Cooking On Sundays

Raven back again, for more cake - and yes, this is old.  After the success of the chocolate cake the week before, I wanted to make more cake, but not chocolate.  I thought a lemon cake might be nice, both because the weather was grand and springy and because I was thinking of the lemon cakes at Seven Stars.
Finding a lemon cake recipe that didn’t need advanced cooking equipment that I didn’t have was a little challenging, though.  Although I was really tempted by the prospect of one lemon-yogurt recipe that gave all the non-yogurt measurements in terms of the emptied yogurt cups, I ended up picking this one from Smitten Kitchen and tweaking it.
I’m the kind of person inclined to follow recipes, though, so there’s not much more to say about it…. okay, maybe there is.
I doubled the recipe, for starters, because I wanted to make enough cake for sixteen people.  This was a huge amount of cake batter. It took:

• 3 cups flour
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 cups plain whole-milk yogurt
• 2 cups plus 1 tablespoon sugar
• 6 extra-large eggs
• 4 teaspoons grated lemon zest (3 lemons, which is a little short)
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• A bottle of lemon juice

I was not in the mood for squeezing lemons, and they were wanted for the curry Stanza was making anyway, so I bought a bottle of real lemon juice instead.  It worked out.  I did use the zest, though.  The original recipe also suggested using blueberries in this, but that made it look breakfasty, and besides, I wanted chocolate. So no blueberries.
Once I mixed all the ingredients but the lemon juice, into last week’s leaky pan it - half of it, really - went.  Much less leaky this time.  While that was baking (350F for about 50 minutes) I poured some lemon juice in with the extra tablespoon of sugar and heated that until the sugar dissolved.  I wanted the cake really damp, so I used about a cup.  Baking this takes a while, so I also melted some semi-sweet dark chocolate for the planned topping, so I’d have that ready.  Having only one pan, I did only one part at a time, but that ended up being for the best, as it gave the bottom layer enough time to rest that it was nice and stable.
When the cake had finished baking and set properly, I soaked it in lemon juice.  Yep, soaked.  This is a pretty porous cake, so it’s possible to pour the juice in pretty quickly, but it’s a good idea to let it sit a while afterward so it doesn’t drip or ooze when you move it to a serving plate.
The expected sixteen people had by now been whittled down dramatically, so rather than make two separate cakes, I opted to make a two-layer cake.  I soaked the second layer separately before putting it on top, and for once, thankfully, I even managed to get the layers on straight.  This is not a cake you can adjust without tearing the heck out of both top and bottom, so if you try it, be careful.
Basic structural success achieved, I pulled out my secret weapon, the chocolate.  I drizzled melted chocolate all over the top and sides, but it still seemed to be missing something…. something decorative and lemony….
What I was looking for were the New England-style gummy lemon slices like the ones in the picture, but, as it turns out, you really can only get those in New England.  (Hunh!)  Instead, I used more traditional gummy lemons, cut in half.
It came out rather nicely, although there wasn’t nearly as much chocolate taste as I’d hoped.  When I do it again, I’d put chocolate between the layers, as one of the eaters suggested.  It was reviewed as “AWESOMZORS!!!eleventy-one!!etc…” though, so I’m pleased.

We’ve got a a triple hitter here, especially with the salad being bigger than the entree, and the cake being fancy enough to impress everyone….

We started with salami and mushrooms.  Really, my friend made these, and it literally was just fancy salami and some portobello and criminy mushrooms.  The ingredient list is already done!  It was just stirred fried in olive oil, and that was that.  We kind of didn’t make enough, despite usual cooking style, although I suggested we throw everything else in there too, we didn’t.  Also, I almost forgot to mention, we boiled some pasta to go with this.

I made a salad where I did live up to my reputation of “everything goes in it”.  I planned on following this butternut squash salad recipe, but in the end, I only used the salad dressing.  In this salad I put:

• Garbanzo beans
• String beans
• Green cauliflower (I think it’s advertised as “broccoflower” or something)
• Half a red onion
• A bunch of cilantro
• Green bell peppers
• The remains of a small red cabbage

I steamed the cauliflower just a little, boiled the garbanzos enough that they were cooked, but I just did this so that they were soft enough to eat, and I did this ahead of time so that it was a cold salad.

And I made a tahini dressing out of:

• Tahini (in a jar) (I didn’t make it)
• Finely chopped garlic (one of these days I’ll get a press)
• Some of the onions above got into the garlic, so they were finely chopped as well
• The juice of three lemons
• Olive oil
• Salt

I mixed with the quantities in the dressing until I feared that I wouldn’t have enough lemon juice to balance it if I added any more tahini, and while straight the salad dressing was not the best.

Then the cake.  I didn’t really make the cake, I just helped pour and such, so I might suddenly hand the keyboard to raven, but the cake, if I remember, started something like this:

• Half a block (not stick, like two sticks) of butter
• A block of fancy dark (60%) chocolate (9.7 oz, I think)

I’m stealing this.  So the recipe came off the inside of the chocolate wrapper, because I had planned to make this cake and been thwarted by Stanza’s kitchen.  (You might have noticed that he doesn’t seem to go in for precisely measuring things; he doesn’t have a measuring cup, and there’s no way I’m making imprecise buttercream by hand.)  I needed an emergency easy recipe.  Fortunately for all of you, Scharffen Berger (the Co-op had fancy chocolate, what can I say) puts the recipe online.  You need:

• One brick of chocolate, 9.7 oz, give or take a smidge
• 7 oz of butter. (Half a brick, equivalent to 7 tablespoons.)
• Five eggs
• A cup of white sugar

I whacked the chocolate into little pieces with a knife that was probably bigger than was wholly safe (I’d recommend a hammer instead; this was one thick brick of chocolate.) Then I melted the butter and the chocolate together - they recommended a double boiler, but I was feeling lazy and this chocolate has enough cocoa butter that it was okay in the microwave.  The eggs and sugar went into another bowl until the liquid chocolate was done, at which point they all got mixed together.

The recipe is one of those chocolate cake recipes that tells you to bake it in another pan full of water.  We tried this and found - panic panic! - that our newly acquired springform pan leaked, so I dried the batter out as best I could while Stanza tried to see if the pan could be made non-leaky.  Finally we gave up and cooked the thing without the second pan of water, but with a piece of tinfoil underneath just in case.  Three-fifty for an hour and a half.

The finished product was not the best looking cake ever, since it was kinda flat, so I thought I’d make it prettier by covering the whole thing in homemade whipped cream.  I halved the amount of sugar I normally put in whipped cream and added a little vanilla, because the cake was really sweet.  There was some old nutella in the cabinet, so I mixed a little milk into it and spread that on top.  (The cooking style around here is perilous and catching, let me warn you.)  Then I covered it in whipped cream and chopped some hazlenuts up for the top.  Done, and it even looked fairly impressive.  Everyone certainly said it was tasty enough - but how can you go far wrong with that much  chocolate involved?