Strawberry-Lemon Cake, A.K.A. The Cake That Caused Me To Wash My Stand Mixer FOUR TIMES.

Hey everybody.  Sorry for the long period of radio silence… my life has been crazy.  Which is not to say bad.  Really, it’s been crazy AWESOME.  My summer was so good and included lots of friendship time, great music with my chamber choir, hard work getting ready for school, and an AMAZING trip to Disney World with my man-friend where he proposed!  That’s right, I am Kelly Cassady, soon to be Mrs. Man-Friend.

However, with school starting again I have been wanting to return to some of my usual routines, including baking.

I recently had a birthday, and my bestie Katie got me the book that I have been SALIVATING over, “All About Cake,” by Milk Bar owner Christina Tosi.  This book is adorable and complicated and I can’t wait to make more of the recipes, but mostly when I look at it I wonder how Christina Tosi can possibly be as skinny as she is with the amount of butter that she must consume on a daily basis.

She’s so glam.

I also made sure to watch her episode of Chef’s Table while making this cake, so I feel that Christina and I are now friends and have a connection.  I’m sure she feels the same and will contact me for a lunch date after reading this post.

My fabulous friend Jordan had a birthday today, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make one of Christina’s enormous layered cakes.  Jordan gave me a list of what she liked in her sweet indulgences, and this strawberry monster definitely seemed to fit the bill.  Warning: graphic contact.  This cake is NAKED. That’s right, those sides are 100 percent au naturale with NO FROSTING.  Also, notice where I accidentally dripped the strawberry jelly all over the bottom layer.  *Facepalm*

Alright folks, buckle up because this cake has approximately one billion components.  It took me ten hours of cooking followed by 12 hours of setting and 3 hours of thawing.  The clean up was soul-crushing.  More about that later.  But it was a great cake, and I learned a lot of new techniques.  This one didn’t turn out too pretty, but I feel like next time I make one like this I’ll be able to do a lot better, and that’s really the point of baking, after all.

First up, the sponge.  Christina advised baking on a sheet pan instead of in round cake tins and then cutting out the rounds, and I have to say that I really dig this method.  This cake was unbelievably level considering all of the sloppy layers.  However, I made my first mistake right away and used a pan that was a little too big, so my sponges were a little too thin. It didn’t affect the taste at least, just the aesthetics.  The batter was so light and fluffy, check it out:

While that was baking in the oven, I worked on the next component, pickled strawberry jam, which sounds weird and tasted a little weird, although delicious.  I was very unsure of this step… vinegar in a jam?  But let me tell you, it was the right choice.  The jam included blended and sieved fresh strawberries, sugar of course, sherry vinegar, white wine vinegar, and pectin.  I am going to go ahead and admit that I did not measure the pectin and was punished with slightly runny jam.  Just for funsies, lets keep a count of the number of times during this bake that I had to wash an appliance.  So far: blender 1, stand mixer 1.  Oh boy.  After it started to thicken up, I chucked it in the fridge to set up, rescued the sponge that I had forgotten about, and turned my attention back to the recipe book.

Alright Christina, we have to have a quick chat about formatting.  Because your recipe is deceptively easy when perusing.  Then the reader begins noticing that lots of ingredients are complicated components with recipes on other pages, such as: “liquid cheesecake, see next page,” and “lemon curd, see page 133.”  There was also “vanilla cake, see page 190,” “pickled strawberry frosting, see page 225,” and “milk crumbs, page 129.”  I’m pretty sure this little scavenger hunt was designed to make me lose concentration and take netflix breaks, and it certainly worked.

Anyway.

I made a basic cheescake recipe (using my stand mixer), and put it in a loaf pan.  I baked this for about 30 minutes, and then chilled it…

I made a lemon curd using the zest and juice of three lemons cooked with egg yolks and sugar and then blended with butter…

And I made the pickled strawberry butter cream (using my stand mixer) with a stick of butter, some of the jam I made earlier, and powdered sugar.

So many delicious components!

Then, I made a couple weirder things.  First up, something called “milk crumbs.”  After hunting through the book for the recipe and reading it, I will confess that these didn’t sound too appealing.  Baked powdered milk with flour and sugar?  That I then coat in more powdered milk? Weird.  However.   I toasted the crumby nuggets in the oven for twenty minutes, and realized that my house was filling with an incredible aroma of browning butter and… something else?  Happiness?  Love?  Something along those lines.  Once I pulled them out of the oven, I poured white chocolate over the and left them to harden for a while, trying to keep myself from just eating them all right then.  Milk crumbs, you might be my new favorite food.  Friends and family, get excited to eat this on every dessert item for the rest of my life.  If you make this cake, double the milk crumbs.  Trust me.

Next step: mix together the lemon curd and the cheesecake.  It definitely felt wrong to dump my baked cheesecake in the bowl of my mixer, but hey, Christina is the creator of the milk crumb, so what she says goes.  After washing my stand mixer again, I completed this step, juiced some lemons into a bowl to use as a soak element for the sponge, and finally had all the components.

Final list of components: vanilla sponge, lemon juice soak, cheesecake, lemon curd, strawberry jam, strawberry frosting, milk crumbs.  Holy complicated layers batman.

Final count on washed appliances: blender three times.  Stand mixer four times.  Let that sink in for a second.

Here we go with construction.  Stay with me.

The first layer was fun because I was supposed to cut out two rounds from the sheet pan and then use the remnants for the base, which felt like I was breaking lots of rules.  I soaked this layer in lemon juice.  On top of that, I spread half of the remaining pickled strawberry jam.

Sidenote: thanks for the new cakestand, mom!

If you’ll notice, you’ll see that my plastic wrapping on this cake is a little…unusual.  Christina instructs the baker to use acetate, a flexible plastic sheeting material.  I couldn’t find that, so I just doctored up some plastic folder dividers.  I’m going to go ahead and call this a life hack.  They worked great, and they are prettier than clear plastic.  Christina, take note and be sure to include this change in future cookbooks.  Send my royalty check when convenient.

On top of the jam went a third of the milk crumbs, followed by half of the cheesecake mixture.  It was difficult to finish the cheesecake layer, because it occurred to me to try it and I realized that it tasted like lemony fluff from heaven, so I was having trouble not just eating it all.

I repeated all of those layers again, (cake, lemon juice, jam, crumbs, cheesecake) adding more folder strips to accommodate the growing height of the cake.  I put the last sponge on, and spread on the pickled strawberry buttercream.  Last layer: more milk crumbs.

I popped it in the freezer to set overnight, leaving it in the tin with the plastic wrap on.

At this point, I looked around my kitchen, and realized that it was completely and utterly destroyed.  Like.  Every single dish I have ever owned was dirty.  I own six silicone spatulas, and I had used them all, including the Ravenclaw one and the one that looks like a snowman.  There was cheesecake everywhere.  Anything that had touched the jam pan was suspiciously sticky.  I started to clean.

I did pretty well at first, filling the dishwasher and powering through a bunch of pans and appliances.  I thought I had finished, and then turned around and realized that on the counter behind me was a bowl that had held melted white chocolate that had now reformed into a substance resembling cement, the blender that had held the lemon curd, and the oversized cake pan that doesn’t fit in the sink or dishwasher.

This was the emotional low point, and required a break to watch Say Yes to the Dress and contemplate whether just selling the house and moving somewhere else was a reasonable option.

I then mustered enough motivation to finish the job and went to bed.

I thawed the cake in the morning and took it downtown to celebrate Jordan with the cast of the musical she has written with my man-friend.  Y’all, this cake was good.  If you have twelve open hours, a personal dishwasher to hire, and an enormous kitchen with lots of spatulas, this recipe is for you.  If not, do not attempt.

It was creamy, tangy, buttery, and luscious.  That being said, I did make some pretty serious mistakes with this that I can fix the next time I make a Christina Tosi cake:

1. My jam was too slack.  Cook longer and use more pectin.
2. It was messy.  Both the clean-up and the actual aesthetics of the finished product.  Oh well.
3. I should’ve used a smaller sheet pan to make thicker cake layers.
4. I needed to double those milk crumbs because those bad boys were the bomb dot com and made this cake.

If you are interested in this book, here’s a nice link for you.  Happy baking!