Shadow Cake Baking

I've loved being a part of the Cake Slice Bakers for the last few years. We've baked from some great cookbooks and I could always find something to bake that was fairly easily convertible to dairy-free. Our latest cookbook, The European Cake Cookbook, is much more difficult because it uses quite a lot of whipping cream, cream cheese and mascarpone, none of which I've yet to find a good substitute for.

It isn't quite within the rules of the group, but hopefully within the spirit, for me to bake similar recipes and post them around the 20th on the month. For February there was a cake that looked pretty good, the Lemon Meringue Cake. Because I had to bake a birthday sheet cake ahead of time for my scholarship group (served on Feb. 20th), I did part of it, but baked it as a sheet cake and finished it with canned frosting instead of meringue. Meringue just wouldn't hold up for the two to three hours that the cake sat there waiting for its turn.

The cake was lovely and delicious and lemon curd is always delicious. This is the perfect time of year to make it, too. The recipe we were given is very close to the one I always use, but since I had already made lemon curd for my birthday and still had some, I used that.

Of interest, perhaps, is part of the decoration I did on the top. The writing of Happy Birthday AJ and the piping around the edges of the star was done with plain Royal Icing, but the fun, and new for me part, was that I wrote on a gold toned Wilton Sugar Sheet star shaped cutout and then removed the backing and put that on the cake. The moisture in the canned vanilla icing (could have done "Buttercream" like I did on my birthday cake, but ran out of time) held down the sugar sheet star and moistened it enough that when the cake was cut it cut easily and since it's edible I could serve bits and pieces of it with the center servings and it was fine. I recommend it - easy to use and you can cut any shape or even make ribbons or layered flowers, etc.

Didn't get good photos once the cake was cut because I was doing the cutting and got distracted.

Hope that is is OK for me to sort of do the recipes like this.

Each month The Cake Slice Bakers are offered a selection of cakes from the current book we are baking through. This year it is The European Cake Cookbook by Tatyana Nesteruk. We each choose one cake to bake, and then on the 20th - never before - we all post about our cake on our blogs. There are a few rules that we follow, but the most important ones are to have fun and enjoy baking & eating cakes!

Follow our Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest pages where you can find all of our cakes, as well as inspiration for many other cakes. You can visit our blog where the links are updated each month. If you are interested in joining The Cake Slice Bakers and baking along with us, please send an email to thecakeslicebakers at gmail dot com for more details. The Cake Slice Bakers also have a new Facebook group called The Cake Slice Bakers and Friends. This group is perfect for those who do not have a blog but want to join in the fun and bake through this book.