44/99: Lemon Meringue Cake

 

I have a new venue for my cakes.  For every home football game this season, I am assigned to bring one of my cakes to the grove for the Highlands tent. So, since this one has been on my schedule for awhile, The Lemon Meringue Cake was the final decision.  Don't worry though, I'll make the next ones a little bit more Ole Miss festive.

This cake, though tasty, stressed me out while I made it.  You see, there's this blog (all of you RHBers will know what I'm talking about) that has the most incredible Lemon Meringue Cake on it. The blog is called Hector's Take on Rose's Heavenly Cakes. The guy is incredible.  Anyway, he made the ULTIMATE lemon meringue cake. Seriously, go look at it real fast: Hector's Lemon Meringue.

I know. You're jaw just dropped. Mine does every time I look at it.

That was the goal. Needless to say, it was a failure. I tried to pipe the meringue but you know, it's harder to make a meringue rose than you'd think. I need to develop my piping skills. I finally spread out my meringue mess and made the normal-not-so-impressive topping. Sad day.

That was mistake number two. Mistake number one was entirely my fault since I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing.  I was trying to work on dinner and complete the cake at the same time.  Meanwhile, I had some friends over while I was cooking and I got distracted.

I accidentally added the lemon meringue to the lemon curd and thus ruined the cake. I had to start over on those which actually took more time than you would think.

Once I finally got done, it turned out nicely.  I liked it a lot but probably not as much as the Lemon Canadian Crown. The cake itself was very moist (just as Rose promised it would be) and had a distinct lemon flavor.  The meringue was probably the best part.

Here's the sliced cake where you can see the lemon curd in between the lemon cake with the almost two inch meringue topping.

I didn't get tons of feedback at the tent but people seemed to like it.  I returned in the afternoon and realized that someone had actually scraped the meringue off of half of the cake and eaten it. I guess that means the meringue was excellent but the cake wasn't quite up to par.  So aside from the terrible cake etiquette (I can say this because I know who did it) it was practical feedback.

Then one of the ladies e-mailed me and said this:

"The lemon merangue cake was fantabulous on Saturday.  Hap is still talking about it!  My only issue was that it was GONE when I came back from the game! :)  And that was a bigger bummer than losing the game! :):)"

After the game, I took about a fourth of the cake and my friends and I finished it off with forks in hand.  We loved it.

So it was a great recipe. Success for the Lemon Meringue!