Arnold Palmer Cake: Part Three

Lemon Tea Cake

• 115 g (8 T) butter (preferably Plugrà) [See my note on this topic in my 3/10/12 entry]
• 300 g (1 1/2 C) sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 egg yolks
• 65 g (1/3 C) grapeseed oil
• 110 g (1/2 C) buttermilk¹
• 70 g (1/4 C) lemon juice
• 4 g (1 t) lemon extract (Whole Foods and Harvest Co-Op in Central appeared to only have alcohol-free lemon flavoring.)
• 185 g (1 1/2 C) cake flour
• 20 g (9 bags) Lipton black tea leaves
• 4 g (1 t) baking powder
• 4 g (1 t) kosher salt

Mise en place


Cake batter ready to go into a 350° F oven for thirty minutes. I think I've used my stand mixer so much in a little over a month that at least a couple weeks ago I've thrown the tilt of the head out of alignment; therefore, the cake isn't 100% homogenized but it's easy to hide.
Finally bothered to twist the screw clockwise a tad after this though.


And 30 minutes passes.


Stamping out the cake rings. Lesson learned this time is that it's useful to stamp out parts of the circle instead of doing my best to try to stamp out two complete circles from a quarter-sheet pan.


Tosi says to use scraps to build the bottom layer of the cake that no one will ever see... Unless of course your entire cake collapses in on itself as it did on my trial run on Sunday. Oh, I tried to be careful, but certainly I wasn't careful enough. "Judy, please pack your knives and go," Padma Lakshmi as if I'd ever be cooking at such the high, hyper-restaurant-paced level that puts you in the running on Top Chef.


A cake layer smeared with lemon mascarpone. Essentially, it's lemon curd lightened up (I think that's the turn for it...) with a bit of mascarpone, an Italian cheese often associated with tiramisu.


The non"pectic-nh" pectin I used this time was not at all quite as successful as when I used the Ball brand pectin at the TAGS hardware store in Porter. Hopefully this doesn't lead to obvious architectural failure when this cake is served two Saturdays from now, but HEY!, I didn't break any layers so far!


What... I don't break any layers at all?!

Yes of course I see the crack, but a crack is not a full break.


All composed and with just a bit of a saran wrap and ready for a 2-week hibernation in the freezer.


Trial run cake before it collapsed. Looks an awful lot like the professional version except a little crooked as I'll never let Joe A. finish saying.


So far I haven't served an actual "slice" of this to anyone. This is what remained after composing the trial run cake. Good lord, I can just see how stupidly convenient it is to make a cake from a box and just ice it with canned frosting, but it makes my skin crawl.
Hopefully I can offer actual slices to my family on March 24th.

¹Excerpts from the Wiki for Buttermilk:

Originally, buttermilk was the liquid left over from churning butter from cream. Traditionally, before cream could be skimmed from whole milk, the milk was left to sit for a period of time to allow the cream and milk to separate. During this time, naturally occurring lactic acid-producing bacteria in the milk fermented it. This facilitates the butter churning process, since fat from cream with a lower pH coalesces more readily than that of fresh cream. The acidic environment also helps prevent potentially harmful microorganisms from growing, increasing shelf-life. However, in establishments that used cream separators, the cream was hardly acidic at all.

Commercially available cultured buttermilk is milk that has been pasteurized and homogenized (if 1% or 2% fat), and then inoculated with a culture of lactic acid bacteria to simulate the naturally occurring bacteria in the old-fashioned product. Some dairies add colored flecks of butter to cultured buttermilk to simulate residual flecks of butter that can be left over from the churning process of traditional buttermilk.

Condensed buttermilk and Dried buttermilk have increased in importance in the food industry.

And what does all the food literature I've read have to say on the topic? Well, that buttermilk in the dairy case is certainly not real buttermilk and since the stuff is used so sparingly I wouldn't buy the stuff. Different authorities support the use of clabbered milk (milk mixed with a bit of lemon juice or white vinegar and left to get lumpy) or powdered buttermilk which is found in the baking aisle of most conventional supermarkets. I'll go with the dried stuff, particularly when baking, but take note to add the buttermilk powder with the other dry ingredients and the reconstituting water with the wet.