Well, apparently I am not the cook my mother was. I excitedly served Mark an after dinner piece of my mother's famous recipe
An old index card I found in her recipe box, in her own writing revealed the recipe
Mark 'You've got a long way to go to make your mother's lemon bread'
Me 'What's different?'
Mark 'Well, uh, the color, the texture, the lightness the taste, pretty much everything...'
Sigh. So if you are craving lemon bread I suggest you use google to look up a recipe, at least until I perfect this one. I'm thinking that although it said shortening, she may have actually used butter. And since there was a temperature but no time, perhaps I over cooked it. I may try again, or I may leave it as one of those sweet memories of my Mom.
5 comments:
I can sympathize. I have the recipe for my grandmother's fudge, and it never, ever comes out as good as she made it. Ever.
Thanks Francesca, nice to know I'm not alone....
Marcia - I might be the lemon juice that you used. Did you use fresh or bottled? I know, bottled....arrrgggg. However, they do have different tastes--try the opposite of the one you used. Shortening and butter, while both oils, do cause a recipe to function a bit differently. If you try butter and it doesn't quite work, I bet the shortening was right. Crisco makes a butter flavored shortening that you might want to try. I don't know how much time was spent on creaming the shortening and sugar together but to get fluffy, you might want to just let it cream for about 5 minutes. I'm not saying any of this will work, but it might be worth a try. I have tried many of my mom's and grandmother's recipes and sometimes I think they wrote things down but followed the recipe in their brains. :-)
Good luck,
Pamela
(Tucson, AZ)
Thanks Pam, I suspect there were some secrets only Mom knew, but I will keep trying. Real lemon juice by the way.
Hi Marcia - We have had this same recipe as a family favorite for about 50 years - ours uses butter, not shortening. You need to really bead the sugar and butter well, until fluffy. Also, we always poke some holes in the loaf as soon as it comes out of the oven, so when the lemon juice sugar mixture is poured on the hot loaf, it soaks down into the cake and makes it moist. Keep on trying!
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