This post is mostly pictures again, because I’m a perpetual procrastinator. Actually, it’s because I have way better things to do with my time than sit in front of the computer these days. Like cutting down a lilac tree with a chainsaw. But that’s not food related, so I’m not supposed to talk about it.

First, the cast of characters.

Banananas and Crème Fraiche

Eggs and Vanilla

Turbinado Sugar

Oil (to keep it soft even when cold)

Dry ingredients

So, you mix together the bananananana (sorry, sometimes I get carried away with that word) mixture, and the egg mixture, then beat that up with the turbinado sugar. Sift over the flour mixture, and mix some more. Somewhere in here, the oil goes in, but I don’t exactly remember where. Go buy the book if you need to know. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and bake.

Ready for the oven

Here’s where I’m forced to agree with Raymond. I found the food processor rather unnecessary, twice. The first with pureeing the bananas, and the second was when making the frosting. If I had two work bowls for my food processor, or a usable dishwasher (or both), I might not mind, but when you’re faced with this, when only halfway through baking a cake, it’s a bit distressing:

Ooof. That was quite a mess.

On to the frosting. Oh look. We’re using the food processor again!

Butter and cream cheese

Melted white chocolate

I actually found that for the small amount of frosting, my food processor was virtually useless, so I ended up dirtying the workbowl of my stand mixer again and giving the frosting a good beating with the beater blade.

My cake came out slightly underdone, so I ended up putting it back in the oven after removing the cake strips. That still didn’t stop it from sinking in a weird off-center spot. I think my oven’s getting worse every day.

Cake, with frosting lurking in the background.

No worries. The slight depression caused by the sinkage made a great place to fill with frosting.

Mmmm.

A sneak peek to next week: Whoopie pies are The Best Thing Ever. That is all.

I’m sitting here finishing off the last lonely piece that my co-workers left behind, listening to the train running by just across the street. This recipe was really easy. The hardest part was probably washing the food processor twice. Once after grating the carrots, and again after making the frosting.

Sugar, Eggs, Oil and Vanilla

Flour mixture, raisins, carrots (and prepared pans)

Ta-da!

Ok, maybe not quite that easy, but pretty close. Close enough that I didn’t get pictures of the intermediate steps. Basically, you mix together the wet, sift together the dry, add the dry to the wet, then stir in your carrots & raisins (optional). Pour into the pans, bake, cool 10 minutes, remove from pans, cool. Making the frosting is just a matter of mixing together melted (but not hot) white chocolate, butter, cream cheese, and crème fraiche. I was going to use sour cream, but we hit up the local “gourmet” food store, and it turns out crème fraiche wasn’t really all that pricey, considering the usual price of just about anything at that place.

I took (most of) the cake into work today, and it just about all disappeared. There’s one guy who almost always seems to be working from home on days when I leave treats in the office, or he’s on his commute when I send out the email notifying my co-workers, and it’s all gone by the time he gets in. He was especially upset that he missed the pumpkin cheesecake. I was working away this afternoon when he came up to my cube and danced a jig to celebrate the fact that there was still some cake left. Everyone needs a Jamaican Software Architect in their lives!

This cake was really moist and flavourful. I think I’d reduce the quantity of raisins next time, or leave them out entirely if I’m expecting hubby to eat it. He wasn’t a big fan of the quantity of raisins in it, and I found it a bit hard to cut clean pieces. I definitely enjoyed it, though. I like the fact that there was no extra sugar added to the frosting — just what was in the white chocolate.

My favourite non-fiction books!

Curd Mise en Place

See all the lemon zest in there under the strainer? Yeah, I misread the recipe and used all of my zest there, rather than saving some for the cake. Oops. On to cooking the curd. Our kitchen has such bad lighting that I couldn’t tell when it went from translucent to opaque, but I can see it clearly now in the pictures!

Translucent

Opaque!

As someone else mentioned, once you’ve done this sort of thing a few times, it becomes fairly intuitive as to when it’s properly cooked. It doesn’t even take as much practice as you might expect.

Next day was making the cake layers. I decided to do the entire batch in a single 12″ square pan. This way I could cut it in half, torte each half, and stack it all up. This also meant I could cut it ahead of time into little individual portions (picture later). The cake is a fairly standard butter cake, but the addition of white chocolate provides a wonderful tenderness.

Cake Mise en Place

I expected the batter to take me a little longer to mix up than it did, so I ended up having to keep the prepared cake sitting on the counter for a bit while I waited for a sourdough loaf to finish baking. It turns out I didn’t wait long enough and the sourdough ended up doughy, but my husband and I are enjoying it as toast. So, into the prepared pan the batter goes. I put a flower nail upside down in the centre of the pan first, as a bit of a heating core. The batter was so thin in the pan that I was sure this would be next to impossible to torte, but I forged ahead anyway.

12 inch square with flower nail

The cake came out perfectly level with a beautiful crumb.

Cut cake with sourdough in background

So, I stacked the layers with a piece of greaseproof cardboard in between, wrapped them up and stored them overnight in the fridge.

Next up: the white chocolate lemon buttercream!

I took my mise en place pictures twice. See if you can spot where I went wrong, before I re-read the recipe and fixed my mistake.

Buttercream Mise en Place 1

Buttercream Mise en Place 2

If you guessed that I should be using the saucepan for simmering water instead of directly for melting my butter, white chocolate and scraped vanilla beans, you guessed right!

Now, if you read my previous post, you know that despite fixing that error, I still had problems at this stage. Something caused my white chocolate to seize. I tried beating it back together with my hand mixer, but it didn’t help at all. Since adding eggs was the next step, I gradually beat those in, using my electric hand mixer, and ended up with a smooth and creamy custard. I was too embarrassed and frustrated to take a picture of the broken mess, but I’m really glad I didn’t throw it out. For one thing, it would have been an hour round-trip to get replacement white chocolate, and I definitely wouldn’t have finished the frosting that evening.

White Chocolate Custard Base, fixed!

After letting that reach the required temperature, then cooling it down, you beat up the butter, then beat the custard into that. I absolutely loved the flavour of this frosting at this stage. I said to my husband, “I really don’t like white chocolate, but I think this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” It was like licking the beaters from vanilla cake batter, but without the uncooked flour & egg taste. Seriously fantastic, and I think it’s going to become my go-to frosting for a cake that doesn’t require a solid white base for decorating. Since this was going on a lemon cake, though, I forged ahead and added the lemon curd, though I have to admit I didn’t wait 2 hours.

I did put the frosting into the fridge overnight, and tackled assembly the next day.

Assembled cake

My assembled cake doesn’t look all that great, but it doesn’t look too bad after cutting off the sloppy edges and cutting it up into servings.

Woody's Lemon Luxury Layer Cake

You can see my leftover bits of baby chocolate oblivion there, too. I added a little swirl of a peanut butter buttercream sort of thing. I basically took a recipe for “Reese’s peanut butter filling” and beat in some butter to thicken it up a bit and smooth it out to my tastes. The chocolate Oblivions and lemon layer cake were both big hits at our party, and I think my cousins went home with too much sugar and holding their stomachs. My coworkers finished up the handful of leftovers today at work.