L-L-L-Luscious Lemon Cake

Today I bring you a very special guest post from the lovely Miss Susie-Q. Susie is quite the accomplished baker and was kind enough to make the PHENOMENAL cake we all enjoyed at my birthday party. I can't thank her enough still (for the cake and for helping wash the dishes after I sliced open my hand). Today is officially my last birthday related recipe so let's all sit back and enjoy a little cake.



If you ask me, cake is nature’s most perfect food. Okay, so maybe it leaves something to be desired from a nutritional standpoint, but whatever needs it fails to satisfy in the body, it more than makes up for with its ability to feed the soul. I do know people who dislike cake, but I am suspicious of them, in much the same way I would be suspicious of someone who doesn’t like birthdays or rainbows. Cake is celebration food. The point is not nutrition, but indulgence.

I have been baking for a long time. As a kid, my best friend would come over and we would pour over my mother’s cookbooks and after much deliberation and more than a little bickering, we would pick a recipe and spend the rest of the afternoon making it, then stuffing our faces. It should come as no surprise that I had a rather chubby adolescence. But as we entered different high schools, and drifted apart, I fell away from baking.

Then one foggy summer day, everything changed. I was working as a swim instructor. Berkeley doesn’t get real summers. It is typically terrible until about two in the afternoon, so I had essentially spent several hours trying to convince small children that they wanted to swim as they turned an increasingly unnerving shade of blue. And then there was cake. It was a coworker’s birthday, and they had picked up a sticky chocolate confection from a nearby bakery, and after the cold, uncomfortable and generally unpleasant morning, that cake was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. I was hooked on cake. Every Thursday, for the next year, was Cake Day. I would come home on Wednesday evening to bake, and drag the cake around with me the following day, offering it to any and all takers until it was gone. There were chocolate cakes, pound cakes, a snickerdoodle cake, and as time went by, the recipes got more complex.



I’ve always felt that baking a cake is a great way to tell someone “hey, I like you.” So I was thrilled when Maya asked me to bake her a birthday cake. She had some very specific instructions: lemon cake, with lemon curd, and she didn’t like typical frostings, so it would have to be French meringue or whipped cream. I found a very highly rated lemon cake on epicurious.com, which was gluten-free (not necessary here). I found a recipe for whipped cream frosting, which needed to be stabilized. And I can’t eat eggs in any significant amount, so the lemon curd would be tricky. But all of those problems solved themselves. I made a substitution of both cake and regular unbleached flour for the rice flour and xanthan gum, figured out a good way to get the cream to keep its fluff, and Maya located a solid recipe for egg-free lemon curd, which I fixed up a smidge with some real butter for authenticity.

And so, after years of baking, and years of experimenting, I created my first original recipe. You won’t find it anywhere else, and it’s pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. Which I do.


I heartily concur.


Susie’s Lemon Cake

Cake:
1 cup canola oil
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon finely grated fresh lemon zest
2 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 350°F. Grease 9 inch round pans. Line bottom of each pan with a round of parchment or wax paper, then grease paper.

Whisk together flours, salt, and baking powder until combined well. Stir together milk, canola oil (1 cup), vanilla, and zest in another bowl.

Beat together sugar and eggs in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed just until combined, about 1 minute. Reduce speed to low and add flour and milk mixtures alternately in batches, beginning and ending with flour mixture and mixing until just combined.

Divide batter evenly between cake pans, smoothing tops, and bake until a wooden pick or skewer inserted in center of each cake layer comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes.

Cool cake layers in pans on racks 10 minutes. Run a thin knife around edge of 1 cake layer and remove from pan, placing on rack. Cool layers right side up. Repeat with second layer. Cool layers completely. Remove paper before frosting.


Lemon Curd:
1/4 cup cold water
1/2 cup sugar
3 Tbs Cornstarch
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
2 tsp finely grated lemon zest
Pinch of salt
1-2 tbsp butter

In a saucepan, whisk together water, sugar, cornstarch, and salt until cornstarch is dissolved.

Bring mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. When mixture thickens.

Reduce heat to low and cook for another minute, stirring constantly.

Pour mixture into a non-metallic bowl and add lemon juice and zest, mixing well. Add butter, mix.

Allow to cool and thicken at room temperature.

Can be refrigerated, covered, for several days. Before serving, beat thoroughly to a smooth, spreadable consistency.


Frosting:
1 tsp unflavored gelatin
4 tsp cold water
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/4 cup confectioners' sugar
1/2 tsp lemon extract
zest of one lemon

Combine gelatin and cold water in small saucepan. Let stand until thick. Place over low heat, stirring constantly just until gelatin dissolves. Remove from heat and cool slightly. Whip cream, sugar, lemon extract and lemon zest until slightly thickened. While beating slowly, gradually add gelatin to whipped cream mixture. Whip at high speed until stiff.

Assembly
Cut cake layers in half, and spread lemon curd on bottom half, cut side up. Replace top half (cut side down).

Place one newly reassembled cake on cake plate, and spread generous amount (1 cup or so) of whipped cream frosting almost to edges.

Place second cake on top of the first, and mound remaining whipped cream on top.

Dig in.

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Restorative

This last week or so I seem to be doing not much else but working and sleeping. The sleeping being necessary because I am pretty sure I had some form of Venusian death plague starting last weekend that I refused to acknowledge other than to sleep for nearly 36 hours straight. I got over this just in time to have one of my busiest weeks all year, personally and professionally, and then enjoy the weekend full as it was of a 6 hour class, an admissions meeting for school (hopefully to start in August), and moving furniture.



After weeks like this, simple is better. I ended Sunday night with an impromptu family dinner of turkey burgers with friends. A few weeks ago I made this chicken, and I think this would have worked out nicely as well.

Roasted Chicken, with Lemon and Mint
Serves 2-3

1/2 of a 5lb whole chicken, cut down the breast and backbones
1 medium or 2 small lemons
handful of mint leaves
2 medium cloves of garlic
salt
pepper
olive oil

1) Prepare your whole chicken by cutting it in half up the back bones and breast bones. Reserve the other half for dinner another night (should hold in fridge for up to 2-3 days depending on how fresh it was to begin with, or you can freeze in a large freezer bag).

2) Slice half of the lemon(s) into whole thin slices, should be a complete cross-section of the fruit. Crush the garlic cloves with a fork. Rinse and shake off the mint, it is not necessary for it to be completely dry.

3) Run your fingers under the skin of the chicken to create several deep pockets for stuffing. Place lemon slices, garlic, and mint liberally inside these cavities.

4) Salt and pepper the skin of the chicken. Place skin side down over medium-high heat in a HOT cast iron pan with 2 generous tablespoons of olive oil. Brown well, 7-10 minutes - including a few minutes with the ribs down and skin up.

5) Turn chicken skin side up, squeeze remaining half of the lemon, cut into wedges over the top. Throw the wedges in the pan with the chicken and place the whole pan in a 400 degree oven and roast until the chicken is done, 40-50 minutes. The internal temp will be 165 in the thickest part of the breast and the juices will run clear.

Enjoy with some crusty bread, a quick greens salad, a glass of wine, and your feet up.

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The Sophmore Slump

Nearly a week without cooking anything of consequence. How is a girl supposed to keep her blogging up if there isn't anything to blog about? Well, to be fair my parents were in town and we went out to eat quite a bit. I was hoping to regale you all with visually stunning photos of what I ate, but 1) I forgot to take pictures of most of it, and 2) I think the best thing I had all weekend was a martini at Scoma's in Sausalito. Gin. Extra dry. With an olive. Mmmm... nothing like raw oysters and a big fat Martini to make everything right with the world.

So instead of showing you, I will tell you about the one thing I did make (which I also conveniently failed to take a picture of), Jamie Oliver's Chicken in Milk. It was so good. Go make it. Go. Right now. No, seriously. You need to have made this for yourself yesterday because it really is that good. It is also incredibly simple.

I pretty much never follow a recipe explicitly unless I am unfamiliar with the end product or cooking technique, or if I am baking. This recipe is so simple, straightforward, and practically perfect that the only thing that could be adjusted is one of the cooking instructions. The recipe calls for the lid of your cooking vessel to be off the entire bake time, but another blogger made the accidental discovery that its even better if you leave the lid on for the first hour and then take it off to finish for the last 20-30 minutes. Leaving the lid on for the majority of the cooking time prevents the delicious sauce from evaporating and turning into charcoal at the bottom of the pot, and makes the chicken that much more moist and juicy.

So that is all I have to show for the last week. I'll come up with something better next time, I promise.

P.S. Jamie Oliver just won the 2010 TED Prize to pursue his desire to help revolutionize the way we teach children about food and eating. His work goes hand in hand with Michelle Obama's new Let's Move campaign to fight childhood obesity. There are so many things I could say but I think that these inspiring people and their projects can speak for themselves. Please click on the links to these sites to learn more about these projects, and, if you would like to become more involved, find out ways that you can offer your support.

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