The First Birthday of the Season

The apron is a gift from my friend Denise - it says, "You'll eat it. You'll eat it and you'll like it!"

September is the big birthday month in my family - it starts off with John's birthday, and then there's my niece's, mine, and Mary's all in a clump. When my dad was still with us we would celebrate my niece's, mine, and Mary's with him in a big quadruple birthday bash. Since mine was two days after his, I never had my own birthday - it was always shared. And since Mary's is the day after mine, I suppose my birthday will always be a shared experience, which is just how I like it.

Happy Birthday, John!

Yesterday was John's birthday and we celebrated it at my sister's house; she served up chile rellenos made with poblano chiles her husband grew in pots in their backyard. They were delicious but I seriously feel like I gained five pounds yesterday. I hadn't even planned on eating much for dinner because John and I also had lunch at Roppongi and I ate so many onion rings with wasabi aioli I really didn't need dinner.

I dream of cake!

I couldn't resist homemade, homegrown, homeserved chiles - who could? And of course there was cake made by yours truly. The cake was based on this recipe, which in turn was based on this. I used a mixture of Meyer and regular lemons because that was what I had and since John really, really likes lemon, I added lemon to both the cake batter and the frosting. The batter got the zest of two of the Meyers (they were small), and the frosting got the zest of one Meyer and two tablespoons of lemon/Meyer lemon juice in place of two T of water. I used every bit of the lemon curd between the layers, which was sort of overkill but I liked the idea of letting it drip down the outside and then frosting over it with the 7-minute frosting, which has enough body to cover something like that pretty completely. The resulting cake was very reminiscent of lemon merinque - delicious.