A Recipe

Usually, this is a space where I write about books. But, I bake a lot. Like, a lot a lot. There are a few things I can do without a recipe because I've done them often enough that I've essentially memorized the formula. But, yesterday, I wanted cake. Specifically, I wanted snack cake, but not chocolate or yellow or spice or applesauce or any of the usual square pan snack cake varieties. I wanted a citrus cake. But, I didn't want a loaf cake either, because they tend to be heavier than what I was looking for. Ultimately, I had to come up with my own recipe. I borrowed a lot from various snack cake recipes on the internet and in my cookbook stacks, so I'm in no way claiming that this is 100% original. It is, however, delicious and a recipe I will use again, which is the real reason I'm putting it here.

1 cup granulated sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) softened butter

Mush these together with a fork and then whip them up with a wooden spoon because, no, I don't have a stand mixer.

Add:

1 egg
3/4 teaspoon lemon extract
1/2 teaspoon orange extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whip it all together until it's creamy and delicious.

In a separate bowl, stir together:

1 to 1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Nutmeg and dried ginger to taste (I used about 1/4 teaspoon of each)

On the stove, heat until just warm:

1 cup buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon dried lemon peel
1/4 teaspoon dried orange peel

Alternate adding the flour mix and the buttermilk to the fluffy butter mixture until you have everything combined. Pour the batter into a greased and floured square or rectangular pan. Bake at 350F until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. (For the rectangular pan I used, this was about 35 minutes. The smaller the pan, the thicker the cake and the longer it may take.) Cool it in the pan for way longer than I did (at least 30 minutes, probably closer to an hour) and sprinkle with powdered sugar before cutting. If you're feeling fancy, you can make a glaze of lemon juice, powdered sugar, and water instead of using the powdered sugar. I'm not going to tell you how many servings this makes because it makes however many or few you feel you can get out of whatever pan you used. You can just eat it straight out of the pan with a fork, if that's what makes you happy. I wouldn't blame you one bit. It's pretty tasty cake.