Indulge in Delicious Lemon Icebox Cake!

May 12, 2015

Oh how I wished this cake worked for me, but I really can’t explain what happened. Why did two of my Angel Food Cakes fail? Why did the assembled cake crack in half when I unmolded it, and why didn’t it slice nicely?

I’ve made many of Rose’s Angel Food Cakes successfully, but this cake seemed to be wet and sticky instead of light, dry and fluffy. The texture of the Lemon Mousse Filling was beautiful, but the cake didn’t hold together.

The Finer Cookie is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for websites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This post contains affiliate links, which means The Finer Cookie will receive a small commission if you make a purchase using this link. This modest income helps support the website.

Lemon Cake Recipe :

Ingredients

Volume Grams Ounces

Instructions

ANGEL FOOD CAKE BATTER

Each component of this cake seemed to be good. The egg whites were fresh. They whipped perfectly. The sugar was added easily.

Vanilla and lemon juice going into the meringue

The flour incorporated well.

The oven was at the right temperature, and set with heat just from the bottom to give maximum rise. The internal temperature of the cake was at around 190ºF-200ºF before I removed it from the oven and it had great loft.

The Angel Food Cake #1 just out of the oven

Then while hanging upside down, it fell out of the pan and died.

Look at it! It loft completely disappeared. I utterly sunk. Gone.

CAKE #2

Cake #2 came out of the oven like the first one, but it sank and collapsed too (but didn’t fall out of the pan)

Cake #2. I ask you, does this look right?

LEMON CURD

I put this together without any incident. It tasted really good and was the right consistency.
Then I whipped the cream.

LIGHT ITALIAN MERINGUE

Again, looks good.

Adding the Italian Meringue to the Lemon Mousse

PREPARING THE CAKE

I understood that if the cake were fluffy, light and dry, it would have absorbed the moisture of the lemon mousse over the 12 hours in the fridge. The cake would sort of dissolved into the mousse, like a bread pudding. The picture in the book is beautiful and I so wanted mine to come out like that.
I wasn’t going to make the cake a 3rd time, so I began to cut and assemble the cake and hoped for the best.

Cutting the cake (if you could call it that)

Look at the texture of the cake. Again, the texture is all wrong. Too dense for sure. Anyone know what happened?

So I filled the cake pan with layers of cake, Lemon Mousse and cubes of cake. All the components filled up the 16 cup cake pan. There wasn’t an inch left.
When I unmolded it, it cracked in half and the more I sliced it, it just fell apart.
I give on the Lemon Icebox Cake. It tasted good though.

WHAT ARE THE ALPHA BAKERS? Here’s how it works: once a week, for the next two years, 25 Alpha Bakers commit to baking their way through every recipe of Rose Levy Beranbaum’s newly published