Hell’s kitchen!

A few weeks ago, I experimented with two new “recipes” that led to disasters. The first one was to try to cook a lemon pie without using the lemon zest, as I am highly suspicious of the lethal contents of any commercial lemon zest, even biological ones. Unfortunately, the main reason why zest is involved in the lemon pie is to freeze the curd into something decent, yellow and nice-looking. So the result was a semi-liquid brownish and buttery substance sitting on top of the crust near which no one in the family (but me) wanted to be  caught! I did eat most of it… The second disaster involved figs that grow profusely at the back of my garden at this period of the year. I tried to make a fig cake from the six figs I had gathered earlier in the day and could not find a proper recipe in my cookbooks, hence mixed a dried fig cake recipe with a pear cake recipe. Unfortunately, fresh figs are producing much more juice and the outer core of the cake took forever to bake, with its inside unable to dry. My kids had a valiant go at it for a few slices but part of the cake did end up in the bin as well!