Lemon cake: 3 minutes, 100 calories!

A couple weeks ago, my four-year-old decided it was my "betend buwtday." To celebrate, she served me "betend wemon sauce cake."

And then I wanted real lemon sauce cake. But I knew I didn't want a whole lemon cake in my house, so I tracked down a microwave lemon cake recipe. The original recipe called for 3Tbsp of oil, and one commenter had trouble with the cake turning out oily. So I cut calories and fat by replacing half that oil with applesauce.

The recipe:

3 tablespoons all purpose flour
3 tablespoons confectioners sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tablespoons canola oil
1 1/2 tablespoons unsweetened applesauce
3 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice (I squeezed 1/3 of a medium lemon)
1/4 teaspoon lemon zest
splash of vanilla (oops, I forgot this!)

Mix the dry ingredients, then add the wet ingredients. The lemon juice will probably react with the baking soda and begin bubbling, resulting in a fluffy pancake-like batter.

Divide the batter between two ramekins and microwave. The original recipe suggested 45 seconds and that a full minute was too much. However, even after a minute, the edges of my cake were totally liquid. I ended up microwaving for 1:30.

The original recipe used a lemon juice + 2Tbsp confectioners' sugar glaze, but I used some leftover blackberry syrup. I'd also wanted to use this beautiful jar of lemon curd I have, but after the results, I decided it wasn't worth opening the jar.

The result was a little gummy at first and didn't release from my bowls well (even though they were greased and floured)--hence the :S on the plate.

However, after it had a few minutes to set, it tasted pretty darn good! I let my four-year-old try a bite and she insisted I share my cake with her. The bright flavor of lemon—and the word "deewicious!" from my daughter—totally brightened my day.

Each cake is 95 calories. Woot!

Have you tried microwave cakes?

Pick your own berry syrup

Last week, my family and I went berry picking at McBride's Briar Patch. We'd never been there before, and we were really impressed: they had buckets for you to use, ropes to tie them around your waist, little metal buckets for the kids, and bags and boxes to carry your berries home. The owner was so nice: he showed us how and where to pick and knew everything about the berries.

My 4-year-old was our best picker! She filled her entire bucket all by herself. All together, we picked 3 pounds of raspberries and 1/2 a pound of blackberries. The owner told us that since it was so hot, we should be sure to put our berries to use that day.

So that night, Ryan and I got to work turning our berries into berry syrup with this recipe from PickYourOwn.org (you can also find local PYO farms here!).

First, rinse and mash the berries. Then boil the mash.

Now strain the boiled mash (discard the pulp). You can strain it again through cheesecloth, but we found this actually pretty difficult because the cheesecloth clogged. If you have a good way to do this in volume, you might be able to let it sit overnight to get very clear juice. We settled for not-so-clear juice.

Next, add the sugar. You'll want to use right around one and a half times the amount of juice. So if you end up with 3 cups of juice, you'll use a little more or less than 4.5 cups of sugar.

The raspberry juice is still waiting, but I went ahead and made the blackberry syrup.

Bring the sugar and juice to a boil, and boil for one minute.

You can pour the juice into jars for canning, or directly into containers to keep in the fridge if you want to use it right away.

My blackberry syrup was really good, especially considering how tart the berries were. However, after a couple days in the fridge, it was almost as thick as jam! I microwaved it a little to help it flow better.

What's your favorite kind of berry?