Monday, July 18, 2016

Cream Cheese Butter Cake with Light Lemon Curd Buttercream

Bright, blooming flowers are magnets to bees.  Just like how this vibrant yellow cake captivated my daughter's attention.  She was hoping her mischievous snowman ("Snowgies" or "Snow Babies") could sneak away the entire Cream Cheese Butter Cake.  Fortunately, I was quick enough to slice them into ninth.

We both started having one ninth of the cake at the same time, but I stopped half way to get a good shot of the cake.  By then, she had finished her portion and jumped over to photobomb me with her thumbs up, "It's divine, Mum.  The lemon curd is so delicious!!"

 


After weighing the ingredients, I made the lemon curd first.  Comparably, lemon curd was more difficult to make than the cream cheese butter cake since it required a good amount of arm muscles for the continuous stirring, moving away from fire before boiling and straining through fine mesh.  However, it was so worth all the effort - the wonderful taste of lemon curd outweighed everything.

After whisking together the eggs, sugar, lemon and salt over double boiler, the mixture was stirred continuously over fire till it thickened.
  

During the stirring, I was unsure if the mixture has reached the desired thickness and opaqueness, so I kept checking the temperature.  It took a good 20 minutes for me and since unsure, I asked my daughter to read me the paragraphs on lemon curd 3 times.   After that, I pushed the thickened mixture through a double layer fine mesh, which might be too fine since it was not an easy and clean process.  The strained mixture was thick and shiny.

  

I blended in the cold butter with an immersion blender and chilled the mixture in the refrigerator for 2 hours.
 

Meantime, I started baking the cake.   The cake process was straightforward - typical way of Rose's butter cakes.
  

The cake was baked after 35 minutes.

   

One ninth of the cake was not enough for each of us.  Both of us looked at each other and decided to share another half of a ninth.  My daughter told me to put a note in the recipe to slice the cake into sixth next time coz that was apparently a better size :-)

As soon as we finished, a few visitors came by and it did not take long at all for them to finish off the rest of the cake.  Of course, it was a great hit for everyone, including one of them who does not like cheese.  Everyone agreed that the cake was scrumptious and deliciously rich.  The thin layer of tangy lemon curd just made this cake so special - not too sweet and not too heavily frosted.  The texture was dense and looked somewhat coarse, but when put in the mouth, it was so tender and basically melted in the mouth.  Since they finished the cake so quickly, my visitors all concurred that they would need more of the cake to tell me more.

8 comments:

  1. This cake was not big enough!!! Your daughter is so funny. I had a hard time with the curd, too. It took a long time to thicken. I cooled it down over ice with more stirring so my granddaughter could take it home.

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    1. Sure not big enough!! I see, that's why I made the curd first since it requires 2 hours of cooling.

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  2. The thumbs up picture says it all.

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  3. Yes, i love the thumbs up picture! Your blog post has me looking forward to this cake!

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