In Search of the Perfect Lemon Layer Cake

October 1, 2017 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

Ahhhh the lemon layer cake. You’d think the combination of cake, lemon curd, and frosting would be relatively simple, right? Well you’d be wrong, especially if you’re me. I’ve been on the search for the perfect lemon layer cake for almost as long as I’ve been writing this blog – as evidenced by my previous three attempts (and a fourth here, if you count a crêpe cake) – but I have yet to find The One.

So this summer, I tried again – twice. First, I made Nate yet another lemon birthday cake using Bon Appetit’s Lemon Curd Layer Cake recipe, which sounded absolutely spectacular with its whipped-cream-and-lemon-curd frosting. Things started out well with a solid lemon curd recipe and a beautifully fluffy, spongy, light cake recipe, but the frosting let me down (why does this always happen?!). According to the picture accompanying the recipe, it should have been stiff enough to pipe, but it definitely wasn’t, and it – and the lemon curd filling – ended up running all over the place. To save the cake, after I filled and stacked the layers (which were totally crooked!), I had to chill it with a skewer down the middle to hold everything in place long enough to solidify and hold its shape.

As a last resort I added some gelatin to the remaining whipped cream frosting – which is a common way of reinforcing whipped cream – only I overestimated the amount of gelatin and ended up with bouncy whipped cream that set as I spread it on the cake (NOT IDEAL), and the rosettes I piped around the edge of the cake to hold in the lemon curd topping ended up sliding off because they also set before they could stick. So all in all, not a slam dunk, but still pretty delicious – especially the cake itself, which included lemon curd in the batter and was definitely the winner in this particular recipe.

Take two was a Lemon-Blackberry Cake with Lemon Buttercream adapted from the Flour cookbook by Joanne Chang, which I made to take to a family gathering. I doubled the recipe, and the resulting cake weighed about thirty pounds and included over a dozen eggs and an entire forest of lemons! I had high hopes for this recipe, but sadly, it did not deliver for me.

The lemon curd recipe was good (and it made a ton) but cake itself was a bit too dense for my liking and it didn’t soak up even half of the lemon syrup it was supposed to. It was the frosting that was the real disaster though: a hybrid of Swiss meringue frosting (which uses egg whites) and French meringue frosting (which uses egg yolks), it was the soupiest mess I’ve ever dealt with – even worse than the Swiss meringue cream cheese frosting misadventure of several years ago. It WOULD NOT emulsify or thicken properly, and I literally worked on it for hours, using every trick I know – chilling, resting, beating, stirring – you name it, I tried it. I was taking process pictures as I went with the intent to post the recipe, but the frosting was so demoralizing that I deleted them all. Eventually I just held my breath and crossed my fingers and went for it with frosting the cake, chilling it as often as I could during assembly and surprisingly, I was somehow able to pipe a border around the top of the cake. After all that effort for a less-than-perfect result, I sort of hated this cake, even though in the end it tasted pretty good (albeit a little dry) and the family all appreciated it

So, after all this, I have come to some decisions. The next lemon layer cake I will probably use the cake layers from the Bon Appetit version, either the lemon curd from Flour or Tartine’s lemon cream (so good!), and a regular Swiss meringue buttercream frosting – unless anyone has a brilliant, perfect lemon layer cake recipe to recommend, in which case, I’m all ears! Sadly, any experimenting will have to wait a while though, as I’m currently nursing a fractured left elbow and banged-up right arm from a mountain biking spill two weeks ago, and any mixing, beating, kneading, rolling, piping and other lovely baking actions are currently off limits – but I can still drool over lemon layer cake recipes

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Melissa Clark’s Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream

February 14, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 10 Comments

Melissa Clark's Devil's Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream | Korena in the Kitchen I’ve been trying to write this post about this Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream for three days now but seem to be experiencing writer’s block, so in an attempt to get something down on the page so that I can share it with you in time for Valentine’s Day (because nothing is more appropriate than chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day), I give you the following Reasons You Should Make This Cake:

1) It has not one but two kinds of frosting: Swiss meringue buttercream filling laced with vanilla and cracked black pepper (yes, pepper), and the most divine whipped chocolate fudge frosting on the outside. Black pepper might sound like an odd thing to pair with classic chocolate and vanilla, but it’s not odd – it’s very, very good.

Melissa Clark's Devil's Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream | Korena in the Kitchen

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The “Why Bother” Cake

August 19, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 23 Comments

Since I was about 7 or 8, my Mum has had food sensitivities to wheat and dairy. This was over 20 years ago, before being gluten-free and drinking soy or almond milk were “mainstream” like they are today, and food choices back then for pretty much everything were extremely limited. At some point, we started to refer to anything wheat-free and dairy-free as a “why bother?” because most often, without both wheat and dairy, whatever you were eating was barely worth it – especially when it came to dessert.

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Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream: An Exercise in Perseverance

August 5, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 16 Comments

Not the most attractive photo…

*** UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR A NEW METHOD THAT ACTUALLY WORKS!!

** EDITED TO ADD: After having frosted the wedding cake using this frosting, I have to say that I do not recommend this recipe – it just plain did not work very well and was extremely hard to work with, unfortunately I almost want to take down the recipe, but this was a pretty epic post and I’m kind of proud of it, so I’m going to leave it. The frosting tasted awesome (like liquid cheesecake – emphasis on the liquid) but it would not thicken up enough to spread easily; it would not un-curdle no matter how long I stirred it, chilled it, or left it at room temperature; and it was so soupy that I had to frost the cake in several coats, chilling between each coat to build up the frosting layer. And because it was curdled, it didn’t have a smooth finish (which was OK because the look of the wedding cake was kind of rustic, but it was still annoying). Bottom line: cream cheese has too much water in it to make a proper Swiss meringue buttercream, which relies on the high fat content in the butter to emulsify with the egg whites. If you’re looking for a cream cheese Swiss meringue buttercream frosting recipe, check out this one – it works around the cream cheese/high water content problem.**

Alternative titles for this post:

Zen and the Art of Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream

Testing Your Patience with Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream

How to Give Yourself Gray Hairs and an Anxiety Disorder

So. After the wedding cake trial I did a while back, I discerned that I needed to find a cream cheese frosting not made with confectioners’ sugar – more specifically, that I wanted to make a Swiss meringue buttercream frosting with cream cheese. A quick Google search turned up a recipe for Cream Cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream, and lo and behold, this very frosting had been used on a wedding cake! Double score!!

For those who don’t know, a Swiss meringue buttercream frosting is made by beating butter into a whipped meringue base of egg whites and sugar (heated to 140˚F to make them safe). I was a bit apprehensive at the thought of this, mostly because of the amount of egg whites that are required (being that I’m on a budget, and egg whites are more expensive than confectioners’ sugar). However, this frosting is seriously delicious – creamy, light, buttery, and not overly sweet; basically it blows any confectioners’ sugar frosting out of the water – so I was willing to overcome my initial qualms in favour of deliciousness. I had made Swiss meringue buttercream once before, back when I was in high school, and I don’t remember it being terribly difficult or onerous – I was only about 16, so it can’t have been *that* hard – but I had also read a few posts about how this type of frosting can be the most demoralizing endeavour because it just. won’t. come. together, and I knew I needed to do a test run.

I scaled down the recipe to use only 1 egg white and got down to business. A full 3 hours of beating/whisking/stirring later, I still had soupy, curdled glop (albeit delicious, cheesecake-flavoured glop). I was reluctant to give up, because this recipe and all others I had read tell you to just keep beating it and not lose hope – it will eventually work out. But I had to go to bed, so I declared this small test batch a failure. I did not, however, lose faith in the recipe or the method: I figured that the amount was too small, that the beaters of the KitchenAid weren’t able to get into the mixture far enough to really do anything, that it was just too hot in the kitchen and the butter and cream cheese were melting. I made plans for a second test run with a slightly larger batch.

At this point, I got a few tips from Jackie of Foodology, including a link to Sweetopolita’s post Swiss Meringue Buttercream Demystified. Reading this helped a lot, and introduced the idea of chilling the mixture when it gets too soupy. I started on the second test batch with renewed hope and things went marginally better – however it was really hot in the kitchen (mid-day at the end of July) so I had to alternate between bouts of chilling and beating the tar out of the frosting in the KitchenAid. And finally, over two hours later, it started to come together. Whew! Up until this point, I was planning on making the frosting in Vancouver, but now I decided I was going to make it beforehand and just refrigerate it, because if it didn’t come together when I needed it to, I would seriously lose it.

So, based on all I had learned, I made a larger batch (half of what I needed in total, to accommodate the size of my mixer), starting early in the morning to avoid the hot kitchen issue. You are supposed to let your butter/cream cheese come to room temperature, but I decided not to let either get too soft, thinking that the heat of the kitchen would be less of an issue that way. I whipped up the meringue, beat in the butter and cream cheese, and then set the mixer on high to do its thing. And two hours later, nothing. Still a curdled mess. I took the whisk attachment off the mixer and half-heartedly stirred at the frosting by hand a few times – and EUREKA! With slow stirring, the frosting somehow started to come together in a thick, fluffy mass. I put on the paddle attachment and turned the speed to low, and a (long) while later, I had proper frosting!! But seriously, it still took all bloody day. And I still had another batch to make.

But now I *finally* had it figured out. While the previous batch was going, I read this Swiss meringue buttercream tutorial and had two more epiphanies: 1) beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form; and 2) once the butter is added, stir on low speed with the paddle attachment. I had sort of figured this out for myself, but this was the first time I had actually read that SLOW SPEED was the important thing here (I don’t know if I just missed it in all the other tutorials I read, or what). The fourth time is apparently the charm, or maybe I was just used to it, because the frosting came together fine – but it still took over an hour of stirring!

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering why the heck I went to all this trouble to make this particular frosting. The answer is that is it freaking delicious – it tastes just like cheesecake without being sickly sweet. Nate watched me make this frosting four times and thought I was crazy because of how long it was taking, but then when he tasted it, he said, “Now I know why you persevered.” It’s that good. So here is the recipe, along with all my tips for making it….

Wedding Cake Trial!

July 11, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

I finally got the replacement power cord for my computer so I can post about the wedding cake trial run I did a few weeks ago – yay!

First of all, cake size: there are about 55 guests at the wedding, so I’m making a three-tiered cake with 10-inch, 8-inch, and 6-inch round tiers, each about 4-inches high. I used the Wilton party cake serving guide and Earlene’s cake serving guide to come up with those sizes, which should yield about 60 pieces of cake (including the top tier, which will be eaten at the wedding rather than being saved for the bride and groom’s first anniversary). Wilton’s wedding cake serving guide gives much smaller servings, so I opted for larger pieces and slightly more cake than might be needed, to be on the safe side.

Based on the comments from the post where I asked for advice on which flavour to make the cake, the lemon cake with raspberry filling and cream cheese frosting is the clear winner! This was actually the combination I was going to go with in the first place, so thanks for validating my choice! So, now that my paralysing indecision was dealt with, I had to actually choose recipes for a lemon cake, raspberry filling, and cream cheese frosting, and then do a test run to figure out recipe yields and make sure they came out alright and tasted good!

After looking at dozens of cake recipes, I finally settled on a lemon butter cake from Margaret Braun’s book Cakewalk (she did the swirly yellow and white cake from my previous wedding cake post). I chose this recipe because she uses it for stacked cakes, so I know it will hold up, and also because it doesn’t require whipping egg whites separately, which is time consuming.

I halved the recipe to make two 6-inch cakes, and ended up with 4 3/4 cups of batter, which turned out to be more than enough (I’ll need two cakes to get the 4-inches of height). I took some advice on baking a level cake from i am baker and sacrificed a towel to cut into strips to wrap around the pan before baking.This is supposed to act as insulation and stop the edges of the cake from baking faster than the middle, thus preventing a domed top (which has to be trimmed off when stacking the layers, meaning you’re wasting a bunch of cake). As you can see, it didn’t really work. Later I realized that the towel strips are supposed to be wet, so I’ll give that a try when I bake the cakes for real! (Also, doesn’t it look like the pan is wearing a diaper?)

2 cups of batter = too much

Anyway, using the amount of batter suggested by Wilton, I baked the first cake with 2 cups of batter and it rose up in a dome about an inch higher than the pan, which meant I would have to slice off a bunch from the top, so I scaled back on the second cake to 1 1/4 cups of batter. This one baked in a shorter amount of time so it didn’t get the same golden crust as the first one, but it didn’t overwhelm the pan and I wouldn’t have to trim as much off the top.

1 1/4 cups of batter = just right

Based on this second cake, I calculated that I will need about 14 1/2 cups total for all the cakes, which is one and a half times the original recipe (or three half-batches, which will be easier for my mixer to handle!). Doing this required all of my math skills and I definitely can’t explain how I figured it out, but it does make sense. Thank goodness for calculators! Math problems aside, the cake itself tasted really good, with a pound-cake like texture (firm rather than airy) and a nice moist crumb. I will add a bit more lemon juice and zest next time though – it could have been more lemon-y.

The frosting: cream cheese frosting is usually quite soft and heavy and not exactly fluffy, so I spent a long time looking for a recipe that would give me something both spreadable and light, but that would also be able to sit unrefrigerated for a while and not lose its shape. I found this recipe for Professional Cream Cheese Buttercream Frosting, and the only thing that I wasn’t sure about was that it contained shortening. I know that lots of decorators use shortening-based frostings because they are light, fluffy, pipeable, and hold up well at room temperature, but I’ve never even bought shortening (ie, Cristco) before, so I was wary. I made a quarter batch for this 6-inch cake, which gave me 2 2/3 cups of frosting. I liked that it got really firm in the fridge, which would make moving and stacking the cakes easy, but it was not as fluffy as I wanted and WAY too sweet. Upon further research, apparently this is usually the problem with confectioner’s sugar-based frosting, so I’m going to try a cream cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream frosting instead, like this one. This method sort of scares me but I think it will taste much better, so I will just have to get over my fear! I got the idea for vertical stripes on the sides from i am baker. The swirly stuff on top was just me trying to use up the rest of the icing (actually I was trying to do this, but I failed. Among other things, my star tip was too small!)

I used store-bought raspberry jam to spread between the layers, because I figured that making my own jam or filling would be too difficult, but now I’ve changed my mind. The jam was not quite raspberry-ey enough, so I’m going to try a no-cook freezer jam recipe instead, which is essentially just mashed berries with sugar and pectin. Hopefully this will result in a suitably rasberry’d filling!

I also made a simple syrup of sugar, water, and lemon juice and zest to sprinkle on the cake layers before spreading them with raspberry. This tasted great and helped keep the cakes moist.

And finally, the cake base: my trusted friend Martha suggests that you can use regular 3/16-inch foam-core board to put the cakes on, which I did, but I covered it in foil because I wasn’t sure how well cake and paper go together. The foil was a bad idea though, because when I cut the first slice of cake it came off with a chunk of foil stuck to the bottom. Now I don’t know if I should buy real cake boards from a bakery, or just use the foam core au naturel, as Martha suggests…

You can see the perfect wedge of foil that was removed with the first slice of cake

So, the plan: I will bake the cakes ahead of time and freeze them, then fill/frost/assemble the cake the day before the wedding. I will add more lemon to the batter, be careful about sifting and not over-beating, and use wet towel strips when baking in hopes of ending up with a level cake. I still need to try the cream cheese Swiss Meringue Buttercream frosting, and make the raspberry filling. Figure out what to do about the cake base. Oh, and did I mention I need to transport all of this plus equipment on the ferry from Victoria to Vancouver and assemble it in my grandparents’ kitchen before moving the cake to the venue?? Did I also mention how EXCITED I am about this?!?!

Here’s some helpful wedding cake-related links:

My trusted friend Martha puts together a tiered wedding cake from start to finish

A helpful video on how to get a smooth finish on a frosted cake

A really pretty decoration idea for a wedding cake

Cake and filling/frosting recipe ideas from Martha

Deb at Smitten Kitchen made a wedding cake for her friends: read about it here

PS: I’m off to California for a week to visit my aunt and uncle starting tomorrow, so I might not update again until I get back. Rest assured, however, that I will have lots of delicious things to write about!!

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