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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Lemon Crêpe Cake

July 24, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 7 Comments

Lemon Crêpe Cake | Korena in the Kitchen So… it’s been a while. I wish I could say I’ve been too busy vacationing or holidaying to post anything, but I’ve just been working and unmotivated to blog. I actually made this cake for my birthday (32!) back in the first week of July, and it’s taken me this long to get it up here. We’ve had an incredibly hot and dry summer so far here in BC, and as a result there are hundreds of wildfires burning throughout the province. The day I made this cake, we awoke to a hazy sky and blood red sun casting an eerie, apocalyptic, Martian filter over the world, thanks to the smoke from all those fires settling over Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. It was the strangest light for taking photos, so please excuse if the pictures look a little weird.

Lemon Crêpe Cake | Korena in the Kitchen

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Lemon Curd Macarons

January 2, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 14 Comments

Lemon Curd Macarons | Korena in the Kitchen

Happy New Year, friends! Here’s to 2015 being the sweetest year yet, and what better way to start a sweet year than with a lemon curd macaron? Given that you can buy lemons and oranges year round in any grocery store, it can be easy to forget that citrus is in fact a winter fruit. However, the explosion of different varieties of lemons, oranges, and grapefruits during the colder months of the year proves that nature still works on a schedule, and that schedule clearly states that citrus coincides with winter, making a lemon curd macaron a perfectly Christmas-y (I made these as part of my Christmas Baking) or New Years-y thing, indeed.

Lemon Curd Macarons | Korena in the Kitchen …

Lemon Meringue Coconut Macaroon Tarts

April 10, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Lemon Meringue Coconut Macaroon Tart Lemon curd. Toasted meringue. Coconut macaroon. What’s not to love?

(I told you there’d still be plenty of butter and sugar in these parts… no flour in this one though!)

In the course of making these little tarts, the only thing I didn’t really love was that for some reason, my meringue topping just would not whip up to stiff peaks. I started it off by hand with a whisk, because I thought how hard can it be to whip one egg white into a stiff meringue? Apparently it’s pretty hard (and I think I know the reason I’ve ended up with tennis elbow, or more accurately, baker’s elbow!), so I transferred it to the KitchenAid mixer, ending up with sticky meringue on half the utensils in my kitchen, and still only achieved floppy peaks. Nonetheless, the meringue toasted nicely under the broiler, which worked out much better than my failed blow-torch attempt.

I used my wacky creaming method for the lemon curd, and this I did manage to make successfully by hand. And then I made the coconut macaroon tart shells by hand, too. ;)…

Silky Lemon Curd

February 17, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 17 Comments

Silky Lemon Curd As mentioned in my previous post, I loves me some lemon. Lemon curd is one of my favorite things to spread on toast, dollop on scones, stir into plain Greek yogurt (or layer with granola in a dessert-for-breakfast parfait), or just eat straight off a spoon. It’s also darn good in a tart shell or as a Danish filling, which is the reason I came across this particular incarnation.

Greek yogurt, lemon curd, and granola parfait

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Lemon Heart Danishes

February 14, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

Lemon Heart Danishes Valentine’s Day. An excuse for heart-shaped baking. I’m in!

Lemon is my favorite sweet/dessert flavour second only to chocolate, but it’s hard to buy decent lemon baked goods. I hate fake lemon even more than I love real lemon, and unfortunately most of the time, store-bought lemon-flavoured things are pretty dreadful. So in the case of lemon, it’s best to take matters into your own hands.

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