This past Friday was Eric's mom's birthday. Since I was working all weekend we didn't really do anything to celebrate with her so we had her over for dinner last night. We had salad with grilled flank steak and I of course wanted to make a birthday cake. I asked him what his mom's favorite cake was and he said he didn't know and after some thought he said she likes lemon things. So after some browsing around I decided to make Luscious Lemon Cake from a Southern Living Desserts cookbook that she gave me for Christmas last year. I also love lemon things so I was excited to try it.
Ingredients:
Cake:
8 egg yolks
1.5 sticks butter, softened
1 1/4 C sugar
2 1/2 C cake flour
1 T baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 C milk
1 tsp lemon zest
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
Luscious Lemon Frosting:
2 sticks butter, softened
2 tsp lemon zest
1/4 C lemon juice
2 lbs powdered sugar
Let's get started...
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Mix egg yolks on high until thickened and pale in color...about 4 minutes. Then set aside.
Place butter in mixer on medium speed and mix until creamy.
Add sugar and mix until fluffy and well mixed.
Mix flour, baking powder and salt together. Add to mixer gradually, alternating with milk until well mixed.
Add lemon juice, lemon zest & vanilla and mix together.
Grease & flour 3 8 in round cake pans.
Spread mixture evenly between the 3 pans.
Bake 12-17 minutes until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Mine needed 15 minutes. Set out to cool for at least an hour.
So you have 3 beautiful 8 inch round cakes & this is when disaster strikes...
So you are sitting in the other room catching up on facebook, email, starting this blog post, uploading pictures, etc., not paying any attention to the whereabouts of your dog. You proceed to go back into the other room because you think the cakes will be cool and you can make the icing and finish the cake and this is what you find....
Your dog has eaten the top off of two of your three cakes, there are crumbs EVERYWHERE and she is in a sugar coma in the corner...
So you yell at her "BAD DOG, BAD DOG, BAD DOG!!!", call the boyfriend at work to tell him HIS dog is bad and that she has destroyed his mom's birthday cake, yell at the dog some more, she hides, you feel kind of bad because she is so cute even though she is a little terror.
Then you get down to business of trying to salvage the cake. You realize that if you take the cakes out of the pan you can cut horizontally across each of the 2 damaged cakes and the bottom part of the cake is untouched & your cake just won't be as tall as originally planned.
Here's how you make the icing...
Mix the butter in the blender until creamy. Add lemon juice & lemon zest. Mix together, Add powdered sugar gradually and continue mixing until icing-like consistency.
I placed my one full sized layer on the bottom, a layer of icing, another layer of cake (1/2 layer in my case), layer of icing, layer of cake (another 1/2 for me) & a final layer of icing. You can ice the sides too if you want but the icing is very lemony so I think between the layers is enough. Also if you only like a mild lemon flavor you could use another type of icing since the cake also has a bit of a lemon flavor.
In the end, yours looks like this...
Southern Living's looks like this...
VIA
You realize you don't work at Southern Living for a reason, you worked last night, you've only slept 2 hours and as long as the cake tastes good it's fine...disaster somewhat averted. You also wish you had a cute little cake stand like theirs instead of yours which is made of a makeshift plate & upside down bowl...life goes on. His mom will be here in an hour, house needs to be cleaned, you need to take a shower, clean up the cake disaster, etc. & GO!!
Also my new iPhone 5S came today even though it told me it wasn't going to ship until Oct 21st-30th so there was light at the end of the tunnel.
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