Lemon Cake

This is indeed another post about cake, instead of knitting.

The BF announced yesterday that he felt he was much put upon. He is much prone to exaggeration and he is also much prone to frequent exaggeration. The usual response is to suggest "You wish," and follow this up with an offer to let him decorate the spare room, the office, the living room, put a new bench and cupboard into the kitchen and empty the bathroom - then he might know what "much put upon" is.

Please note that yesterday's statement of 'much put upon-ness' was made whilst sitting with feet up, playing "Lego Star Wars"on the PS3.

Anyway, I thought I'd bake him a cake. His favourite is lemon so I tootled off to the Caked Crusader's blog (go there now) and dug out the lemon layer cake recipe (that I also used for his birthday cake last year. Please note, I didn't like lemon desserts until I baked this cake.



Here, we have a lovely light sponge. The recipe involves adding lemon zest and juice and I really love baking with fresh lemons. I feel a little nervous at the cooling stage with this one - it is so light that I worry it might slice itself into pieces on the cooling mesh.



And this bowl contains home-made lemon curd - for the filling. Much easier to make than it sounds - more lemon zest and juice. The finished product tastes great. Had a few problems with this batch. I hadn't beaten the eggs properly so, as I was stirring, I noticed a few lumps of egg white cooking in there. Not a great look for lemon curd. However, they're easy to pick out and they've had no impact on the taste.



The Caked Crusader recommends lemon icing in her recipe. However, in my opinion, this would make it just a little too lemony and there's also the major issue of the fact that I don't like icing. So, I stick a wodge of melted white chocolate on it. OK, so this does result in massive Cracks of Doom breaking across the cake when you cut a slice. However, I have found a way of minimising this risk - cut bigger slices.



A side view - with the lovely lemon curd spilling out of the sides of the 'sandwich'.



And, this is what a slice looks like, before the chocolate has had a chance to go hard. It was cool, but this is also a technique for reducing the cracks across the topping.