Triple Lemon Cake for my Birthday!

Hello there - nice to see you again this year.  As I did last year, I made Hannah a delicious (?) birthday cake again this year, so here is me blogging about what exactly I did.  If you all remember, last year I tried to make a cake based on Hannah's favourite things - specifically Cadbury's chocolate and Tetley's tea.  So this year both those flavours were out, because I will not be a flavour repeater.  Hmmm what does Hannah like... LEMON!

This year's cake was a delicious triple lemon cake based on a recipe by Martha Stewart.  Why triple lemon?  Because it is a lemon sponge, doused in lemon syrup, and covered in a creamy gooey meringuey lemon frosting. YUM!  Let's get down to it.

Ingredients (Serves 12): 

 

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), plus more for pans
2 large eggs plus 3 large egg yolks (save the whites for later!!)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon zest
2 cups sugar
1 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 lemon, thinly sliced and seeded (this means very thin! Thinner than I did!)

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350°F.  Butter and flour two 8-by-2-inch cake pans, tapping out excess flour.  In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and lemon zest.

2. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer (trusty Kitchenaid!) beat butter and 1 1/2 cups of sugar until light and fluffy.  With mixer on low, beat in eggs and yolks, one at a time.  Beat in 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.  Alternate adding flour mixture and buttermilk, beginning and ending with flour mixture (I did 3 additions of flour, 2 of buttermilk).  Mix just until combined.

3. Divide batter between pans; smooth tops.  Bake until cakes pull away from sides of pans, 32-35 minutes. (This was really cool and easy to know when it was done, because it did clearly and visibly shrink around the edge a bit where I could see a gap between cake and pan.  Great foolproof plan for novice bakers.)  Let cool in pans 10 minutes.  Run a knife around edges of pans and invert cakes onto a wire rack.

4. While cakes are baking, bring remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of water to a boil in a saucepan.  Add lemon slices and simmer for 25 minutes.  Using slotted spoon, transfer lemon slices to a waxed-paper-lined plate.  Stir remaining 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice into syrup.

5. Using a toothpick, poke holes in warm cakes on rack.  Brush with lemon syrup.  Let cool completely.  Frost cakes (more on this coming!) and top with candied lemon slices.

So this is a triple lemon cake.  That means the frosting needs to be lemony as well, so I took Martha Stewart's whipped frosting and added lemon juice to lem-it-up!
 

Whipped Frosting:
 

3 large egg whites (remember them from before?)

3/4 cup sugar

pinch of salt

1/3 cup water

1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (or in our case 2 tablespoons lemon juice)

 

Directions:

1. In a heatproof bowl set over (not in) a saucepan of simmering water, combine egg whites, sugar, salt, and water. 

2. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until sugar has dissolved, 3-5 minutes. 

3. Transfer to a large bowl.  Using an electric mixer (Kitchenaid again, with whisk attachment), beat on medium-high until glossy, stiff peaks form, about 3 minutes.

4. Reduce speed to low, add vanilla (lemon!), and beat until just combined.  Use immediately.

So there you have it.  Lemon cake, with lemon syrup to make it moist and delicious (even a week later), and lemon whipped frosting on top.  Word to the wise, be sure to whip the frosting until the peaks truly are stiff.  I don't think I went quite far enough with that, so the nice fluffy frosting you see below was a bit less fluffy when Hannah got home from work to eat the cake, and had almost dissolved completely by the next evening.  Magical disappearing frosting!
 

The only other advice I would give would be to slice the lemons with a mandolin, if you have one, so that they candy properly and stack more prettily on top of the cake. I did it as thinly as I could with a knife, and it wasn't quite thin enough.

See you next year!



Happy Birthday to Me ~ from my Husband!

Today is the day you see the first ever guest post featured on Sew Lah Tea Dough!  I stayed close to home for the first one, and well, I'm a little biased after all.  Today you get to meet my amazing husband and see the incredible and delicious birthday cake he made for me :-)  I'm the baker in the house, but since we were married I've been lucky enough to have a birthday cake surprise each year!  This year was particularly yummy, and inventive.  I came home from work, not being able to look in the kitchen but smelling some tasty flavours in the air, before being let in on the secret on my birthday-eve.  He even said he had been taking photos as he went along - just like I do when I'm making or baking something I know I will blog about... sooo yes, after all that hard work - he definitely gets to write the blog post for me this week and I'll be back next week!  Ciao for now, and may I introduce the baking version of my husband Jonathan ♥

Hello.  I am Jonathan.  I am usually not a baker - at all!  I love to get in the kitchen and cook, but usually that is freestyling, and I'm pretty sure freestyling a cake would basically result in either a puddle of goo or a large hockey puck.  But for Hannah's birthday, I thought it wouldn't really be fair to make her bake her own cake, so I tried to find a recipe and whip something up.

I know Hannah likes chocolate, so I wanted to make a chocolate cake.  Not only that, I wanted to make a cake that has actual real chocolate in the mixture.  You'd think the internet would be full of recipes like this, but if you thought that (like I did), you would be wrong.  Almost all the chocolate cake recipes I found use cocoa powder to chocolatify their batter, so I had to keep searching.  I knew I wanted to use Dairy Milk bars, because Hannah likes it, and because we had a bunch of it left over sitting in a baggie on the counter.  Even the Cadbury website didn't have a recipe I could use.  Finally I found one - on the Hershey chocolate website and decided to use it, but substitute one brand for the other!

Ingredients (Serves 12-16):

1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
4 eggs
6 (1.55 oz each) Hershey's Milk Chocolate, melted (I used Dairy Milk here instead)
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Dash salt
1 cup buttermilk or sour milk (I did the add-a-teaspoon-of-vinegar trick because I forgot to buy buttermilk)
1/2 cup Hershey's Syrup (I used Nesquik, because that's what we had)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350°F.  Grease and flour 10-inch tube pan or 12-cup fluted tube pan. (Make sure you get every inch of the pan greased and floured.  Missing a spot is bad, as we will see later.)
2. Beat butter in large bowl until creamy.  Gradually add granulated sugar, beating on medium speed of mixer until well blended.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add melted chocolate; beat until blended.
3. Stir together flour, baking soda, and salt.  Add to chocolate mixture alternately with buttermilk, beating until blended.  Add syrup and vanilla, beat until blended.  Pour batter into prepared pan.
4. Bake 1 hour and 15 minutes (mine was in for an hour and a half, when I thought it was done, but in the end it was still maybe just under being well done), or until wooden pick inserted in the centre of cake comes out clean.  Cool 10 minutes, remove from pan to wire rack.  Cool completely.  Sift powdered sugar over top (OR make a glaze, like I did!)

So yes.  That is what I did, with the few changes I made annotated in the recipe.  As I mentioned at the end, I wanted to make some kind of glaze/icing for the cake.  It was already a Bundt cake - not a traditional birthday cake - and I wanted to make it a bit more celebratory.  One of Hannah's favourite things to do with chocolate is to dip it in her tea.  Her best thing is getting a large chocolate Easter egg, breaking it into pieces, an using them to scoop up the tea, letting it melt a bit, and then drinking it.  So what better icing for her chocolate flavoured cake than a tea flavoured glaze!

Again, it was off to google I went.  After looking through a number of different recipes, I ended up finding one for Chocolate Chip Shortbread with Earl Grey Tea Glaze at Good Cooks.  I used this as my jumping off point, but I wanted to make it a 'normal' tea glaze, using Tetley tea bags.  Here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup boiling water
3 bags of tea
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon butter, softened

Directions:

1. Pour boiling water over tea bags, allow to steep 3-5 minutes.  Remove tea bags.

2. In a small bowl, stir together powdered sugar and butter.  Gradually stir in enough tea to make glaze thin enough to drizzle. (DON'T MAKE IT THIN!  I guess this is meant for drizzling over cupcakes, but in this case I wanted it to be poured over and to ooze down the sides of the cake.  I was actually afraid I was leaving it too thick, but it did dribble down nicely.  But you want it quite thick - kind of like molasses.)

And that's all she wrote... or in my case, 'he wrote'.   Baked the cake, had the heart-stopping experience of trying to turn it out of the pan, had a little bit stick to the pan (grease and flour properly please!), and had a nice gooey glaze drip down the sides.  I think the cake is delicious - I think Hannah does too - and we shared a bit with my two grandmothers who both said it was moist and good.  They kind of didn't believe I had baked it :(  But here's the proof, real life photos!  ... Happy Birthday Hannah!

Right - gotta go - time to eat some cake!

~ ~ ~ So there it is!  My first featured guest on the blog... something I'd like to start doing more in this coming year (...yeh, I run on school years still).  Hope you liked it!  It really was a good cake, and he's done a good job right?!  #BestHusband ♥