Lemon Canadian Crown with Homemade Ladyfingers

I SWEAR I made this cake, and it was devoured yesterday after a delicious BBQ at my friend's house. It was a perfect ending to a warm summer evening. My internet at my house has been spotty all weekend and here I am at a cafe with WiFi and I forgot my camera to upload my photos. ARGH! So the post in its entirety is on the way...but maybe not until tomorrow.

OK! Here is the post:

Rose's Heavenly Cakes gives the lemon lover many different ways to make a lemon cake. There's the Lemon Poppy Seed Sour Cream Cake and the Golden Lemon Almond Cake: rich, dense, delightfully lemony. There's Woody's Lemon Luxury Layer Cake, a torted butter cake with lemon curd filling and a lemon curd buttercream. There's the Lemon Meringue Cake, a two-layer biscuit filled with lemon curd, syruped with a pow of a lemon syrup, and frosted with a fluffy browned meringue. And there's this week's Heavenly Cake assignment: the Lemon Canadian Crown. The sides and bottom of this cake are ladyfingers and the filling is a decadent kind of lemon mousse, topped with the fluffy browned meringue. Perfect for a summer BBQ.

July 4, 2011
Name of Cake: Canadian Lemons
Occasion: HCB, and a BBQ
Constituents: ladyfingers, lemon curdish mousse, and meringue

Technically this post knocks two recipes off of my list as the ladyfingers are a separate recipe. You could go buy the packaged ladyfingers, which I did for the Cranberry Crown Cheesecake, but avoidance no longer. I made the ladyfingers.

Ladyfingers require you to separate eggs, beat the yolks to the ribbon stage:

Beat the egg whites to a stiff meringue:

And marry these two together. With some sugar, wondra flour, and stuff.

Then there is piping. After reading the piping instructions several times all I remembered was WORK QUICKLY. So I worked too quickly, and got some sad, skinny ladyfingers to show for it. There are also some proper looking ladyfingers after I told myself to SLOW DOWN, so for a first attempt I think I did ok. I did end up with a ton of ladyfinger-like things.

The springform pan is lined with ladyfingers and the disc (if you piped the disc) gets fitted into the bottom.

This gets shoved into the freezer while you make the lemon curdish mousse stuff. It is not quite a lemon curd as there is no butter, you can use turbinado sugar instead of white, and both egg yolks and some whites are used. It gets cooked over a double boiler until thick and pooling slightly, which for most HCB took longer than the 15 minutes specified in the recipe. I listened to all of How Homelessness Works while cooking the lemon stuff, and that was a 40 minute podcast. So there you go.

After that, however, the recipe is easy peasy.

The lemony stuff cools to room temperature, heavy cream is whipped to soft peaks, they are folded together and poured into the ladyfinger shell, and put back in the freezer for at least 5 hours or up to 3 weeks. Talk about make ahead!

A couple of hours before serving, you whip up a meringue, frost it over the top, and if your broiler works you can brown the top in the there. After browning the cake needs to go back in the freezer for an hour before eating. At this point you can leave the completed dessert in the freezer for up to 3 weeks, but then you have to let it defrost before serving.

Since my broiler is broken, I used the torch, which makes me think that I could pile the meringue on top, torch the meringue, and serve it up straight away without having to refreeze. However I did refreeze as I finished the cake 5 hours before I needed it.

The torte is still frozen for these photos just in case you were wondering why the creamy lemon mousse doesn't look so creamy.

I brought it to my friend's house where she was hosting a 4th of July BBQ. We were all pet owners so we hightailed it home early to watch over our freaked out pets as our neighborhoods exploded around us. But before we did, and after we ate some delicious kebabs, we ate this cake.

"Its like a lemon cloud," one person exclaimed. She was excited. The cake got the thumbs up from all the peeps. It is light and creamy, and very lemony. The ladyfinger shell looks amazing but the delicate flavor gets lost against all the creamy lemon. This was the situation with the Cranberry Crown as well. All in all, this dessert was the perfect end to a warm summery BBQ with friends. I liked it a lot, but I think in the lemon department if I am not making a sour cream bundt then I would choose the Lemon Meringue Cake. How lovely to have so many excellent choices for a lemony cake!

Here is Marie's Lemon Canadian Crown from November 2010...
...and Marie's HCB roundup of all the Lemon Canadian Crowns from the November assignment.