Week 3: Lemon Buttercream Cake

Friday was my friend Talia’s birthday and this was her cake. Talia works with me and also makes beautiful, handmade jewelry under her Piedra Studio brand. You should check it out.

Talia and I love to muse about our favorite things, which in no particular order include cruising, real estate, home shopping, reality television, antique jewelry, faux fur… I could on forever. But something we differ on is preferred cake flavors. As you probably deduced from my birthday Chocolate Bacon Cake, I prefer fatty, heavy, chocolatey cakes. Talia prefers light, elegant, sophisticated flavors. And that’s why I was more than happy to bake her this Lemon Buttercream Birthday Cake, because I want my 52 cakes to have variety and this is a cake I’d never choose for myself.

Some lemon cake recipes call for store-bought lemon curd. I’ve noticed that even the recipes that call for homemade lemon curd include reviews from home bakers who used store-bought lemon curd to save time. So I planned to use store-bought lemon curd for this cake until Talia went to pick some up for me and realized that they include egg yolks, which when you think about how long the jars of lemon curd sit on grocery store shelves, can be kind of gross. So I opted for homemade lemon curd for this cake. And while it’s easy to make, it does need to sit for a couple hours before being used so I made it first.

What is lemon curd? I can’t think of any other way to describe it than lemon jelly. It’s very sweet and tart.

Lemon zest, fresh lemon juice, corn starch and butter are combined in a medium saucepan. Then beaten egg yolks get mixed in. It requires a lot of whisking. It’s a good thing I’ve been taking Pilates classes. Once the hot lemon curd is thoroughly mixed, I poured it into a bowl to cool a bit.

Look how smooth and delightful that looks? After it cooled for about 10 minutes, I covered the bowl in plastic wrap, pressing the plastic wrap directly on top of the lemon curd so it wouldn’t form a “skin” (bleck!). Then I popped it into the fridge to cool completely for a couple of hours.

The next step was the cake. Here’s my mise en place.

As you can probably tell, the ingredients are pretty simple and the cake itself contains no lemon. I figured the lemon curd filling and the lemon buttercream frosting would be enough lemon, so this is a basic, white cake. The first step was to cream the room temperature butter with the sugar until it was light and fluffy.

Then the eggs were beaten in with the vanilla extract. The final step was to mix in the flour and milk in small increments. I chose to use a spatula to mix the final ingredients together because I didn’t want to over mix the batter. This is what it looked like when all combined.

Then it was time to christen my new cake pans. When baking my Chocolate Bacon Cake in my 9″ pans, I realized the pans had slanted sides, making them not ideal for stacked layer cakes. So I treated myself to a set of two round 8″ x 1.5″ nonstick pans (although they appear to be 2″ high), which happened to be on sale at Sur La Table. Score! I also utilized my handy dandy cake pan strips, which are dampened just before they’re wrapped around the cake pans. This was my second time using them and I definitely notice a difference in how much less the layers dome up as they bake, making them a must-have tool for layer cakes. I also lined the prepared pans with parchment rounds.

In hindsight, this should have been my first clue that there wasn’t enough batter for 2 full layers. You’ll see the batter doesn’t come up very high in the pan. But I thought, oh, they’ll rise, it will be fine! The cakes baked 25 minutes in my oven. Here they are flipped out of their pans.

Ya see? they’re a little bit thin. And the recipe I planned to make required that each layer be cut in half horizontally, resulting in four layers. So I hemmed and hawed about whether or not I should bother with the four layers.

And then I distracted myself by making the lemon buttercream frosting. One thing I learned is that lemons should not be zested ahead of time. When I zested some lemon to make the lemon curd, I thought I’d just zest some extra so I wouldn’t have to zest more for the lemon buttercream, but when it came time to make the buttercream, about 90 minutes later, the extra zest had dried up and I had to zest some more. Lesson learned.

This is really just a basic buttercream recipe that uses lemon juice and lemon zest instead of vanilla extract.

Then my mind wandered back to the dilemma about the layers I thought maybe I ought to just keep the two layers and fill the middle with the lemon curd. But I reasoned the lemon curd wasn’t voluminous enough to really support the second layer. So I pushed on and very carefully split each of these short layers into two. I’m not going to lie; it was scary.

Then it was assembly time. I recently picked up a baker’s turntable at my local baker’s supply shop. It only cost about $12. Since this cake was coming to work with me the next morning, I also picked up a cake board and box. I highly recommend these professional tools because it makes transporting the cake to its final destination much easier and you don’t have to schlep a cake keeper back home. Also, it makes the cake look REALLY professional and, in my opinion, expensive! I covered the cardboard cake board in foil, shiny side out.

Something I learned from watching hours and hours of cake shows on television and instructional videos online is that a dab of buttercream in the middle of the cake board helps “glue” the bottom layer to the surface. Then I placed the bottom layer on top of the board on the turntable. And onto that went the first layer of lemon curd.

So far, so good. Then I placed the second layer on top. And on top of that went a thin layer of lemon buttercream and that was when the first layer of lemon curd started to ooze out, which would be cool if this was a rustic layer cake. But no, this cake was going to get a smooth coat of lemon buttercream on top! So I did my best to scrape it away with my offset spatula.

On top went the third layer and on top of that went the second layer of lemon curd. And the last step was the fourth cake layer. You can see how thin the 2nd and third layers are.

Now is when I should have popped the layers into the fridge for 30 minutes or so to set. But it was getting late and that smart step hadn’t occurred to me so I went ahead and frosted the whole thing. And this part took forever. I was trying to achieve just the right amount of frosting – not too much, not too little. And I wanted it to be as smooth as possible. But as hard as I tried, some of the layers seemed to still be visible through the buttercream. I figured I’d just cover it up with some thin, sliced lemon.

And to cope with the not-so-smooth top, I used a $2 tool, also from the baker’s supply shop. It looks like a triangle. Each side has different sized teeth. I swirled the medium sized teeth side around the top to achieve the ridges. In the pic below you can see what I mean about the layers peeking through the buttercream on the upper, lefthand side of the cake.

When I went to place the cake in its box, I realized the cake weighed… a lot. I worried there was too much filling. But luckily, it made it to the office in one piece and my arms did not buckle under the immense weight.

Here’s how it looked after it was served.

The interesting thing was the middle layers were so thin, they kind of jelled together with all the lemon curd and lemon buttercream. The cake was a little dense and not quite as light and fluffy as I’d hoped. I really can’t give the taste a fair verdict since, as I mentioned earlier, I’m not  lemon cake kind of person. But the lemon-cake-eating people who tried it seemed to like it, so I guess it turned out alright.