Saturday, June 7, 2008

Lemon Cake

My mother-in-law loves lemon cake. Five years ago for her 60th birthday, I made a fancy lemon cake from Bon Appetit that took two days to make, including making the lemon curd from scratch. She talks about it often and it makes me realize how much doing special things for people really matters. People like to be remembered, especially with food.


This year I wanted to try another recipe, perhaps for something easier. I found a lovely recipe in Country Living magazine, maybe in the April issue. In the magazine there were several different versions of the frosting, including this one featured on the website in yellow. I can't seem to find a picture of the one I copied... but maybe I could scan the photo from the magazine itself?!? The recipe is found at the same link.


It was supposed to be a four layer cake. I stayed up 'til 1 am working on it, making sure that both of the two layer pans were perfectly baked. I went to bed totally exhausted but satisfied, knowing that I had finished the tricky part and would enjoy the decorating during nap time the following day. Friday morning we drove Carl to school. Before we left, I made sure that the cakes were covered up with a towel and far from the edge of the counter. While we were gone, the counter surfer, aka Molly, was engaged in a little surf's up activity. She nabbed one of the layer pans off the counter and ate the pan clean. Hmmmm. Maybe I should know better by now? This isn't her 1st time attacking a special cake in our house. Fortunately, the recipe shows that the cake is just lovely as two layers, so I went for it. Here it is in process. Mmmm.






1 comment:

Stephanie said...

Hi Wife,
I checked out both recipes--and yeah, the BA one is labor intensive but looks amazing. I want to try that one day, but probably not in Luanda where I can imagine that mascarpone costs at least 10 bucks a container. (In Abidjan it was 8). But the buttercream frosting in the second one also looks really good, with marshmallow cream. You've given me cravings....!