Meyer Lemon Coffee Cake

It really is hard to pass up a good sounding recipe with lemon as the star ingredient. I found this recipe on the Martha Stewart website and it read really well...it baked up even better!!!!! The cake is dense, the Meyer lemons add a nice sweet lemony flavor and the strudel topping is buttery and crunchy...I plan to take the topping and try it on another dessert just to see how it does...it really is wonderful.

As you can see it has wonderful eye appeal...looks like a coffee cake just waiting for a steaming mug of joe...

The recipe calls for about 10 Meyer lemons...5 lemons must be sliced paper thin...so I used my mandolin..a gift from my father many years ago...the mandolin is intimidating and I have a great deal of respect for it...it gives me shivers just thinking about the prospects of running into the blade at a high rate of speed...but you can't beat it for making wonderful paper thin slices...

A half of the batter is placed into a greased tube pan then half the lemon slices are piled on... you must simmer the sliced lemons in water twice and they must be cooled before using...a bit of time required but little skill is needed to do this...

After the last layer of lemons are placed the top of the cake it is covered in that delicious butter, brown sugar, flour strudel...


Once baked the cake is allowed to cool for 10 minutes you take the outer pan off...then the instructions for removing the cake from the tube reads like something I have never done before...place two large spatulas under the cake and lift it off and place it on the rack to cool...well easy said then done...due to the heaviness of the cake...this procedure was very very very tricky!!!!! I had to use one cake mover spatula (really big one that looks like a pizza peel) and then I doubled up on my spatulas for the other side and lifted...ohhh...the cake sagged at the seams and I was sure it was going to split in half...I lowered her back down...counted to three and tried again...once in the air...busting at the seams...no hands to spare...the tube would not drop off...sooooo with my chin I pushed down on it and it dropped onto the cooling rack just where the cake was suppose to go...not good...with an elbow I knocked the tube away...I believe all these shenanigans were called for, so as not to drop a single crumb of strudel...in the end it worked but this truly was on the trickiest cake from pan removals I have ever encountered.

Once cooled and the coffee was brewed...I totally forgot how hard it was to get this cake put the pan...one bite took all my "bad" memories away...simply delicious...

Excuse me while I have one more "little" slice...like the skinny girls say..."ohh just a little slice for me...no no even thinner than that please"

...uh huh...right...signing off with a mouth full...

Elizabeth