Meltwater of Bluster

[ismo]

Cake . . . Such cake, very frosting . . . . I will be chased by cake in my dreams, if I ever go to sleep. I thought it would be easy . . . . I made this three-layer lemon-orange cake. It sounded simple and pretty. In my fantasy world, I even had time to decorate it with a few flowers. But, as in the sonnet, I found it "in waking no such matter." A kind friend posted a yummy lemon curd recipe that you can make in the microwave. This sounded quick and simple. Unfortunately, while I was melting some butter in the microwave, I blew it up somehow and my entire microwave was thickly coated with the very best butter. If only this had been a recipe for coating your microwave evenly in melted butter, I would have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams! After I cleaned up this fine disaster, I felt kind of gun-shy of the microwave and ended up making the lemon curd the slow way, stirring it over boiling water for ten minutes. Then I made the frosting, which sounds easy but was not because it involves quite a lot of hand-grated lemon and orange zest, plus fresh-squeezed juice. My kitchen is littered with dismembered citrus.

Then I put the cake together and frosted and filled it. Lemon curd is a slippery little critter. The cake is in the refrigerator now, stuck together with toothpicks to keep it from sliding sideways on a frictionless layer of lemon curd. Baking is my forte, if we're talking about flavor, but sometimes the presentation goes a bit pearshaped. My hope is that it will chill into shape overnight and then I can take out the toothpicks and give it a bit of a polish. Everything does taste exceedingly lemony. It's delicious, but I hope not too acute for the palates of the guests. I hope it will mellow a bit overnight and be just lemony enough, perhaps with the addition of a little vanilla ice cream when served. My evening would have made a priceless episode of the Great British Bake-Off, but I think I might have been asked to leave the pavilion. I'm the only baker my family has, though, so they can't get rid of me.

Comments

evenly coated OH NO

[siriosa]

poor lamb. i'm jittery about the melting of the butter, and tend to do it in 15 second chunks. i was just showing orient how the lemon curd is done, and we made a new land speed record: 4 hands are twice as fast as 2, and it only took 4 one-minute spins in the microwave to have goodness. which we immediately put on scones.