I recently made two cakes, for two family birthday parties. The first one was a bit more elaborate (for me).
The apple cake I made for Christmas was from Sally’s Baking Addiction and was everything I want my cakes to be. It was fluffy and moist with great flavor! So when I started looking for the birthday cake I was going to make for the Saturday party, I went straight to Sally. I made a lemon blueberry cake. Since it was a celebration cake, I did three 8-inch layers. I don’t have a lot of round cake pans, but at some point I bought a set a three disposable 8-inch cake pans. Finding those felt lucky. To bring out both flavors, my layers were a lemon curd and a blueberry compote. Sally’s recipe recommends cream cheese frosting, but I decided to try a Swiss meringue buttercream.
This whole process took me about four days in order for me to spread everything out and not have to do all of the work in one or two days.
The Fillings
I made the blueberry compote first, and it turned out pretty meh. It was too sweet and it was very thin. In the end, I decided to fold in unsweetened whipped cream to make it slightly less sweet and thicker so it wouldn’t just soak into the cake. While I wasn’t in love with the result, it served its purpose of adding some blueberry flavor.
I’ve made lemon curd a few times. I absolutely love lemon curd. This was a little stressful. I was using the whole eggs - yolks for the curd and whites for the buttercream. This seemed like a perfect system, but the execution was not great. I have separated eggs so many times with just my hands, and it has never gone this poorly. It’s very important that no fat (yolk) is in the buttercream in the initial stages, which led me to err on the side of letting some whites in the yolks if I was having trouble separating that last bit of yolk and white. A bit of egg white ended up scrambling in my lemon curd. Luckily a quick strain fixed that issue and the curd was smooth and very lemony.
The Frosting
The only frostings I have made is basic American buttercream and cream cheese frosting. Both are sweeter than I like, so I was looking for something different, and decided on Swiss Meringue Buttercream. Aside from wanting a less sweet frosting, I also used it as an opportunity to practice making meringue, which I had not previously done!
I read a few different recipes and they were quite similar, just slightly different quantities of sugar and eggs, so I decided to go with Sally’s version, with two small tweaks from Stella Parks’ recipe on Serious Eats. The two tweaks I took from Stella were: vanilla bean in addition to vanilla extract and toasted sugar instead of plain granulated sugar. (Toasted sugar is just granulated sugar that has been toasted in the oven. Stella recommends it as a way to tone down sweetness and add complexity to recipes that call for granulated sugar).
My biggest challenge was the egg whites and sugar never reached 160 degrees on the double boiler. Sally gives both the temperature and the cue of it being done when you can not feel individual granules of sugar. Since it wasn’t reaching the specified temperature but the sugar was fully dissolved, I moved on to the next stage.
Next up was beating the cooked sugar and egg whites. Mine beat up pretty quickly and I moved on to adding the butter. I will say that the end result was…fine. When I tried the frosting that night, I didn’t really like it, it still tasted pretty sweet to me and it didn’t have the complexity I was hoping it would from the toasted sugar and two formats of vanilla.
But, things got better and worse. Once the frosting had time to meld, I came to really like the flavor. I made the frosting on Thursday evening and pulled it out Saturday morning to come to room temperature. Sally’s instructions were to beat it to reconstitute it, which I did, but I don’t think I did it enough because it was a little it broken, although it still had good flavor and texture.
The Cake
Sally’s Lemon Blueberry Cake recipe uses butter instead of oil and was definitely denser than her other cakes that I have made. But it was incredibly moist and had great flavor. I would definitely use this recipe again.
The Final Result
This all came together great! My husband told me it was the best thing he has had that I have baked. You can see in the pictures how the frosting separated, but it still tasted great!
Another Cake!!
Literally in the middle of working on the lemon blueberry cake, my aunt texted to make plans to celebrate my little cousin’s fifth birthday. I offered to make the cake for the party and was told she really liked chocolate. Luckily, I have the same cake preferences, so I made a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.
I described this to a friend as “tasting like a cake mix, but better.” I grew up with cake mix cakes, so that’s what I want in the birthday cakes I make and this one hit the mark. The frosting was ridiculously good. I highly recommend both recipes. I used leftover Swiss Meringue Butter cream to decorate the cake. Sally has instructions on how to fix broken Swiss Meringue Buttercream (basically you melt it down and rewhip it) which worked like a dream! The texture was smooth. Overall I am super happy with how it turned out.
I’ll be back next week with a pie fail. Whomp whomp.