Confession time.
I have never liked “lemon flavor” breads or baked goods. Lemon Merengue, sure. But cookies and other “cakes” that are supposed to taste like lemon? Blech. So you can imagine my surprise and internal anger, when, during the cake-cutting-and-smashing-into-eachothers-mouth at my wedding, resulted in me tasting lemon flavoring in the cake! The cake was gorgeous, and was supposed to alternate layers of chocolate cake, white cake, chocolate cake, white cake. Now the chocolate portion was delish, but somewhere along the line, someone missed the memo of NO LEMON, and added lemon ALL UP IN THAT BEAST of what was supposed to be plain ol’ “white cake”. Needless to say, we did not save and eat the top layer of our cake on our 1 year anniversary.
Fast Forward 10 years (holy cow, we’ve been married almost 10 years?!).
I actually don’t gag at the thought of lemon in my cookies and cakes anymore. Now, I will actually intentionally put lemon in my baked goods! Who is this person I’ve become?! I honestly don’t know, but I can say that the only thing that has changed is the “lemon” that is used in the baking. I truly believe this makes all the difference. I’m sorry friends, but if you are using bottled “lemon juice”, or lemon extract from the store, I’m here to tell you it’s just not the same. Those of us who normally hate lemon “flavor”, can tell the difference.
Since we have cut out most of the processed things we consume, I now use real lemons (gasp!) or pure lemon essential oil.
And I’m telling you, the result is nothing short of delicious. In fact, I use my lemon essential oil in recipes quite often, and they are always very well-received by all in the Crunchy Mountain household…especially my Lemon Squash Poppy Seed Bread!
Okay, okay, I’ll shut up. After all, you came here for a recipe…not to hear me ramble on about my weird lemon “issues”.
This recipe for the Whole Wheat Raspberry Lemon Muffins (minus the Essential Oil part) came straight from one of my favorites! 100 Days of Real Food: Fast & Fabulous
– check it out!
– check it out![amd-yrecipe-recipe:7]
Here are a few pics of Little Miss T, for attention. Isn’t she cute? Oh yeah, and she digging the muffins. 😉
