Lemon Curd Cake

Happy Birthday Jenn!!

This is the quintessential spring cake. For some reason it's a big hit at baby showers. If you like lemon, this is the only cake for you. The flavor combinations are perfect, the cake is subtle and lets the lemon curd and cream cheese icing shine. And you know I love that it's the easiest damn cake in the entire world to make. I made the lemon curd, cake, and cream cheese icing in an hour plus baking time. AN HOUR. Just get yourself organized and use your kitchen aid well and you too can bust out the perfect cake in one hour. This doesn't include my favorite part though- assembling the cake and decorating it. That can take me about 30 minutes. It all depends on how fancy we're getting with the decorations.

Yellow Cake Recipe Here

Lemon Curd Recipe Here

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:

8 oz cream cheese
8 oz butter (2 sticks) @ room temp
1 tsp vanilla
3 c powdered sugar

Method:

Cream the butter and cream cheese in your electric mixer.
Add the vanilla.
Add the powdered sugar 1/2 cup at a time. Watch out cuz it's going to blow all over the place. That's why you're adding it 1/2 cup at a time. I add it when the mixer is off and then turn it on low and mix between each addition.

Assembling the cake:

Everything should be room temp or slightly still chilled from the fridge- basically don't ice a hot cake and don't use hot lemon curd. Let it all cool down.
Cut each of your cakes in 2 horizontally giving you 4 total layers. (I've been really into 4 layers lately).
Give the cream cheese icing a quick beat in the mixer to get it nice and fluffy- don't just ice with it right out of the fridge.
Ice the sides with a light layer of icing first- a base coat if you will. Just get it all covered.
In between each layer of cake spread cream cheese icing and then lemon curd on top of that.
On the very top, again, icing then lemon curd so that the top is yellow and we can write on the curd with icing.
I'm leaving the sides of this cake un-iced so you can see the layers.
Then I just did a little piping around the top edge and embellished a little.

The traditional way to assemble this cake is leave it in 2 layers, put lemon curd in the middle, ice the outsides and the top with cream cheese and then put a final coat of curd over the top of the cake. The white icing under the curd makes it look very yellow.

Have fun with it, decorate with strawberries or fresh flowers or icing roses. Swiss dots are fun too. You can also add a little food coloring to some of the icing and write on the cake, cream cheese icing is a good consistency for that.