The Goldilocks Cake {Lemon Pistachio Layer Cake}

June 9, 2019 By Korena in the Kitchen 1 Comment

If you are a long time reader, you may be aware that I have been on a multi-year quest to make a lemon layer cake that is juuuuust right. I’ve made many, many attempts – the first one, with dense layers and teeth-achingly sweet cream cheese frosting; this meringue-topped beaut that introduced me to Tartine’s fantastic lemon cream; this lemon, blackberry and white chocolate behemoth; a cake with wonderfully soft and light layers but disasterously drippy frosting; another lemon and blackberry behemoth with more drippy frosting; and most recently, one that featured a brilliant lemon curd formula and was so pretty – but all were too dense or too sweet or too drippy, and still not juuuuust right.

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Lemon Cream Pistachio Sandwich Cookies

December 31, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I realize I’m posting Christmas cookies a week after the event, but I can never seem to find time to blog about anything in the midst of my annual pre-Christmas baking madness. And it’s still technically Yuletide until tomorrow, January 1, so it’s not too late for Christmas cookies! Especially when they are as good as these ones.

About eight Christmases ago I made a lemon-pistachio sandwich cookie filled with lemon frosting that Nate particularly liked, and he’s been asking me to make them again ever since. I remember being less impressed with them: I found them too sweet, not lemony enough, and their roll-and-cut construction meant they were finicky as heck to make. But I agreed that the concept had potential, so this year I set out to re-engineer them into the cookie of my dreams.

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Mini Mile-High Lemon Meringue Pie

July 13, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

How is it that I had never made a lemon meringue pie before now? In fact, I’m not even sure I’d ever actually eaten lemon meringue pie before I made this half-size one – which is surprising, because lemon things are second only to chocolate things on my dessert hierarchy. I’ve eaten many a lemon curd tart, but not a lemon meringue pie. What is the difference, you might ask? Well, according to me, the differences are:

A lemon curd tart has a sweet shortcrust pastry (like a shortbread cookie), whereas a lemon meringue tart uses a blind-baked flaky pie shell. It should be noted that this particular blind-baked pie shell was the best I’ve ever made, owing to a few tips courtesy of Stella Parks, aka BraveTart: the first being her low-and-slow blind-baking method using sugar as a pie weight, and the second being the use of bleached all purpose flour, which has a more predictable profile of starch to protein than unbleached all purpose flour and results in a more tender and flaky pastry. (I have been an unbleached flour user for as long as I’ve been buying flour because the alternative sounds scary and chemical-laden… but once I read about the difference and about the bleaching process (which doesn’t actually use bleach), I realized that it’s not scary, it’s just chemistry, which is what successful baking relies on.)

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Lemon Sunshine Layer Cake with Lemon Curd and Marshmallow Buttercream

April 26, 2018 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

I noted previously that I was having a moment with Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, and wanting to bake all of her stuff. Well, the moment continues, and this cake is the result. I got the BraveTart cookbook for Christmas and have been drooling over it ever since. The things I’ve made from it have been fantastic so far (including Oreos, oatmeal cookies, English muffins, and caramelized white chocolate blondies), and the recipes are wonderfully researched, tested, and always teach me something new about baking and pastry cheffing. So I figured I’d be in good hands using BraveTart recipes for attempt number seven in my quest for the perfect lemon layer cake. And – spoiler alert – while it wasn’t quite perfect, it was pretty darn good.

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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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Cranberry White Chocolate Lemon Tea Braid

December 13, 2016 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

Along with the perfect Christmas dessert and the best Christmas cookies, every year I’m on the look out for a delicious holiday breakfast or brunch pastry – and this year, I think I may have stumbled on it kind of by accident. I had half a batch of challah dough in my freezer, a container of cranberry sauce leftover from Thanksgiving, and I’d just seen a photo of the beautiful poppy seed tea “braid” from Luisa Weiss‘ Classic German Baking – and it all came together in a swirly braid filled with cranberry sauce, white chocolate chunks, and lemon zest, glazed with a lemony icing. It was a huge loaf, so I gave some to friends and planned to take the rest to work to share with my colleagues… but plans changed when Nate and I discovered how good it was, and we ate it all ourselves! (Sorry, colleagues!)

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Lemon Pistachio Biscotti

December 16, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I had a jarring realization this past weekend that we were less than two weeks away from Christmas and that I hadn’t started any Christmas shopping – or worse, any Christmas baking. But then I remembered that I had actually baked and sent off holiday cookies for the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap several weeks ago, so all was not lost. I participated in the Cookie Swap in 2013, then missed the sign-up deadline last year, so I was pretty excited to be part of it again this year. Participants pay a small entrance fee to raise money for the Cookies for Kids Cancer campaign, and then are matched up with three food bloggers to send cookies to. In return, you receive cookies from three other bloggers. These are the goodies that I got in the mail:

Vegan candy cane shortbread from Kacey of The Cookie Writer
Vegan snickerdoodles from Lisa of The Viet Vegan
Three different kinds of brown sugar cookies from Allison of The Bacon Eating Jewish Vegetarian

Merry Christmas to me, indeed!

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Turkish Delight

May 15, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

Turkish Delight | Korena in the Kitchen

For the Month of May, Rachael from Pizzarossa challenged us to make candy but not just any candy! She challenged us to make Turkish Delight, or Lokum.

This month, I joined the Daring Cooks (counterpart to the Daring Bakers) to make Turkish Delight, the jelly-like, powdered sugar-coated squares of rose water candy. If it sounds a little weird, that’s because it is. Weird, but good, and the homemade version is pretty close to the Turkish Delight I remember eating in the holiday candy boxes that my teacher parents usually received around Christmas.

Turkish Delight | Korena in the Kitchen

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Sourdough Sticky Lemon Pull-Apart Loaf

February 20, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 34 Comments

Fair warning: February is turning into a carb-heavy month around here. I personally have no problem with this – when it’s this cold and disgusting outside, I want all the comfort food I can get, and this winter I’m putting those calories to good use with some good ol’ strength training as per this idea. I guess you could say my personal fitness philosophy at the moment is eat the bread, lift the weights. For me, they balance each other out. Although when you’re baking a lemon-scented pull-apart loaf with cream cheese drizzle that’s made with sourdough to boot, the bread might have the upper-hand…

None of this is to say that all I eat is bread and carby baked goods. OK, I eat my fair share, as evidenced here, but the rest of my diet is mostly from scratch (just like the baking) and includes a good balance of leafy greens, fruit, veg, and protein – just so we’re clear about why I don’t weigh 300 pounds. 😉

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Overnight Sourdough Lemon Waffles

September 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 31 Comments

Since receiving a waffle maker from Santa-Nate last Christmas, I’ve experimented with a lot of waffle recipes. In particular, I’ve been looking for a really great overnight yeasted waffle recipe, one where you mix up an enriched yeast batter, let it rise and develop flavour overnight, then add eggs and baking soda (for extra leavening power and a light, airy texture) in the morning before cooking the waffles. I made one recipe that came with the waffle maker, which was pretty good, and twice I tried the famous recipe from Marion Cunningham’s Breakfast Book, via Smitten Kitchen, with middling success. The first time I made it I intended to serve waffles to our breakfast guests, but the batter seemed to have given up the ghost and died during its overnight rest*, so I tossed it and had to whip up a quick non-yeasted recipe instead. I tried it again a second time (because the recipe has such great reviews), this time tweaking a few things, for a much better result. But still not quite the overnight yeasted waffles of my dreams (although, thanks to those glowing reviews, I will probably try again to capture the magic).

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