Today we are keeping it short, SOUR, and sweet with our Citrus Cake Edition! This week I celebrated my 31st birthday and all week I had the pleasure of eating and making cakes. For my birthday Zikki and I went a picked citrus right off the tree in my grandmother’s garden. With loads of citrus in the back of our car, we ran home to make our favorite cakes of the season: EVOO Citrus Sumac Semolina Cake and Blueberry and Lemon Pound Cake…yo! Delish. They were gone within a few hours.

Today: All about Citrus!

1. 🍊EVOO Citrus Sumac Semolina Cake Recipe

2. 🍋 Blueberry and Lemon Pound Cake Recipe

3. 📜 History + Origin: Citrus

If you’ve never done it…there really is nothing like picking your own lemons and oranges, at their peak sweetness. I swear one lemon here has the strength of 3 lemons back home in New York!

🍊 EVOO Citrus Sumac Semolina Cake

Apart from being seasonal and sporting an incredible texture due to the semolina flour and the sumac, this EVOO Citrus Sumac Semolina Cake is olive oil based which makes it dairy free. 🙌🏻 After we baked the cake we prepared and poured a bright pink blood orange syrup on top to add another layer of zing and to help retain that perfect pound cake moisture!

🍋 Pistachio and Blueberry Lemon Cake

What is a better way to start your week than with a fresh warm Pistachio and Blueberry Lemon Cake fresh out of the oven enjoyed with a good cup of coffee, time with my girls and just a moment to slow it down. I would say that equals a GREAT birthday.

For this cake, I was inspired by a recipe I saw on Keren Agam's blog. I really loved the use of a flour blend consisting of ground pistachios, semolina, and white flour which really takes it to a whole new level. It gives a wonderful color and texture to the cake! I also wanted to enjoy the blueberries in every slice of the cake so I spread them in between a few layers of the cake batter. I couldn't be happier with the result. Moist, sweet, yet balanced green-ish cake decorated with blue dots. Such a perfect bite to start your week with!

📜 History + Origin: Citrus

The various species of Citrus are all believed to be native to the subtropical and tropical regions of Asia and the Malay Archipelago, and to have spread from there to other sections of the world. Citrus has been cultivated through the ages, and in some pretty remote places.

The history of the spread of citrus reads like a romance novel. Even in very early times, the appearance of both the beautiful tree and fruit attracted the attention of travelers and received mention in their written narratives. However, no matter how loved citrus was, the spread of the citrus tree from one part of the world to another was actually quite slow.

Around 310 B.C. the first member of the citrus family was introduced to Europe. For several hundred years this was the only citrus fruit known. A tile floor mosaic found in a Roman villa near Tusculum indicates that lemons and limes were becoming known in Italy. Another mosaic in Rome, this one designed about 330 A.D. for Constantine the Great, indicates that, at least in Italy, oranges and lemons were being grown.

It is now known that the sweet orange had been grown for many centuries in China and had apparently reached an advanced stage of cultivation before it became well known to Europeans. Han Yen-chih, wrote in 1178 A.D. and translated into English in the Monograph on the Oranges of Wên-chou, Chekiang, 1923, named and described some twenty-seven varieties of sweet, sour, and mandarin oranges. He also described citrons, kumquats, and the trifoliate orange and discussed nursery methods, grove management, and diseases.

Of course, other areas with temperate climates started cultivating citrus as well and created their own citrus gardens. Areas such as Spain and other tropical regions did their part to bring citrus to many lands, including the Americas. Through exploration and conquest, sweet juicy citrus found its way around the world.