.  She mentioned she liked lemon, so I found this recipe.

I’m a chocolate girl, so I never would have made this for myself.  But it is a-mazing!  The Almond cake (which introduced me to almond paste) is delicious and joins perfectly with the lemon curd on top.

This is also a fairly forgiving cake, as I put it in the wrong sized pan (9×1-inch is not quite the same as 9×2-inch) and it spilled over onto the bottom of the oven.  Turns out that aside from the extra-crispy bottom, that spillover was very tasty too.

I also didn’t put all the lemon juice called for in the lemon curd, but it was still divine.

I’ve learned from Julia Child not to tell everyone your cooking/baking mistakes, so I kept mum about my cake baking trials.  No one noticed anything amiss and the cake was very well received by all.

I’ve also learned that when you freeze a piece the lemon curd becomes something like sorbet.

Another Vintage Cakes winner!

The mysterious case of the bagged legumes

For years I’ve been buying beans (and also rice) at Fred Meyer that came in a one-pound bag of thin plastic that flopped around.  This was fine by me.

Then, one day Fred Meyer’s bean (and rice) bags all got thicker, until they could stand up.  They also developed a zip-top closure.  This seemed excessive for me, as I usually either make the whole batch of beans in the bag, or pour extra into a mason jar to store.  But it wasn’t actually a troubling thing, so I rolled with it.

Today I went to grab a bag of black beans, and *poof* all the beans had been converted back to the original thin-plastic floppy bags.

What gives? File this under: changes I don’t know about and will never know about.