#39 - Bake 50 Different Pies Update

I grew up with this pie and I'll always have memories of my gram attached to it. Lemon meringue pie. One of my favorites. For almost every holiday for as long as I can remember, my gram has ALWAYS had a lemon meringue pie at her house....this is my mom's mom. Right before I moved into my apartment, I told my gram at Easter that I was going to have to get her recipe for lemon meringue pie from her one day. I said it laughing, thinking it was a secret recipe that she was going to take to the grave with her because it tastes SO. DAMN. GOOD. So I can't even BEGIN to tell you how hard I laughed when she nonchalantly went into her pantry and came out with a box of jello lemon pudding mix and said "here you go!" Yep....she uses the recipe right off the lemon pudding jello box. She makes her meringue a tiny bit differently, but I use the meringue recipe off of the pudding box too. Three egg white and 1/3 cup of sugar. And I use a frozen pie crust too. This is a pretty easy pie to make but it's SO DAMN GOOD! See that, all in caps twice in this post....I promise you it really is :p

#98 - Bake 50 Cakes Update

The Beekman Boys released a new cookbook! A cookbook that's nothing but desserts.....dangerous....It's the Beekman 1802 Heirloom Dessert Cookbook and it had plenty of things that I wanted to try, but the first was this one, a lemon and orange olive oil poundcake with a lemon glaze. Sounds nice and healthy, right :p What I really loved about this recipe is the simplicity and the naturalness of it. The cake is just cake flour, sugar, eggs, olive oil, lemon and orange zest and fresh squeezed lemon and orange juice...not lemon and orange "flavoring". The real stuff! And the icing is just confectioners sugar mixed lemon juice.

The recipe calls for an entire cup of olive oil! So I knew that with all of that oil mixed with 4 eggs, it was going to be quite a moist cake! Not to mention, quite a heartburn making cake, which I can testify, it is :p But when I cut the first slice....so beautiful just how moist it was!

And then of course came the taste test. I was worried that with all of that lemon juice it would be too tart. I tasted the glaze by itself and it was REALLY tart! But when you spoon the glaze over the cake, you end up with most of it on the parchment paper underneath the cooling rack :p But it adds a nice hard glaze on top that is fairly tart, but it's PERFECTLY balanced with the cake that's not overly sweet, but perfectly moist and just oh. so. good. Seriously I love this cake and it's going to take all of my willpower to limit myself to one piece a day....I think I'm going to have to bring half of this to my mom :p