Sunday, July 19, 2009

Lemon-Lime Curd Cake with Blueberries

I stumbled across the delicious looking cake on Vita Arina’s flickr page and started to drool. Now I’m not a big fan of lemon curd (don’t you just hate that name?), but this cake looked scrumptious enough to tempt even my anti-lemon heart.


I started the egg whites beating, mixed up the batter, and then folded the peaked eggs whites into the batter.



Here are the cakes just out of the oven. I over baked them of course (I over bake everything), but they weren’t too, too dry. The cakes had a faint lime flavor and the spongy, airy texture of angel food.


Here is the lime curd in the staging processes. My curd came out much more yellow than Vita Arina’s. It must be the Egg Land’s Best eggs that I used. Notice how bright, almost neon, the yolks are? No Photoshopping, I promise.


The finished curd. Look at the little bits of lime rind suspended in the curd. It makes it looks so old-fashioned and home made.


Next it was time to prepare the whipping cream frosting. The recipe called for gelatin to “stabilize” the heavy whipping cream. I had never done this before, but you know what--It really worked! I took the final pictures of the cake outside in 95 degree heat and 100% humidity, and the cream frosting did not droop or melt one bit. Thanks, Vita. Stabilized whipping cream frosting is a amazing.

Here is the gelatin softening, and then melted. Vita said to heat gelatin over a low fire to liquify it, but I just zapped the bowl in the microwave for 15 seconds at 30% power. Worked fine.




Be careful when you pour the gelatin into the cream. Do it slowly and consistently and keep the beaters going. Some of my gelatin clumped and I had little semi-solid balls of gelatin in the frosting. Nasty.

Next came the assembly. Cake-Curd-Blueberries-Cake-Curd-bulueberries-Cake.



One third of the curd goes between each layer, and the final third goes into the frosting. The curd really added a nice flavor to the whipping cream. Not too citrusy or sweet. Just perfect.


So here is the final cake. Not as nice as Vita Arina’s, but not too bad for a novice like me.