a farewell to fruit.

Well, it appears that summer is over. While technically the seasons do not make the switch till further into the school year, it is clear to me that days of lying lazily on the beach have past. Now I must focus my attention to college applications and unhealthy amounts of homework, leaving my lovely summer fruits behind me. Fortunately, I have two summery birthday cakes to post so I may celebrate summer vicariously through them. The first belonged to my mother, who requested the raspberry-marsala cake that I've made many times before. The second was my brothers, who surprised me with his sophisticated taste with a request for lemon cake with raspberry garnish.

(As a side note, sorry for the picture quality, these were taken at night and I had to toy around with them in iphoto, with less than successful results.)

The raspberry cake comes from epicurious, and is available here. The frosting, meanwhile, is from AllRecipes, available here. I have used both recipes many times in the past and LOVE them both, the cake is extremely moist with a completely unique taste (not overly sweet with a marsala slap) and the frosting is the perfect consistency, with not too much sugar.

The next cake was one of the more ambitious cakes I've ever set out to make: lemon layer cake with classic vanilla frosting. Alright, so maybe not so ambitious, but the recipes were rather nit-picky.

The recipes for both the cake and the frosting came from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. Admittedly I've never eaten at the Magnolia Bakery, though this book makes me want to! (A side-note though, are their buttercream frostings so unbearable sweet in real life? Because I have made their buttercream frosting with half of the sugar called for and I had to throw the cake out it was so sweet.)

So there it is. Goodbye summer. While I am always a little sad to say goodbye to summer, I must admit that I am excited for this year to begin. This is my last year in high school, the last year before I become a legal adult, and admittedly this scares me a bit. But I feel that I will be ready to move on when the time comes, away from high school, from my family, from Massachusetts. But I am beginning to realize that I will be ready when the time comes, and cooking has become a factor in this realization. I love to cook, and it was only this past summer that I really realized it. It's cheesy, I know, but having the responsibility of cooking dinner for my family multiple times a week this past summer has made me feel that I will be ready when the time comes to live on my own, that if I'm scared or lonely, at least I won't starve.

But for now, for this last year, I will let my mother make me pancakes in the morning, as long as I can make her dinner at night. And I'll face winter and my lack of precious fruits, knowing that next summer their taste will mean something different to me. Goodbye my precious raspberries, see you next summer!