Monday, May 24, 2010

Torta al Limone Ricetta di Ricerca

Ohhhh Lemon cake.  I've been working on a lemon cake recipe for years.  This time, I took my usual lemon recipe (prone to sinking in the middle... causes a sink-hole of frosting when you cut it) and crossed it with my old Joy of Cooking recipe for white cake.  What I got was this.


Isn't that beautiful?  The cakes turned out wonderfully coloured and didn't fall down.  However, I found this recipe to be devoid of lemon flavour, and ridiculously dense with a very large crumb.  I considered sharing the recipe here, but it's really not the best cake ever, so I've withheld it.  It tastes a little bit baking powedery, and a little like corn bread or biscuits or both.  It isn't bad, but it's not really cake either.

On to the frosting:

I've done a lot of frostings on the fly before, they're not too hard to trouble shoot if you know which order to put things in, but the problem here was I wasn't paying attention and poured ALL the lemon juice from one lemon into it instead of 3 Tbs.  Whoops!  Now I've got all the lemon frosting EVER hanging out in my fridge.


All that lemon caused the butter to separate into tiiiny particles.  It doesn't taste bad at all, but it looks weird and it's too thin to spread properly.  The large lumpy bits are lemon zest, by the way.


Awwwww, isn't it cute?  I used my fantastic 6in pans for this cake, and put it on a desert plate.  You can see all the rather-too-thin icing coming out the center.  I mixed julienned almonds into the frosting for the center.


And finished!  It came out rather lovely, despite the frosting sinking down the sides a bit.  The outsides are coated in coconut, and there's a ring of more julienned almonds 'round the top.  This cake took 4 hours to bake/build, tasted pretty good, but wasn't perfect.  I think I'll try again in a few weeks.

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