Lemon bread

Ingredients:

• 6 tablespoons butter or margarine, softened
• 1 cup light brown sugar, packed
• 2 eggs, beaten
• ¼ cup sour cream or yogurt
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1½ teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

• 1/3 cup superfine sugar
• Juice of 1 lemon

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease an 8½-inch loaf pan. Cream butter and brown sugar. Beat in eggs and mix well. Add sour cream and zest, beat until smooth. In separate bowl combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Add dry ingredients to the wet, mix well. Fold in nuts. Spoon batter into pan, bake for about 50 minutes. Remove from oven and make holes in the top with a toothpick. Dissolve glaze sugar in lemon juice and pour onto the loaf while still warm. Cool for 15 minutes in the pan, then on a rack completely.

Yield: 1 loaf
Source: Paraphrased from Allrich, Cooking By Moonlight
Use for: Imbolc

Pagan recipes

Jesus came to me in a dream and told me to fight for my country and to bake. Well, at least I did one of those things with my life. I work in a bakery on 57th Street. It's a tough time for a baker these days. Too many underpaid Polish folks moving to the area, too much competition. But my mother always said that everyone deserves an equal opportunity.

I've been baking ever since I was real little, but I've never had anything happen to me like what happened yesterday. A guy walks into my bakery and asks me if I'd bake his loaf of lemon bread. I say no, I only bake my own bread, your bread will probably contaminate my ovens, and if you got a problem, you can call the Po. So he does. And I'm sitting there with this man holding this loaf of what I think is uncooked lemon bread and these two police officers interrogating me about what I'm hiding in my oven and why I won't bake his lemon bread. And then the man up and splits.

So the next day, the same man comes back, furious. Turns out, the man was a cop, and his loaf of lemon bread was a pound of heroin. He's all pissed, because he's getting locked up. He was trying to plant that loaf on me so he could meet his weekly quota of drug dealers, but instead, he got caught with it. So now he goes to prison. He's probably going to get raped in the ass by some tall black man, but you know, it's better him than me. So I say to him, you know, it's you're fault, you were the one being dishonest, and if you had your way, I'd be the one getting locked up. And the man spits in my face. Some of my customers see, and they try to pin him down, but I'm like, nah, let him go, so the man leaves to go see his momma for one last time before he goes behind bars. I mean, you know he was going to see his momma. A man like that never moves out. He's a leech.

Man, people will do anything to get ahead. Like my pa said, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it's better to be the one doing the eating than the one being eaten. That's part of the reason I became a baker. You get to do a lot of eating.

This story came to me at 2:00 AM last night, in a five minute flash. It demanded its release here. Don't blame me, blame it.