I have been busy lately with work and studying for (and passing!) my PHR exam, but I did manage to find some time to make a Bundt cake…using my Chrysanthemum mold for the first time.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Reactions consisted mostly of “Wow! Is it a pineapple?” Maybe that’s because I did a glazed lemon cake and it was yellow…but it looked and tasted lovely. Special gratitude to my mother for cleaning the pan for me while I was asleep (I made it at her house…normally I don’t have elves cleaning my dirty pans).
While making the cake I got to use my mother’s lemon squeezer. It worked so perfectly I asked her where she got it and she said it came with her from our old house and that she thought she sent away for it in the mail “years ago”. This prompted me to look for her model online, and sure enough, it was made by Sunkist. I tracked down a photo of it.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
This is all you need (but check out some of those other crazy things in that photo…what is that…a lemon spigot!?). Citrus is a big component of the cakes I make and I have just been squeezing my fruits into bowls and then picking out the seeds. Not very smart when there are a vast array of lemon squeezers out there.
The oldest known lemon squeezers were found in Turkey and date back to the early 1700′s. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office lists over 200 patents for lemon squeezers, the majority of which were registered between 1880 and 1910, which I will now refer to as The Golden Years of Lemon Squeezing Ease. The are pretty simple things. You push down on a lemon to force the juice and pulp from the rind; and the juice passes through the sieve. You can then obtain the maximum amount of juice the lemon has to offer for your baking, and the rind is still fine for zesting. Because the lemon juice is very acidic, the squeezer can only be made of acid-resistant materials. Lemons are jerks like that, but that’s what makes them lemons.
Like my first car, a 1990 Toyota Corolla named Doris that ruined me for all cars since.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
