Lemon Buttercream

I bought icing sugar in bulk about 4 months ago in expectation of my next cake. Maybe to you that’s ridiculous, but to me that’s prudent planning.

I didn’t know what the cake would be at the time, and there’s no way I could have suspected it would be a 6 egg yolk cake from the 1948 Joy of Cooking. I hadn’t even yet met the person who gave me the book, but you know there will always be a next cake, and you know that icing sugar doesn’t go bad, and you also know that having to take a trip to the store in a Montreal winter can mean the death of unborn cooking or baking plans.

So I took 4 cups of my icing sugar, as instructed by Ms. Rombauer, the Joy of Cooking author and my companion in all things good baking, and blended it with 1/2 cup of soft butter. That’s really not that much butter to ice 2 cakes. If each cake has 8 pieces, that’s 1/4 cup per cake, and only 1 1/2 tsp per slice. There was no butter in the cake itself or in the custard filling, even. I’m not going to call these egg yolk sponge cakes light or anything, but I could have done worse in terms of butterfat content. No pounds of butter here. It wasn’t really intentional, since I only had about this much butter anyway, but the cakes were for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre bake sale, so it was kind of convenient since most Japanese people can’t digest milk very well. Stereotype I know, but if I can make fewer people sick with my baking, I’m all for it.

Anyway, I beat the butter and sugar for a long time because I’m a big believer in fully creaming butter and too much is better than too little (so about 2 minutes. Probably overkill since the butter was nice and soft already, as per Ms. Rombauer’s instructions) and then beat in about 1/4 cup of lemon juice. Pour, taste, pour, taste. I like the icing pretty puckeringly sour to cut the richness of the cake. It should be VERY sweet and PRETTY sour and it needs to be a nice balance between these two.

I should ahave gone back and properly read Irma’s instructions…There is, of course, a foreword to the section on icings. She says for raw icings such as this one you can put the uncooked icing over hot water for 10-15 minutes to get rid of the grainy texture. So I did, and then I didn’t read the part where you’re supposed to beat the heat out of it afterward before icing the cake…Instead, I let it cool on its own, but I didn’t wait quite long enough.

Assembling the cake: I cut each of the 8″ cake layers in half (carefully with a sharp knife!) and spread half the cooled orange custard in the middle. Then I put the tops on like a jelly donut. None of the custard even went over the edge. It was just enough filling. thanks, Irma. The buttercream wasn’t cool yet, though, so I didn’t want to spread it right away and end up with soup icing that ran everywhere.

So I pooled some of it into the centre of the top of the cakes and set them on baking sheets to make the drive in my borrowed car to the JCCCM. I figured I’d do the sides when I got there. That was a stupid idea. I have a few too many of those. The icing had hardened up WAY too much by the time I arrived and there was no way I could ice the sides and make it look like the icing on top blended into the icing in the middle. So I treated it more like fondant and tried to make smooth pieces out of it before sort of attaching them to the cake. It turned into a kind of abstract work of 3D icing art. Well, one cake did. The other I just left as it was, with a pool of icing centred in the middle, and the sides un-iced. I got to slice the cake myself, so it was cool seeing the layers. It wasn’t gorgeous, but it tasted great and people bought it and apparently liked it, and so no, I’m not such a failure. I’m not sure what Ms. Rombauer would think.