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Last Friday was the vernal equinox. Do you know where your sunshine is?

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This lemon layer cake is the perfect trio of sunny components: bright lemon curd, paired with a fine-crumbed cake, generously slathered in an impossibly light whipped frosting. 

The recipe comes from The Perfect Cake, by America’s Test Kitchen^[1]. I’m presenting it in a bare-bones form, mixed with my voluminous notes. If you like it, consider buying the book, which is filled with a lot of interesting and helpful info that I have not presented here.

Serves 10-12

Lemon Curd Filling

Ingredients to fill a 9-inch, 4-layer cake

1 tsp unflavored gelatin
1 cup lemon juice
10½ oz. (1½ cups) sugar
1/8 tsp salt
4 large eggs plus 6 egg yolks
8 Tbs unsalted butter, cubed and frozen
White cake (see below)
Seven-minute frosting (see below)

How to make the filling:

Because the filling has to cool for several hours, it makes sense to start with that, and then make the cake.

1. Sprinkle gelatin over 2 Tbs of the juice.
2. Over medium-high heat, cook the sugar, salt, and remaining juice. Meanwhile, whisk the eggs and whites. Once the sugar has dissolved and the juice mixture begins to steam, pour it in a slow, steady stream into the eggs, whisking constantly. Return the mixture to the pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches 170°F. Stir in the gelatin. Stir in the butter. Place a bowl onto a scale, tare the weight, and pour the curd through a fine-mesh sieve into the bowl. Make a note of its weight. Press plastic wrap directly on the surface of the curd, knife a few punctures into it, and refrigerate for 4 hours.

Lemon sizes vary, as does the amount of juice you can expect to get from one. Plan to squeeze six lemons, in a worst-case scenario. If you wind up with extra juice, no problem. There are so many ways to use it up. There’s something very satisfying in that the six whites you don’t need for this filling, are exactly the amount you do need for the cake.

White Cake

Ingredients for two 9-inch cake layers (which you will split, to create four layers):

1 cup whole milk, room temperature
6 large egg whites, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
9 oz. (2¼ cups) cake flour
12¼ oz. (1¾ cups) sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
6 oz. (12 Tbs, or 1½ sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 12 pieces and left to soften

How to do make the cake:

This cake uses the reverse creaming method.

1. Prep two 9-inch pans (with parchment). Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

I don’t like to use parchment, because most of the time, it’s unnecessary. However, without parchment, I was able to coax these cakes out of their pans only by using the “slowly swish the pans over the lowest flame your stovetop will produce,” for a good 30-45 seconds. It took two go-rounds of this. Very scary. Use the parchment. 

2. Whisk the wet ingredients, about 100 strokes by hand.

If you don’t want to wait for your milk to come to room temperature, nuke if for about 15 seconds to give it a head start. If you don’t want to wait for your eggs to come to room temperature, give them a bath in the hottest water your tap will produce, somewhere between 110 and 120°F. After five minutes, change the water.

I’d heard that a good way to separate yolks, when you have a lot of them, is to crack all the eggs into a bowl, and then fish out the yolks with a slotted spoon. I tried it while working on this cake, and found it to be moderately successful. The whites cling to the yolks, and it isn’t easy to coax them off when the yolk is in a slotted spoon. I had to finagle them with a second slotted spoon. Once I got the hang of it, it seemed like a decent method, but I doubt I’ll stick with it.

3. Have your robot paddle the dry ingredients, about 30 seconds on lowest speed.
4. Piece by piece, paddle the butter into the flour mixture, lowest speed. Don’t overmix.

Many reverse creaming methods ask you to add a small amount of the liquid to the dry ingredients along with the butter, claiming that it will help to combine the two more cohesively. Feel free to try that.

Note that “softened butter” isn’t butter at the ideal temperature for spreading on pancakes. It’s colder than that. But on the other hand, it is softer than straight-from-the-fridge. The butter should kerhunck a bit as you add it to the mixer, but then blend very quickly. Make sure to stop mixing just as soon as you’ve achieved a crumbly, mealy texture, with some pea-sized chunks. It should take no more than a minute to add the butter and get it to this texture. If you continue to beat the mixture to the point that it begins to form clumps, you’ll wind up with a markedly dense cake.

5. Mix the wet ingredients into the flour mixture in two additions (the second one, a half-cup’s-worth): 1 minute on speed 6 (of 10) for the first, 20 seconds on speed 4 for the second.
6. Divide batter: about 1 lb., 4⅝ oz. per pan. Bake for 23 minutes. When cool enough to handle, remove from pans and cool on racks.
7. Split the fully-cooled cake layers. Use a scale to precisely divide the curd into three equal parts. This will ensure even layers. Spread one third of the curd over one layer. Don’t spread the curd all the way to the edge; go about a half-inch shy. Stack another cake layer on top, spread another third of curd in a similar manner. Continue until you have four cake layers with curd in between each. Subsequent stacking and spreading should’ve pushed the filling right to the edge of the layers. If you need to, push down gently on the top layer to make this happen. The curd should just barely be popping out from the cake layers here and there. Wrap the cake, top and sides, in plastic wrap and refrigerate as you make the frosting.

Seven-Minute Frosting

Seven-minute frosting is very old-school. It’s impossibly light, soft, and fluffy.

Ingredients to frost a 9-inch, double-layer cake generously:

7 oz. (1 cup) sugar
2 large egg whites
1/4 cup water
1 Tbs lemon juice
1 Tbs corn syrup

How to make the frosting:

1. Put everything into a stand mixer’s bowl. Place the bowl over simmering water and whisk until it reaches 160°F.
2. Latch the bowl into the mixer, and whip on speed 4 for 5 minutes (soft peaks), then on 6 for 5 minutes (cool, stiff peaks). Use immediately.
3. Frost the side of the cake. Spread all the rest of the frosting on top.

This particular version of seven-minute frosting isn’t too sweet. It has a light but luxurious texture, just a hint of tang, a beautiful matte glossiness, and impressive definition. It’s at its absolute best when freshly made, so if Paul Hollywood is coming over for dessert, frost the cake no more than a few hours before serving it, and leave it at room temperature.

If you’re serving it to your mother-in-law, who is not knowledgeable enough to be as critical as Paul, but yet is critical enough to pretend that she is, merely aim to frost it day of.

In a day or two, this frosting will turn shiny-glossy and will lose some of its definition. Neither of these things are out-and-out problems, though. Paul would still like it, I’m sure, even if it doesn’t earn you the coveted handshake, and in the end, you might still wind up as star baker. In other words, don’t stress over it. I proudly served pieces of this cake to friends 48 hours after having frosted it.

Four days after it’s been frosted, the frosting that is coating the sides or the cake will start to slide down and pool at the bottom. It won’t actually do this, mind you … it will start to. It will still taste great, and indeed, the cake and filling will have even improved just a smidge.

Seven-minute frosting has a reputation for being temperamental: don’t make it on a humid day, don’t refrigerate it, it might crystalize or seep within 24 hours. The “humid day” business is probably less frequently encountered in our air-conditioned culture, plus I haven’t seen an egg white that could dare not whip in a stand mixer. I did refrigerate this frosting, and it wasn’t a problem. However, you must do so with care. If you leave it directly exposed to the refrigerator’s environment, it will dehydrate and turn gummy. This frosting is too soft to cover with plastic wrap, so I refrigerated the cake in a tightly-sealed cake tote. Regarding weeping, I didn’t encounter it; some people add cream of tartar to the recipe to insure against it. Regarding crystallization, my understanding is that this is the result of not meeting the 160°F cook temperature; I used a candy thermometer and didn’t meet up with this problem.

Let me finish by saying that whatever drawbacks it may have, seven-minute frosting is fantastic. Compared to an Italian meringue, it’s creamier. But compared to whip cream, it’s not. It has all of whip cream’s lusciousness, with none of its heft or depth. It’s able to add luxuriousness to the cake without adding any weight.

We could all use a bit of sunshine in our lives right about now.

Although I live in a densely populated urban environment, it happens to be one with plenty of beautiful parks, the largest of which I happen to live right near. Although because of the pandemic I’m currently hunkered down in my condo – which feels more and more hamster-sized as the days go by – I’ve been making a point of getting out and into the park once a day for a lengthy walk. It’s easy in a large park to keep a safe distance from others. The physical and psychological benefits are critical. Here’s a NY Times article about taking walks during this crisis. It says that places that are in lock-downs such as San Francisco and Milan, exemptions have been made for “engaging in outdoor activity, such as walking, hiking, or running provided that you maintain at least six feet of social distancing.”

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[1] The Editors at America’s Test Kitchen. 2018. “Lemon Layer Cake.” In The Perfect Cake, 138. Boston, MA: Penguin Random House.

Lemon Layer Cake

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. I have no association with America’s Test Kitchen. I’m not going to tell you that they’ve been begging me to develop one, but I’m not going to deny it, either. The truth is, I’m planning to develop my own cooking show called USA Surprise-Quiz Kitchen, where you’re constantly given multiple-choice questions about things I’ve never fully covered on my blog, but were nonetheless buried somewhere in the links I provided. And you’re graded on attendance, so don’t even think about not checking it out once it debuts.  

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