Sweet Yet Sour

Lemon Cake – Fit for a Wedding?

Thursday, April 28th, 2011 | Wedding Cake Try-outs

Although it’s probably not fit for a future king and queen, my next attempt at a wedding cake was certainly delicious and decadent.  We’ll just have to see if it’s fit for our much less formal wedding next summer.

Having as yet only made cakes involving chocolate in the wedding cake try-outs, I felt the need to try something with no chocolate for my next entry in the contest.  So, I returned to Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours” book and settled on her cake which she titles, “The Perfect Party Cake”.  It’s a lemon cake with raspberry jam filling, lemon meringue butter cream frosting and coconut. It sounded lovely and looked like it might be a pain in the ass – which it sort of turned out to be – but it was worth it.

I won’t include the recipe here, but the lemon cake is not just your average lemon cake.  It involves cake flour, lemon zest and Dorie’s recipe asks for four egg whites.  The cake itself wasn’t that hard to make, but the lemon meringue butter cream frosting also requires four egg whites.  I’m sure it’s just me, but I hate wasting eggs like that; I’m unlikely to do much with the extra egg yolks; so instead of using the four egg whites in the cake, I simply used two whole eggs and said a little prayer about not making any high altitude adjustments.

The lemon meringue butter cream frosting is certainly the most complicated portion of the cake; it involves slowly heating the egg whites and some sugar while whisking constantly, allowing it cool briefly and then adding lemon juice and 3 (!) sticks of unsalted butter and whipping it into a nice thick frosting.  For the raspberry filling I used a raspberry jam that I warmed up in a pan briefly to make it easier to spread and then put it through a sieve to get out all of the seeds.

After the cake was made, I sliced the layers (I still don’t have a cake slicing kit – but my birthday is coming up…) and started assembling.  First a cake layer, then raspberry jam, and then the frosting.

After completing the assembly, I frosted the whole thing with the remaining lemon meringue butter cream frosting and then, per Dorie’s instructions, finished it off with coconut all over the cake.

It was very pretty, but doesn’t look much different on the outside from the Redemption Cake.

(By the way, I have now made the Redemption Cake again, just so that this time I had some slices of it to put away in the freezer for my bride-to-be friend.  The first cake disappeared a little too quickly.)

But on the inside, it was a whole other story.

The cake was lovely and light, and contrasted well with the frosting and raspberry filling.  The lemon flavor was not overwhelming, and could actually have been a little more lemony for my taste, but I also don’t want to overpower people – there’s a fine line.

I do like the coconut on the exterior, but I wasn’t sure when I tasted it that it was entirely necessary; there so much else going on with the lemon, frosting and raspberry it seemed a little superfluous.  But, the first thing that I did with this cake was cut a huge piece that I saved in Tupperware in the freezer.  The reviews of the engaged couple were great and apparently the groom-to-be loves both lemon and coconut, so if this is one of the cakes, I’ll be keeping the coconut.

So, what do you guys think?

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