- Mike Sula
- Buttermilk lemon (upside-down) cake
I’ve requested the same simple birthday cake every year since I was teenager. It’s a recipe from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a buttermilk lemon cake that my mom clipped and slightly modified. It’s nothing elaborate—just a dense yellow cake adorned with lemon glaze that soaks into the crumb over a few days, rendering the outer edges something weirdly akin to a crispy lemon fudge and leaving the interior core dense and moist but still cakelike.
It wasn’t my birthday this weekend, but it was Mother’s Day, and I had to contribute something to the Peterson Garden Project‘s bake sale (an organization you should support if you support growing your own food). So I (i.e., the missus) contributed a cake and a half to the sale, reserving half for our own selfish purposes. An interesting development occurred. We failed to turn the first cake right-side up after removing it from the pan and glazed it on the bottom, where the uneven surface allowed for deeper penetration of syrupy goodness. Compared to a proper right-side-up cake, there was no question that the first was superior.
Think this cake doesn’t look so special? Consider the fact that we dropped it off at the bake sale on Friday, and all slices were gone by Sunday. Recipe after the jump: