I have known my share of late bloomers.

But my Meyer lemons? Well, they sure take the cake — literally.

Usually at year’s end, I watch the oval green citrus on my dwarf backyard tree grow ever larger, then slowly start turning bright yellow before taking on a warm orangey-yellow hue by February.

Not so in 2020. For some odd reason, they stayed dark green beyond that winter. Moreover, they remained like that throughout the entirety of 2021, and into the first half of 2022.

Could it be that like the rest of us, they simply needed to chill during the worst of the pandemic? If so, who can blame them?

After their extended hibernation finally ended, I was more than ready to finally use them to full effect in — what else — this “Lemon Mint Cake (Gateâu au Citron et a la Menthe).”

The recipe is from “Gateâu: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes” (Scribner, 2022), of which I received a review copy.

It was written by James Beard Award-winning writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, who grew up in Paris and New York, and has been a food columnist for the Wall Street Journal for a dozen years.

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