This Quick Cake Is the Best Way to Use All Your Berries

New York Times

2 days ago

Summer is for romance, and this year I had the fling of a lifetime with the Hollywood Farmers' Market.
Recipe: Lemon Berry Quick Cake
What a pleasure it is to be seduced by fruit in high-summer Los Angeles, when the sun brings a swelter, the sky is cheeky blue and the clouds are as wispy as your hair when you dare let it down, which I did, often, in response to the sky and the berries. Oh, those berries. First, their colors tease you, maybe encourage a primal version of self, eyes darting from blues to jewel reds to purples. Then their plumpness and shape — some pretty as a picture, others ugly as only fruit can get away with — give you something to linger on. All of it signals a possible level of taste, sweetness and texture that makes you hold your breath, and maybe you hold it in for so long that it lets itself out in an unexpected whistle.
These things, followed by an insatiable urge to face-plant into a table of them, might come over you as they did me recently. And although I managed most of my urges, the willingness to make a fool of myself in my own daydream, specifically nose-diving into a smattering of neon-sweet Pakistani mulberries, kept me coming back for more every Sunday, my Southern heart getting lost in this overwhelming Eden known as California.
I mostly behaved, parsing out my purchases of citrus and plums, but berries are perhaps the most fleeting flirtation. As such, the only proper response is to buy as much as seems fair to the person behind you in line and eat most of them fresh. Then you should take what's left and bake this easy, delightful, toss-some-berries-in olive-oil cake that accentuates how alive it all made you feel.
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