Happy Sunday my intrepid followers (both of you), I hope you are having a great weekend. With the cooler and unsettled weather of the last couple of days, I have found myself getting the urge to do some baking.

When it comes to food, I am very seasonally driven. During the hotter months, I prefer lighter and fresher dishes. In the cooler months it tends to be heavier, stick to your ribs food. Baking is something I really enjoy, but save for special occasion cakes or pies from time to time, I don’t do a lot of it in the summer.

I found myself having some leftover buttermilk in the fridge, so I decided to use it up on some baking. Looking to do something different, I went to my go to site for recipes and general food related information.

Now I should declare here and now that I am a huge devotee of the Christopher Kimball consortium of test kitchens – America’s Test Kitchen, Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country. I have the PVR set to catch the shows on PBS, I have print subscriptions to Cooks illustrated and Cooks Country, and website subscriptions to all three. The information on the sites is huge in volume, and very high in quality. If I am looking for a recipe, this is where I turn first before going into the office and starting to thumb thru the volumes of cookbooks I possess.

After exploring a number of options I settled on something new to me, a Lemon Buttermilk Sheet Cake. The tang and richness of the buttermilk, and a load of lemon flavor from both zest and juice looked to be just what I was in the mood for. The recipe is pretty straight forward, but unfortunately I can’t post it on the site here as it is of course copyrighted.  Sorry!

So after carefully following the recipe, this is the finished product:

Fast forward a few hours, and it is time to try it out.  Wow… With both the both lemon juice and lemon zest giving flavour to the cake, the punch of lemon was really nice. Then there is the glaze for the top that contains lemon juice, and a sugar topping to be sprinkled over the glaze that is a mix of sugar and zest.

The recipe, as with most things I have made from the Cooks Empire, was bang on. The lemon flavour was perfect, the glaze and sugar on the top divine. This is my new favorite cake, and my Chief Food Taster is in complete agreement.

This is not really surprising as they employ very well-funded test kitchens, so each recipe is the final result of very exhaustive testing. If you are interested in learning about cooking, the recipes also include an article that details what went on during the testing, what worked, what didn’t, and what they came up with in the end. Very often there is detailed information on the reasons why something worked or didn’t, and for me anyway that is the best way to learn. I highly recommend a subscription to the websites, it will be money very well spent if you wish to expand your culinary horizons.

In the same vein, I also highly recommend Alton Browns two cook books, ‘Just here for the Food’ and ‘Just here for more Food’. These books followed up his series ‘Good Eats’ which unfortunately has been squirreled away by the Food Network so that they can feed us the current crop of game show garbage that is more mind-numbing than useful or entertaining. Anyway, that is a rant  subject for another time…

Well, I hope you have all had a great weekend, and that the week coming up is a good one for you!

Until later…

Scott