Lemon Blackberry Cake with #TheCakeSliceBakers

Unfortunately my back has been acting up for the last few days, so no blogging for a while. Even the making of this cake was affected because I needed a cake for a birthday party but needed to simplify it. I know it looks fancy, but the blackberries were picked and the jam was made before my back went out and the cute piped icing at the bottom and for the candles was done on Sunday when I was feeling better.

We are baking from The Perfect Cake from America's Test Kitchen and in that cookbook this was a four layer cake (four full layers, not two cut in halves horizontally) which means a longer baking time since two are baked at a time, not four. It also used mascarpone cheese in the icing, which is not something that I can eat due to severe dairy allergies. It's also something that I haven't found a substitute for, so I made a 'buttercream' icing using non-dairy margarine and a different recipe entirely. Because the margarine doesn't whip as light as butter and because it also has more moisture in it than real butter, the icing isn't as stable, so a two layer cake made more sense as well as being faster.

I did make the fresh blackberry jam from the recipe in The Perfect Cake, although I strained it to remove the seeds and most of the skins. Blackberry seeds just seem wrong for a fancy cake. Because I only had two layers, I was able to put some of the jam directly on a cake layer and then put the blackberry flavored buttercream on top,

plus on the top and the sides. The sides looked much better with plenty of icing instead of the veil look recommended by the Perfect Cake recipe. Since there were only two layers I felt that the extra icing was needed to balance out the cake. I got raves for the icing because it was delicious, using some lemon juice and the blackberry jam and not a lot of sugar, so it wasn't overly sweet. I used a circle of fresh blackberries on top for decoration.

The cake has both lemon zest and lemon juice. Because the extra step of whipping the whites and folding them in was too much time on my feet, I used the Perfect Party Cake recipe from Dorie Greenspan's Baking; from my home to yours book for the cake. It uses the dry/wet/dry/wet/dry method for adding the dry and wet ingredients to the butter/sugar/egg mixture, which goes quickly and still produces a moist, tender, fine grained cake.

Next month I hope to go back to following the recipe exactly, but I have to say that this sure did make a pretty and delicious layer cake...and it was perfect for a party of 5. We ate all but two or three slices and all the plates were clean of both cake and icing when we were done...I think everyone loved this cake!

I particularly enjoyed the lemon. It's fresh flavor was a great counterpoint to the sweet blackberries in the jam and icing. Here's a slice for you.

Be sure and check out the other Cake Slice Bakers posts to see which cake they made. #atkcake

The Cake Slice Bakers are baking from a new book "The Perfect Cake" from America's Test Kitchen.

Our choices this month are...

August 2018

1. Blueberry Boy Bait
2. Raspberry Charlotte
3. Blackberry-Mascarpone Lemon Cake
4. Peanut Butter and Jam Cake.

Visit our members to see what cake choice they baked up! 

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