How much do I love lemons?

If I have a choice of a sweet made with chocolate or lemon, the fruit wins every single time.

If I’m cooking and I think the dish needs “a little something,” it’s usually lemon or lemon peel.

And of all the people on TV, “30 Rock” funnygal Liz Lemon is my hero for many reasons but mostly because she “lizzes,” “snarts,” wears Spanx and identifies with Ina Garten the Barefoot Contessa “whose husbands only comes home on the weekends, and she spends the rest of her time eating and drinking with her gay friends.” If only…

So today, faced with rain and an early evening visit to meet a friend’s new baby boy, I felt the need to bake. And who, I ask you,  would refuse homemade brownies, especially dense fudgey ones from Joanne Chang‘s Flour cookbook or a recipe from the fine folks at King Arthur Flour? Like, no one? (OK, maybe I would, but only if there was a lemon bar offered as well.)

But while my pantry is stocked to the max with Callebaut bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate, I couldn’t find a few ounces of unsweetened chocolate anywhere. So instead of cutting back on the sugar, using semi-sweet and playing those bakers’ percentage games, I scrapped it. When baking sweets to give way, the last thing you want to do is experiment.

But while flipping through my King Arthur Baker’s Companion, a paper flew out that was fortuitously nestled in between a recipe for old school Vanilla Pound Cake and another for Lemon-Glazed Lemon Pound Cake. Oh, hello, there!

Thankfully, I had everything in house, including King Arthur’s special Fiori di Sicilia flavor — a combination of vanilla and citrus.

If you’re loopy over lemon like me, you must have a bottle of this in your fridge. While it’s yummy in cakes, it makes an over-the-top frosting. In fact, the coconut-lemon cupcakes I made for Easter disappeared so quickly, I never had a nibble!

Today’s lemon pound cake recipe made two loaves — one to give away and the other for, well, moi.

Now, as Liz would say, before we shut it down, somebody bring me some ham…

Tags: Baking, Cake, Dessert, flour, King Arthur Flour, Laura Raposa, The Foodsmith