Heidi Bakes: Lemon cake with lemon icing

This cake was called "Greek Lemon Cake". I'm certain that the "Greek" part was because it's supposed to have yogurt in it. I had no yogurt (other than my nonfat raspberry yogurt which I would never use for baking). So instead, I used sour cream. Full fat sour cream. I also added a LOT more lemon zest & lemon juice than the recipe called for. It still was not a really strong lemon flavor but it was tasty. The cake was certainly good but not so good that it will go down as one of my favorites. The icing was a lemon buttercream. To lighten it up a bit, I whipped 2 cups of heavy cream and folded that into the buttercream. It lightened the texture and made it not so sugary. You know what I did differently when whipping the cream? I tried a new tip that I had read about - to stabalize the whipped cream. Many folk use clear Knox gelatin to stabalize the cream but I read that if you add a half melted marshmallow that it will do the same thing. Not a cold marshmallow, because it would not distribute evenly into the icing or not a melted marshmallow because the high temperature of the marshmallow, would melt the whipping cream. It's difficult to tell if this tip worked since I folded the whipped cream into the buttercream. But anyways, the end result of the icing was wonderful. I used all lemon juice instead of milk in the icing so that it was really tart. I also added about 2 tablespoons of zest. So good! If you are interested in this recipe, it's on allrecipes.com under "Greek Lemon Cake".

This recipe used NINE eggs! They all needed to be separated so I used my egg separater. I usually do it by hand but 9 is a lot of eggs. And if you are whipping egg whites separately, which this recipe calls for, you cannot have one tiny bit of yolk in the whites.

I thought these yolks looked sunny and pretty.

I always line my cake pans with these parchment circles. You can purchase 8", 9" or 10" circles. It's so much quicker to use these rather than cut each circle out.

These are my cake strips. They are called Rose's Heavenly Cake Strips. They are made of silicone and these are for my 9 inch cake pans. They help insulate the pan for more even baking and also they help my cakes not develop a dome on top which has to always be removed before icing.