The Essense of a Name

I recently had a group of people that I lived with in a large cooperative house in college to my house.  More on that later.  I had been traveling like crazy and not really able to attend to cooking for all these wonderful people who agreed to come to Iowa (a place where none of them live nor anywhere near where we all lived together).  My spouse was on top of that aspect, planning a meal that he could make single-handedly, but he left the desserts to me, and I relied on my well stocked freezer.

The second night I pulled out one of my favorite cakes, a lemon cake.  One of my wonderful guests, Spoon, suddenly asked if this was the cake that my blog is named after, and indeed it is.  How funny that I did not even think of that.  Part of it is because what I hoped to capture in the name and in the blog is the homemade aspect of my life.  I am not living off the grid by any means, nor off the land, but I do like to make things, and I like things that other people made.  I picked the lemon cake because it is tart and sweet at the same time, just like life.  It is the cake that my friend Ivy and I made for my eldest son's wedding cake.  It is a cake that can sustain a blog.  And a marriage.  I recently passed my 2,000th blog post, and only now do I reflect on the name.