Week 32: Limoncello Cake

Limoncello Cake

This week we were supposed to make Italian Cream Cake but after looking at the recipe, we decided against it. Why? Coconut! I like coconut but not a fan of it in baked goods (mostly a texture thing) and everybody else dislikes it in just about everything! What would we do with an entire cake that nobody would eat? So, while thinking of a different cake to make we realized that our favorite dessert (mine and Aubrey’s) at our favorite Italian restaurant just so happens to be a cake…and a darn good one! We found our replacement! We are going to try to make a “copy cat” recipe but we won’t know if the recipe is close until we make one.

I have never had limoncello in anything other than this cake. After a quick Google search, I discovered that limoncello is liqueur that is made by macerating lemon peels in a neutral grain spirit alcohol for several weeks. The peels are then removed and the alcohol is diluted with simple syrup. It sounds like a liqueur that I should have in the cabinet anyway so might as well buy some for this cake!

Since this cake probably isn’t considered a “traditional dessert”, we doubted we would find it any of our cookbooks and went straight to the internet for our recipe. The dessert we were trying to model ours after has a mascarpone frosting so our search had to include a similar frosting. We settled on one from thespruceeats.com.

As usual, we made a few substitutions, mostly the sugar wherever we could. I’m going to point out that this is a very high calorie dessert and absolutely not a healthy option, of course, desserts don’t always have to be healthy. We made the lemon curd as written because our previous experience with sugar substitutes in a lemon curd did not produce what we wanted so, this time, we made it with real sugar (we used super fine). (With our previous attempt, the sugar substitute crystalized and was grainy…NOT good.) We substituted Sola for the sugar in the cake and we didn’t add any white chocolate shavings (even though our favorite restaurant version does have the white chocolate shavings). While we would like to use a whole wheat flour we opted to use a mixture of cake flour and all-purpose flour again since we are trying to make a cake similar to what we have eaten not to mention the whole wheat would have made it too dense. (We were going to make it will 100% cake flour but we ran out. We used what we had which was about 1 1/2 cups.)

Ingredients

For the Curd:

• 3 lemons, juiced and zested
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 6 large egg yolks
• 1/2 cup cold butter, cut into pieces

For the Cake:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup limoncello (lemon-flavored liqueur)
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• White chocolate shavings, optional

For the Frosting

• 16 ounces mascarpone cheese
• 1 1/4 cups lemon curd
• 2 cups whipping cream, or heavy cream, chilled
• 2/3 cup confectioners sugar

Directions

1. Make the lemon curd: Measure out the freshly-squeezed lemon juice. Add any additional lemon juice, if necessary, to make 1/3 cup. 
2. In a medium heat-safe mixing bowl that will fit over saucepan (or top of double boiler), whisk together lemon juice and cornstarch.
3. Whisk in the sugar, lemon zest, and egg yolks.
4. Bring 2 inches of water to a simmer in a saucepan or bottom of double boiler. Place the bowl on top.
5. For 10 to 20 minutes, whisk the egg mixture until thick enough to coat back of spoon.
6. Whisk in the butter a few pieces at a time until each piece is completely melted.
7. Scrape the lemon curd into a non-metallic bowl. Cover the top of curd with plastic wrap, lightly pressing until it completely covers the surface.
8. Place in the refrigerator for cooling.
9. Make the cakes: Preheat the oven to 350 F.
10. Lightly grease two 9-inch round cake pans and then line them with parchment paper. Grease and flour the parchment paper as well.
11. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt with a wire whisk. Set aside.
12. Cream the butter and sugar together in a bowl using an electric mixer.
13. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.
14. Combine the limoncello and lemon juice and zest in a small bowl. Add the flour alternating with the buttermilk and limoncello mixture. Mix until combined.
15. Divide the batter evenly between the prepared pans. Bake the cakes for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through. Cool completely in the pans.
16. Make the Frosting: Cream together the mascarpone cheese and lemon curd in a bowl.
17. Whip the chilled whipping cream or heavy cream until almost stiff—about 5 to 6 minutes.
18. Slowly add powdered sugar until completely combined.
19. Fold the cheese and curd mixture into the whipped cream.
20. Assemble the cake: Once the cakes are cool, remove the limoncello cakes from the pans. Place one layer on serving plate.
21. Frost top with 1/3 of the frosting.
22. Place the second cake layer on top.
23. Frost the top with 1/2 of the remaining frosting.
24. Use the remaining frosting to frost the sides of the cake.
25. Decorate the top with the optional white chocolate shavings.
26. Serve and enjoy! This cake will keep for a few days covered and stored in the fridge, it’s important to keep it chilled due to the mascarpone and whipped cream.

Our Experience

This recipe had several steps. Since the lemon curd needed to cool, that was our first priority and that’s the order I listed the recipes too.

I really thought we were going to have a paste because there didn’t seem to be much liquid, but there was plenty!

It didn’t take as long as I thought it would but it wasn’t quick either. Once again remember, as I discovered in a previous dessert, the yellow isn’t from the lemon, it is from the egg yolks! Since the curd was really warm the butter melted pretty quickly even though the cubes were pretty big.

Nothing unique about the preparation of this cake. We prepared the pans. The instructions stated to grease, paper, grease, and flour the pans. Normally, I would just put the parchment round on the bottom of the cake pan but the blog we were looking at appeared to have it on the sides as well so I went ahead and did the sides too. We got them ready to go because nobody wants a cake that looks like our pound cake! 😉

The addition of yolks to the creamed butter and sugar looks mealy, but exactly what it should look like. We used the KitchenAid mixer with the paddle attachment.

The rest of the liquids mixed together don’t look very appetizing to drink in our mixing “cup”.

We have become a little “OCD” (OK, we have been for awhile) when we are baking and we weighed each pan to make sure each one had the exact same amount of batter in them.

While the cakes baked, we made the frosting. The cheese and lemon curd were mixed together. The lemon curd recipe made a little more than we needed. We probably could have used all of it without any problems, but, we wanted to try the leftovers on something else. The lemon curd was really good and would have been nice on a scone or maybe a pancake. I’ve never purchased or eaten mascarpone by itself so this was a good time to try it. Aubrey said it was like a plain, flavorless cream cheese. Which, is a fairly accurate description as far as I was concerned.

We decided to make our own whipped cream rather than use Cool Whip. We could have made it sugar free but our powdered sugar substitute option would have created the cooling effect and we weren’t willing to go that route. So, the whipped cream is also full sugar. Well, at least no sugar substitute. We did reduce the sugar to about half what the recipe called for. The sweetness of whipped cream should definitely be to taste when you make it yourself.

I tasted the frosting and it was almost exactly like the frosting we were trying to copy. It’s such a light and lightly sweet frosting that the cake can easily take a lot of it. While I wanted to load it up and the recipe created more than enough to do so, Aubrey didn’t want there to be more frosting than cake so she reined me in. (I still think it could have used more!…So weird, me wanting more frosting!!)

What we liked.

This was our first layer cake of our year of baking. It was a winner!! It received a 4 out of 4 (Logan doesn’t even try the lemon desserts anymore). The frosting is very close to our favorite restaurant’s version. It is definitely a keeper.

The weird thing is, I don’t love cake and really dislike (most) frosting. In grade school, I would actually find a reason skip birthday parties because I didn’t want to be the weirdo who scraped the frosting off the cake. I even had a slice of watermelon for a birthday “cake” one year. (Who was I kidding, everybody knew I was the weirdo anyway. 🙂 ) For me, the worst part of cake was the frosting. Most are heavy, thick, and pure sugar. But this frosting is delicious! It is the whipped cream base for sure!! It is light and fluffy and has just the right amount of sweetness. With the lemon curd, this frosting also has a tartness to it that I really enjoyed.

The cake had good flavor and a denser texture than the cake we were trying to recreate but not heavy. It was really moist too. It didn’t have a really strong lemon flavor either. I even think Logan could have eaten it if she had tried it.

For someone who doesn’t really love cake and frosting, I think this cake is delicious!

What we would change.

While this cake was delicious, the cake itself missed the mark if we were trying to recreate our favorite restaurant recipe. We might use our vanilla cake recipe and add some lemon juice, zest, and limoncello to see if that one is closer. We were thinking the cake needed to be lighter and fluffier to duplicate the restaurant version. Oh, and I would have added more frosting. We had about 1/3 of the recipe left over.

What we learned.

We made a lemon curd that wasn’t grainy! We also learned what mascarpone cheese was and how to use it in a recipe. Finally, not to forget the limoncello. Now that I have a nearly full bottle of it, I might have to research some mixed drinks so I can use it.

Until next week, Happy Baking!