Around mid-July, I became obsessed with the idea of lemon and blueberry in baked goods. I know exactly what sparked it: I was driving home from work in Tucson and stopped off at a bakery for a blueberry muffin. I had some lemon Frut2O in my possession, and spent the drive drinking this nondescript blueberry muffin and my lemon water, marvelling about how much better that muffin tasted right after I took a drink, or how the aftertaste was just more blueberry-ish after taking a swig.

But I had a huge problem: nowhere in my rented kitchen was a muffin tin, or even a bread pan.

Woe!

So I waited, considering my options for breads and muffins and what would do me better.

Ultimately, I decided on a blueberry-lemon bread recipe found on epicurious, and just had to wait until I happened to have everything I needed to bake it.

As luck would have it, this coincided the same weekend I was gifted with a ginormous mutant zucchini, and I had to put the bread aside for a few days to deal with the squash. But now, it's 4am, and I couldn't sleep -- too jazzed up. I was hungry, and my sister (my roommate) is gone for the rest of the week, called into work unexpectedly. So I decided to make that blueberry-lemon bread to calm down, and while it baked away, unpacked and cleaned my apartment a bit. (As sad as it is that I've been here 17 days now and am not fully unpacked, but truthfully: I unpacked what I originally brought, and went to my parents' to pick up some more things they'd been holding for me, stashed in the room that used to be mine.)


Anyway: this is brightly lemon, with juicy blueberries. It's a great, sunshiney bread, good for a raining morning like today.

One of my favorite desserts in the summer is lemon cream pie. It's bright and cheery, and nothing goes better with the plethora of fresh berries than the tangy flavor of lemon. Sometimes, I like to mix things up and rather than serve berries on the side, smear some berry puree on the bottom of the pie crust, before pouring in the filling.

My stomach is growling just thinking about it!

A side note: this isn't a last-minute kind of pie. With all the resting and setting time, there's about 9 hours of resting time, and probably an hour or so of baking time (though you could bake the pie shell while working on the lemon curd).