Week 8 -- Lemon Chiffon Cake, Yellow Butter Cake, Lemon Curd

This week in lab I made a Lemon Chiffon Cake (technically two, since we didn't have the proper pans), Yellow Butter Cake, and Lemon Curd.

First, I started working on the lemon chiffon cake because it takes the longest to bake. I sifted flour and some sugar with baking powder and salt. Then I mixed oil, egg yolks, water, lemon juice, and vanilla extract in a separate bowl. I combined my liquid ingredients with my dry ingredients. Next, I beat my egg whites until they got foamy, and then added sugar. When the egg whites reached stiff peaks, I stopped beating them. Then I folded my egg whites into the batter. Right before I started to pour my batter in the pans, I realized that I never added lemon zest to the cake. So I quickly zested a lemon, and folded the zest into my batter. Normally, you would bake a cake like this in an angel food cake pan, but RMC only had 3 so I had to use a normal round cake pan. That also affected the way I cooled my cake. In an angel food cake pan, you would cool the cake upsidedown, but I couldn't really do it that way. Chef Mark suggested we improvise and try to rest my cakes on the edges of three wine glasses. In theory it was a good idea, but it left little indentations on the tops of my cakes. Fortunately, they came out of the pans nicely, so I just flipped them over and made the bottom the "top" of my cakes.

Next, I made my yellow butter cake. First, I mixec egg yolks, milk, and vanilla extract. In my mixer, I combined flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until they were blended. Then I added butter and some milk to the dry ingredients and beat it all together for about 2 minutes. Next, I added the egg mixture in three additions. About this time, Chef Mark told me that he thought the recipe he gave us was wrong. The recipe said 6 egg yolks and because other students cake batters were looking really heavy, he thought that the recipe was wrong and maybe should be 6 eggs. So since I had already added the yolks, I had to get 6 egg whites. Chef Mark told me the weight equivalent for 6, so I measured it out and added it. Shortly after, he came and told me that he gave me the wrong measurement, so I had added too many eggs. It didn't seem to affect my cake in a negative way, so it didn't bother me. My cakes rose nicely, and had a good color and texture.

The last thing I made was lemon curd. I put a tablespoon of lemon juice in a bowl and added a little bit of gelatin. Then I heated lemon juice, sugar, and salt on the stove until it was hot, but not boiling. Then I whisked eggs and egg yolks together. I whisked the hot lemon/sugar mixture into the eggs and then returned it to the stove. I cooked the curd until it reached 170 degrees and was thick. Then I stirred in butter, strained, and chilled it. After our lemon curd had chilled, we were supposed to cryovac it. That was a wonderful experience. The cryovac machine is usually my friend, but today it turned against me. It didn't seal my bag, instead it sucked the curd out into the machine and made a huge mess. It was such a pain to clean up, not to mention that I lost 3/4 of my lemon curd. Luckily, I have nice friends who offered to let me use some of theirs the following week if I didn't have enough.

At the end of the night, we put our yellow butter cakes in the freezer and our lemon curd in the fridge. In our next lab, we are going to fill and frost our cakes. I am so excited for that!