The lemon drop cake from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking is one of my favorite cakes from the Baked quartet of cookbooks. I first made it a few years ago on a whim, brought it to work, and had immediate "please make me this for my birthday" requests. It is also the first (but not the only) cake I've made that someone has requested for purchase.
Unsurprisingly, I was overjoyed by the excuse to make this cake again when it came up on the Baked Sunday Mornings recipe schedule. I have not been keeping up with the recent baking schedule (moving & work); BAKED's lemon drop cake seemed like a perfect re-entry point. Plus, the timing coincided with a holiday party hosted by a lemon dessert connoisseur and I'd been asked to bring dessert. Basically, all the stars aligned... the only question was, would my frosting turn out?
Making the cake batter took about 30-40 minutes and was pretty simple. Before starting, I converted all the volume amounts to weights. The batter follows one of the standard BAKED cake formulas, wherein you cream butter and shortening (I used all butter, because I'm out of shortening and forgot to buy more), then add sugar, an egg and lemon zest (I tripled the zest amount, I didn't think a teaspoon was enough) and continue creaming until fluffy. The dry ingredients are added in 3 phases, alternating with ice water, which helps the batter to fully integrate the dry ingredients into its structure without becoming overworked. Finally, you'll whip 3 egg whites (save the yolks for the curd filling) together with a little cream of tartar until soft peaks form, then you'll fold that into the batter, separate evenly across 3 8-inch cake tins (I got 500g in each), and bake about 40 minutes.
I was rather concerned for my cakes, because they seemed extraordinarily gassy (there were a lot of little bubbles on the surface while it baked). I thought maybe I'd messed something up and the texture would be off, but after leaving the cakes to cool overnight, I evened out the tops and tried a piece of cake... it tasted exactly as expected. Light, delicate, and lemon-y.
The next phase was making the lemon curd. All citrus curd recipes vary a little on the question of all egg yolk, all whole eggs, or some combination thereof: here, we're making our curd with 2 whole eggs, 7 yolks (using up the 3 leftover from making the cake) plus lemon zest, lemon juice, sugar, and butter (added at the end). I used 6 Meyer lemons (courtesy of my parents), producing a little more than ¾ cup (I added it all) plus the zest from 4 of those lemons (although I didn't zest 100% of the surface of any of them). Cooking the lemon curd took me more than twice as long as stated in the recipe (about 15 minutes before it thickened), but I didn't have any problems. After thickening, the curd is taken off the heat, butter is whisked in, then the curd is strained to catch any lumps/cooked egg bits. I lost very little to the straining process, covered the surface with plastic wrap, and moved on to the final and most challenging step (in my view); the cooked frosting.
I have not been having much success with the BAKED cake frostings lately, so I was anticipating disaster with this buttercream, but shockingly, the whole process went quite smoothly. My pre-frosting mixture of sugar, flour, whole milk, and cream thickened and started to boil in just 10 minutes (half the time stated). I beat the thickened liquid for about 10-12 minutes on high, waiting patiently until the mixing bowl was absolutely, without any doubt, legitimately completely cooled to room temperature. Then I started adding my butter, which I only removed from the fridge to cube when I started cooking the frosting (so about 20 minutes at RT only). The butter didn't really seem to incorporate, staying as little pebbles, but I kept at it, slowly and patiently, and eventually the whole bowl became cohesive a few minutes after adding all the butter. I whipped it on medium-high speed until fluffy, then went to add my lemon curd and the small dash of vanilla extract requested. At this point, I realized I should have made the lemon curd further in advance of the buttercream, as the curd was still warm. I decided to risk it, mostly because I was in a bit of a hurry, and happily, this didn't obviously harm the buttercream.
Separately, I liked all three components of this cake, the cake is light and a little lemon-y, the curd is rich and tangy with bright lemon flavor, and the buttercream is luscious, airy, lightly lemony, and not at all greasy. Together, they make an exceptional lemon layer cake. It's not that much work to make; all told, it took me roughly 2.5-3 hours of hands-on prep time plus assembly and decorating.
Refrigerating several times during the assembly process was critical - I had to refrigerate before crumb coating, because the layers slipped and slid with the (still a little warm) bouncy lemon curd between them. I had not quite enough curd to fill each layer with a full 1 cup, but I had a lot of lemon buttercream to spare at the end. My recommendation would be to use some of the buttercream as a dam before adding the lemon curd, since I definitely had spill over and stability issues. If I hadn't been short on time, I would have used some of the extra frosting for piping something decorative, but I never manage to pad in enough time for that. Instead, I'm using it on sugar cookies, which seems like a pretty excellent use for spare frosting.
Head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for the recipe and to see what the other bakers thought of this cake.
