Emergency Room Cake

There are two kinds of people (well, maybe more but please bear with me. After all, this is a baking, not a psychology, blog).

One type of person thinks that lightening will strike them, that they will be a passenger on the one airplane that crashes this year, etc.  The other type assumes that everything will be fine.

I tend to fall into the latter group, but sometimes am persuaded otherwise.  That's what happened a few weeks ago when I awoke with a painful cramp in my calf.  The pain got worse over the next few days, but I assumed it was a muscle pull that would get better eventually.  However, several people whose opinions I normally trust (including DH who "diagnosed" me from the Bahamas) convinced me that I might have deep vein thrombosis.  "At your age, I'd be worried about a blood clot," said Josh, DD's charming (really!) boyfriend.

So off I went to the emergency room, but not before enlisting the assistance of a doctor friend whose efforts both reassured me and made my ER experience easy --- a piece of cake, if you will.  (Of course, I didn't have a blood clot.)

This is a long way to get to the lemon cake pictured above, but I wanted to thank the doctor and what better way than with a cake?

I didn't have a lot of time, or room for failure, so I decided to go with a more modern recipe.  At first, I planned to make the Persian Love Cake (below) but I knew that the high humidity on cake-baking day would torpedo any chance of success.

I settled on the Glazed Lemon Cake from the first Silver Palate Cookbook,  c. 1978, which I thought would guarantee a delicious result.  But, it was just ok (though the doctor declared it a "masterpiece") and I felt obligated to embellish it with a lemon curd (basically lemons, sugar and egg yolks cooked to make a custard) and some fresh berries.

From now on, I'm sticking to pre-1960 recipes and ignoring the advice of well-meaning friends.