I was recently diagnosed with a rare blood disease. It sounds really intimidating, but there are several episodes of House and at least one Hollywood movie about it. If you’re going to get pinned with an incurable disease, at least its something glamourous, right? Anyway, the long and short of it is that every once in a while you get some belly pains and the extent of the medical advice thats been given to me has boiled down to “EAT CARBS”. Now I can feel totally justified to roll my eyes at all the bread-shamers out there while enjoying some guilt free indulgences.

I’m not typically a huge cake fan (I know, I’m a monster), but the balding female nutritionist I was sent to told me to try incorporating more sweets and pizza into my diet, so hey, doctor’s orders. Like most ladies my age, I have a pinterest and know my way around a search for “rustic cake.” All of the lemon cakes that caught my eye took me back to the same recipe, so we decided to use that as the base.

We had to double the recipe to make three 6″ layers. I separated half of the advised lemon zest and grabbed some rosemary and infused the olive oil in an ISI. You’ll want to discard the zest and rosemary after infusing, they’ll tend to lack much flavor. The result was brighter, if not a little subtle. Probably would have benefited from leaving the ingredients to mingle longer or started by infusing into alcohol and mixing that with the olive oil.

The recipe we started from seemed a little fussy, but the batter texture ended up beautifully fluffy.

We ditched the recommended glaze and took some inspiration from the frosting on cinnamon rolls we made for a recent family brunch (they were great, a recipe you should definitely try). I used a block of cream cheese and a 6 oz. container of creme fraiche. Use the whisk attachment to combine those with half a cup of powdered sugar. I tend to err on the side of less sweet, so you might want to add more sugar for a less tangy frosting.

The cake was dense and moist without being overly sweet. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have eaten enough of the icing in the process to cure you from wanting to indulge in more than a small slice, but your coworkers will thank you tomorrow. Safety warning: I can’t say for sure which of these flowers are safe for human consumption, but judging by the amount of times in my life I’ve been told not to eat berries off of bushes I’m going to assume that some of these are not.