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My mother, Judith, is an amazing cook. Not just in the way that most people’s moms are amazing cooks, but in the way that she has been in the restaurant business her entire adult life and knows how to make at least 300 kinds of cheesecake without a recipe, for starters.
I am really good at cooking soup, cheesetoast, and reheated tamales. That’s pretty much my whole kitchen repertoire. Baking terrifies me. It’s so scientific and it seems like there is some magic to it that you have to be born knowing about. I didn’t get that gene.
In fact, one of my first memories is of experimenting with my Holly Hobbie oven in an attempt to emulate Judith and bake yummy things. After one particularly revolting incident, I stopped eating eggs for about twenty-five years. If I use my imagination, I can still summon up the taste of those horrifying “muffins”, and the bile threatens to rise in my throat.
So for Anna Hughes’s birthday, I got this idea in my head that I would bake her a cake. I thought I would take “an hour or two” out of my busy work day and whip up something incredibly delicious and beautiful and perfect, something Tartine-esque. I asked Judith to email me a recipe for lemon cake.
Judith doesn’t write her recipes down. She doesn’t need to, because she’s one of those laidback cooks that uses confidence and intuition as her main skillsets when baking incredibly complicated things. It was a pain for her to try to translate her genius onto paper, but she acquiesced.
After critiquing all of her typos and asking her if she had been having a stroke when she typed that out, I had to call her about a brillion times with questions. For us Virgo artists, little details like WHAT TEMPERATURE DOES THE OVEN NEED TO BE ON are sticking points that can really derail us. Judith was definitely beginning to regret the whole “sure, I’ll help you bake a cake” attitude on about the fifth call, when I started crying because I couldn’t find lemons for less than a dollar each—and I needed about twenty. Apparently there is some sort of lemon drought going on in the world, according to Judith. Tell that to my neighbors, who have 400 on their tree next door.
Judith suggested that I simply buy faux lemon juice at Safeway. I reacted like she had told me to make out with a leper. Luckily, the third store I visited was having a sale on lemons. They must have gotten them from my neighbor.
So here’s how long it took me to shop for and cook this cake: SIX HOURS. Guess how long it took us to eat it? About ten minutes. It was worth it. It was the most delicious, endearing, so-ugly-only-a-mother-could-love-it cake the world has ever seen (for a brief ten minutes).
And it didn’t even taste like panic.
Here’s a PDF of the recipe, if you are brave. It’s not for the faint of heart!
