Lemon Cake

 I don’t even care for cake that much, or maybe the word “cake” conjures up images of super market sheet cakes with sickly sweet icing served at birthday and office parties surrounded by a host of other fast and cheap foods.  But the March edition of Saveur magazine had a huge, sumptuous article and on sultry Southern cakes, one whole page showing off a larger than life slice of caramel cake, another red velvet cake, and so on.  The coffee table taunted me every time I walked by.  

Having nothing in particular to do on a lazy Sunday morning around 10:30, we decided to make a cake, which you’d think would be relatively easy.  Mix dry ingredients, set aside.  Mix wet ingredients.  Add dry ingredients in intervals to wet ingredients.  Bake.  Fairly straight forward, right?

Several hours and many, many lemons later, we realized that making a four layer cake with lemon curd / butter cream based icing is no small endeavor.  The process can be divided into several stages, which I outline below.  The below list is a lot simpler than the actual recipe, but the simplicity itself allows the sheer amount of effort to shine through.  Had we seen this before making the cake…well, we probably woulda still made it J  I have also provided a comparison of our original versus our revised Sunday plan, per “the Cake.”

ORIGINAL SUNDAY PLAN:  2 hours for cake making / 8 hours for video games.

REVISED SUNDAY PLAN: 8 hours for cake making / 2 hours for video games.

Basic Outline of Cake Making Activities:

•Make and bake the batter

•Cool the cake

•Make lemon curd

•Chill lemon curd

•Make icing

•Make syrup to accompany icing

•Cut cooled cake into halved sections

•Ice the cake

•Chill the cake

•EAT THE DAMN CAKE!!


SOURCES:
Recipe from Saveur Magazine:  Saveur's Lemon Layer Cake
Scientific Knowledge obtained from:  On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee

STEP ONE: THE BATTER
As the recipe outlines, "lemon infuses this layered masterpiece in three ways: zested into the batter, in a tart syrup that gets drizzled over the cakes, and in a thick lemon curd frosting."  Here, we started by zesting a tablespoon of lemon for the cake batter.

The next step is to cream butter and sugar together for the batter, adding the eggs one at a time.

I'm getting excited because I know that licking the beaters is soon to come.  Combine the flour mixture and vanilla/milk mixture in equal intervals.

First buttering and then flouring the baking vessels makes it easy to remove the cakes after baking.  Note that we don't have cake pans, so we improvised and used pie pans.  I don't think anyone noticed in the final product.

Almost ready for the oven!

Mr. Distressed is a dirty, dirty man.

STEP TWO: LEMON CURD
The lemon curd uses a cup of juice, so Mr. Distressed got to squeezing.  Notice the 12 (TWELVE!) egg yolks sitting in the background.  Those will also be going into the curd.

Lemon curd: sugar, corn flour, lemon zest, salt and eggs.

Most importantly: do NOT stop stirring!!

This is the beautiful, beautiful finished lemon curd product.  It made me want to make lemon curd tartlets.
We took the opportunity to take an hour walking tour of Clintonville on a gorgeous sunny winter day, to let the lemon curd chill before the next step.

STEP FOUR: LEMON SYRUP
This was after our third trip to the store...we kept realizing we hadn't bought enough lemons.  Laika helps out!   One of the lessons is to read your recipe carefully!!

Lemon Syrup: lemon juice and sugar heated on the stove.  The book is "On Food and Cooking:  the Science and Lore of the Kitchen," which we have found to be immensely interesting and helpful in understanding the science and reasoning behind processes in the kitchen.  This particular page explains the heating of syrups and what temperatures create what reactions.

STEP FIVE: ICING
The frosting:  a cup and a half of butter + lemon curd.  Very intense.

STEP SIX: CAKE ASSEMBLY
Halve each of the two cakes to create four layers.

In between each layer of cake, add not only icing, but also the tart lemon syrup.

In summation, we had a blast making this cake and learned a lot!  There were a few snafus, but overall the cake turned out quite tasty.  Incidentally, I realized while creating this post that I used 12 egg yolks for the lemon curd while the recipe only calls for 10, but that's not exactly a fatal error...it just made the cake a little bit richer.  This recipe is very involved and I would not recommend it for the beginning cook.  If you're looking for a weekend challenge though, this one definitely yields good results both in time spent creating as well as eating.