My Day In The Kitchen

These days I spend a great deal of time in the kitchen, fixing dinner, baking treats, cleaning. But the longest run yet was last Friday when I baked a Lemon Curd Cake with Lemon buttercream frosting and a batch of Chocolate Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream frosting for my friend Katie's birthday party.


The recipe came from my Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, a great cookbook, but Martha doesn't like to take any shortcuts. I started at 9:30 am and was finally placing the curls of chocolate decoration on the cupcakes around 7:00 pm.




The lemon cake had several different processes, starting with baking the two pans of cake batter. The hardest part was making the lemon filling that would go between the four layers. This included zesting 4 lemons, which is scraping off the outer yellow layer of the lemon. I just bought my first "zester" the day before.

The outer icing was fun to make, not to mention delicous. Pictured is the icing being mixed in my mixer. This mixer was Grandma Rea's and now it gets used quite frequently and is one of my favorite things in the kitchen. I love to think about about all of the yummy treats she made with it over the years.

I cut the two cake rounds in half to make the four layers and then carefully stacked them with the filling in between. The outer icing I put on with an icing spatula, which makes all the difference in decorating a cake. The last step was decorating, which was done with the lemon filling. I followed the design from the book, but added "Happy Birthday Katie".


The cake and the cupcakes were the hit of the party. I have to thank Kenny who was my taste tester, I couldn't have done it without him!