Sunday, March 1, 2009

Cookish Blog: Smitten Kitchen

http://www.smittenkitchen.com/


What do you do when life hands you lemons, but you don't want lemonade? A friend's in-laws sent her and her husband a styrofoam cooler of lemons from their tree in AZ. That's a lot of lemons, and said friend is not that into lemons. So, I ended up with a bag of lemons. What to do? I turned to my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen, and Deb came to the rescue.


1. Whole Lemon Tart: This tart uses a whole lemon. Peel, pith, and all (except the seeds). This creates a powerful lemon flavor with a backslap of bitterness. This is not a bad thing, as far as I'm concerned, but you should be warned. Deb has a great tart crust recipe as well, which I multiplied by 1.5 to fit my 11-in tart pan, since the original recipe is for a 9-in tart. I don't roll out the crust, just push it in to the tart pan. This provides a nice, thick crust. I did not increase the filling for the tart, so the crust-to-filling ratio was very nice, in my opinion.


2. Lemon Pound Cake: This is an Ina Garten recipe, and made two lovely loaves; one was a gift for a friend's birthday, and the other...well, I had to taste-test it, right? This uses up a lot of lemon, so it was just the right recipe. The resulting cake is moist and packs quite a lemon punch. Next time, I think I would use a toothpick or skewer to poke some holes in the cake to help it soak up the lemon syrup. It didn't quite drain all the way through the cake, so it wasn't as evenly distributed as it could be. Tasty, though.


Smitten Kitchen has great recipes and awesome pictures. Check it out!

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