Daphne's 1st birthday cake

I made this cake for my friend Sylvia's daughter's 1st birthday party.  It's lemon curd with cream cheese icing.  I like this cake because it's nice for summer and everyone really loves the zing of the lemon curd.  The cake itself is a pretty simple orange juice cake that is very moist and tastes great with any kind of icing.  In this case it really lets the lemon curd shine.  And who doesn't love cream cheese icing?  That also goes really well with lemon curd.  They have a complementary tang.

This cake needed to feed 25 people and I'm not super keen on double stacked sheet cakes so I used
2- 12" rounds and 2- 9" rounds.  I tripled the cake recipe, made one batch of lemon curd, and doubled the icing recipe.  I had the perfect amounts of everything- I like to have a little bit of everything left over in case I need to touch something up or just to save in the freezer.

I layered lemon curd in between the 2- 12"s and the 2- 9"s but between the 12" cake and the 9" cake I just spread a nice layer of cream cheese icing.  One thing that I did to make serving the cake easier is I put a tinfoil covered cardboard cake round in between the 9" and 12" cake layers.  This way the top cake can be cut and served, they can remove the cardboard round and then cut the bottom cake.  I put lemon curd on the very top, piped dots around the edges with the cream cheese icing, and wrote on top of the cake with melted butter and semisweet chocolate chips.  Lastly, I threw on some sliced strawberries for color.

Lemon Curd Cake
Recipe from The Night Kitchen Bakery

• Lemon curd
• Yellow cake
• Cream cheese icing