Chateau Gateau

Alana

Yesterday was my half-brother’s birthday so I offered to bake a cake for the party. He requested lemon, so I pulled up my post from Stephen’s Birthday Cake. 

I looked back on my previous post with this recipe and noted that I found the middle/non-blueberry layer a little bit dry. I figured I could fix that by mixing blueberries into the entire batch of batter. Unfortunately this did not fix my dry-cake issue. The blueberry batter didn’t rise as much as it should have; I ended up having to make another half batch of batter so there would be enough cake.

The second thing that I needed to address this time around was the lemon curd. Last time it all oozed out the side, despite me piping frosting around the edge. Really this entailed using less curd, despite the recipe calling for 1 cup between each layer… That would be WAY too much!

The puppies are curious about cake! Yay for house sitting!

Here is the revised ingredient list for my 1 ½ batch of cake. The rest of the instruction are to be found here for the cake and frosting, and here for the lemon curd. The frosting is still a single batch, but I definitely found that I had JUST enough to ice the cake-and-a-half so you might want to 1 ½ that as well. 

Blueberry Lemon Birthday Cake

Ingredients

For the curd:

• 4 lemons (or 6 Meyer lemons), or 2 oranges, or 5 limes (or 8 Key Limes), preferably organic
• 2 whole eggs plus 4 egg yolks
• 1 cup sugar (200 grams) (7 ounces)
• 4 tablespoons (60 grams) (2 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature and cut into small even cubes

For the cake:

• 3 ½ cups plus 1 tablespoon (435 g) all-purpose flour, sifted
• 3 teaspoons (13.5 g) baking powder
• 1 ½ teaspoon (10.5 g) salt
• 3 cups fresh blueberries
• ¾ cup (180 ml) sour cream
• ¾ cup (180 ml) whole milk
• 3 teaspoons (15 ml) pure vanilla extract
• ¾ teaspoon (3.75 ml) pure lemon extract
• 1 ½ teaspoon (7.5 ml) lemon zest
• 1 ½ cup (3 sticks) (340 g) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 ¼ cups (450 g) white sugar
• 6 large eggs, at room temperature

For the frosting:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) (227 g) unsalted butter, softened
• 2 teaspoons (10 ml) lemon zest
• 5 cups (625 g) icing sugar, sifted
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) fresh lemon juice
• ¼ cup (60 ml) whipping cream (35% cream)
• ¼ teaspoon (1.25 ml) pure lemon extract
• a pinch of salt
• yellow food gel, optional