The New York Times recently reprinted a Maida Heatter recipe for lemon bundt cake that was originally published in its magazine in 1970. I was eager to give it a try, especially because I happened to have a bag of lemons on hand.
This recipe is simple enough. You cream room temperature butter with sugar; add eggs; alternately mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, and salt) and milk; and stir in lemon zest. I poured the batter into a Bundt pan I had generously coated in baking spray with flour and put it in the oven. The recipe instructs you apply a glaze of lemon juice and sugar to the cake immediately after it comes out of the oven. So I made the glaze while the cake was baking and when the cake was done I took it out of the oven and tried to unmold it right away. It was stuck, so I wedged a thin flexible plastic spatula around the edges of the cake and gave the pan a firm shake. The bottom half of the cake fell out -- with the top half left behind and still stuck to the pan.
I was very distressed about the broken cake -- but I tasted it and it was exceptional. It was tender with a very fine crumb, more like what I would expect in a layer cake as opposed to a Bundt cake. It was so good that I had to give the recipe another try. The next day I baked another lemon cake and I made two significant changes.
First, I decided that I should follow the recipe's instruction to grease the pan and coat it in bread crumbs. I've had a lot of luck with baking spray with flour in the past but figured that the coarse texture of bread crumbs might help. We didn't have any bread crumbs in the house and I didn't even have any white bread that I could use to make my own. But then I realized that I did have a broken, day-old lemon cake just sitting around. I toasted some of the leftover cake in the oven and made lemon cake crumbs. Then I generously greased the Bundt pan with shortening (which Rose Levy Bernanbaum recommends over butter for greasing pans since shortening is 100% fat while butter is not) and made sure the entire surface of the pan was coated in cake crumbs.
Second, after I took the cake out of the oven I let it cool for about 7 minutes before trying to unmold it. It fell out of the pan with its dark golden brown crust entirely intact. I brushed it with the lemon glaze and left it on a rack to cool overnight. The following morning I sliced it and it cut beautifully. The highlights of the cake were its superfine texture and the burst of bright and sweet lemon flavor around the edges of each slice where the syrup had soaked into the crust. That said, I thought that the cake itself was not lemony enough in the center. I think this could be remedied by adding more lemon zest to the cake batter, applying more lemon glaze to the hot cake, and/or poking holes into the cake with a skewer before adding the glaze.
Still, I was very happy with the way that this cake turned out. And I'm glad that I was able to re-purpose my first failed cake to make crumbs to contribute to my subsequent successful effort!
Recipe: "East 62nd Street Lemon Cake" by Maida Heatter.
Previous Post: "Dessert Is a Lemony-Splendored Thing: Lemon Bundt Cake," September 11, 2013.
This recipe is simple enough. You cream room temperature butter with sugar; add eggs; alternately mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, and salt) and milk; and stir in lemon zest. I poured the batter into a Bundt pan I had generously coated in baking spray with flour and put it in the oven. The recipe instructs you apply a glaze of lemon juice and sugar to the cake immediately after it comes out of the oven. So I made the glaze while the cake was baking and when the cake was done I took it out of the oven and tried to unmold it right away. It was stuck, so I wedged a thin flexible plastic spatula around the edges of the cake and gave the pan a firm shake. The bottom half of the cake fell out -- with the top half left behind and still stuck to the pan.
First, I decided that I should follow the recipe's instruction to grease the pan and coat it in bread crumbs. I've had a lot of luck with baking spray with flour in the past but figured that the coarse texture of bread crumbs might help. We didn't have any bread crumbs in the house and I didn't even have any white bread that I could use to make my own. But then I realized that I did have a broken, day-old lemon cake just sitting around. I toasted some of the leftover cake in the oven and made lemon cake crumbs. Then I generously greased the Bundt pan with shortening (which Rose Levy Bernanbaum recommends over butter for greasing pans since shortening is 100% fat while butter is not) and made sure the entire surface of the pan was coated in cake crumbs.
Second, after I took the cake out of the oven I let it cool for about 7 minutes before trying to unmold it. It fell out of the pan with its dark golden brown crust entirely intact. I brushed it with the lemon glaze and left it on a rack to cool overnight. The following morning I sliced it and it cut beautifully. The highlights of the cake were its superfine texture and the burst of bright and sweet lemon flavor around the edges of each slice where the syrup had soaked into the crust. That said, I thought that the cake itself was not lemony enough in the center. I think this could be remedied by adding more lemon zest to the cake batter, applying more lemon glaze to the hot cake, and/or poking holes into the cake with a skewer before adding the glaze.
Still, I was very happy with the way that this cake turned out. And I'm glad that I was able to re-purpose my first failed cake to make crumbs to contribute to my subsequent successful effort!
Recipe: "East 62nd Street Lemon Cake" by Maida Heatter.
Previous Post: "Dessert Is a Lemony-Splendored Thing: Lemon Bundt Cake," September 11, 2013.
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