Hello. It’s me again. I am currently trying to figure out whether any of my small, yet appreciated, number of followers are still here. If you are still here, then please stay, for I will be attempting to start this blog again and thus why this post is called “The Rebirth of my Blog” (cue fanfare). The fated lemon birthday cake will come later.
The first thing you may have noticed is that this blog has changed its name. Like a newborn butterfly shedding its chrysalis, we have shedded The Ultimate Foodie Blog and and have been reborn as The Diary of a Chaotic Cook. I say this name with about ten percent confidence as I am not the best cook however I can definitely promise that this will be a new experience for me and hopefully a fun one for you, my reader. Secondly, there is not going to be a consistent upload schedule, but I will endeavour to post at least twice a month if not more, as it will now be quality and not quantity. Finally, please sit back, enjoy this post and have a good time.
The fated lemon birthday cake –
When people say to describe myself as a cook, I normally just say to replace that word with person who bakes and they will have me. I find baking a lot easier than cooking, mainly because my sweet tooth is bigger than my intellectual capacity but also because I happen to be okay at it for once. Now I enjoy baking, but cakes are my absolute worst enemy. Give me cinnamon rolls any day. I get called by my friends and they ask me to make them birthday cakes and it nearly always results in me having an Oscar winning meltdown because the cake did not turn out right or the cake is too delicate to ice. It was my friend’s birthday on the 24th and so I decided to attempt John Kannell from Preppy Kitchen’s moist lemon cake (Youtube link below) I SWEAR by John Kannell. He is an incredible cook and baker and whenever I have needed something delicious to bake his recipes have always been a crowd pleaser.
This cake consists of three layers (I made two because I had bigger cake tins) of this dreamy, beautiful lemon cake and in the middle it has this heavenly mascarpone filling with lemon zest and icing sugar, and to top it all off as the literal icing on the cake there is a marvellous swiss meringue buttercream. I have officially run out of positive adjectives to describe this.
I have to admit that I did edit the recipe slightly I omitted the whipped cream from the mascarpone filling and I swapped out the swiss buttercream for a normal one but I honestly can say the recipe would have been delicious either way.
I started off by greasing one cake mould as I was planning on making the cake twice to obtain two separate layers so I was going to make two full cake tins, but I realised that the first layer was going to overflow so I split the first layer into two separate tins. First, I mixed 160ml of milk with 80ml of lemon juice in a bowl. I was a bit worried as it started curdling but as I later discovered this is fine and it helps the recipe. I then put the bowl aside and started working on the sugar aspect of the cake. I had to put 285g of sugar (I used white caster sugar) in my food processor alongside the zest of an entire lemon (I used about 3/4 of the lemon because I am a weakling and do not have the strength to zest the entire lemon). And in John’s words, I had to “run the hell out of it”. I ran it until I got what I named “the shaved ice look” where it looked like shaved ice and was almost like little mountains.
After that, I creamed 115g of butter with the lemon zest sugar I mentioned before using my overworked and underpaid electric mixer until it was nice and fluffy. To that I added 3 eggs, one at a time, whisking between each one. In another bowl I sifted 240g of self raising flour (all purpose if you use that) alongside 1 and 1/2 tsp of baking powder and 1/2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda. Because I used salted butter, I did not put in the salt. Then you have to add the milk lemon mixture from the beginning and the flour mixture I just mentioned into the butter sugar eggs mixture. (I did this in alternating batches, dry then wet etc. until both mixtures were in the butter sugar one). I mixed this up and poured the mixture into my cake tins where they went into the oven at 180 degrees celsius (350 fahrenheit) for half an hour.
For the filling, I added 225g of mascarpone and 85g of icing sugar to a bowl and folded them together with (you guessed it) more lemon zest!!! I swear my hands were going yellow with all this zesting. I used about half to 3 quarters of a lemon. I ignored the whipping cream stage because I don’t know how to whip cream and I honestly didn’t feel the filling needed this. So, once the cakes had cooled I put the filling in the middle of both cakes. I find that swiss meringue buttercream is too sweet for me so I whipped up a regular vanilla buttercream and added yellow food colouring (it looked a bit like a biohazard) and our favourite character lemon zest (I eyeballed it a bit). I was going to ice the cake but then realised my buttercream might be too stiff for a delicate cake so I had a stroke of pure genius and added the leftover filling into the buttercream to make it smoother. AND GUESS WHAT, I did not have a meltdown whilst icing the cake so with that burst of self esteem I finished it and added fresh lavender from my garden and fresh lemon slices (lemon zest sat this one out) and it was amazing.
My friend adored and it and unfortunately now I have 6 other people asking for this but oh well that’s a story for another time. I hope you have enjoyed this post and I look forward to seeing you next time!
Goodbye!
N.B ( All copyright for the video goes to Preppy Kitchen, I do not own this video)
Please do NOT repost this without my permission
The Diary of a Chaotic Cook 