Flaherty Wines

One of my projects this past month was to perfect a lemon chiffon cake. I love big, tall, fluffy chiffon cakes, but all the recipes I found for lemon chiffon included lemon extract or lemon oil. Given our excess supply of lemons right now, I’m definitely not looking to use something that comes out of a bottle. It was easy to achieve a really nice lemony flavor using juice and zest, but I ran into problems with the technique. Specifically, my cakes were falling out of the pan when I inverted them to cool. This was a first for me, so I initially assumed something was wrong with my recipe (since it had never happened when I was using someone else’s recipe for a chiffon cake). The culprit, however, turned out to be underbaking. I raised the oven temperature from 325F to 350F and baked the cake for a full 70 minutes instead of 55–60 minutes. The cake was perfect! Moist, light, lemony—in short, everything one would expect from a lemon chiffon cake.

A couple of notes. It is important to sift the flour before measuring, even though you have to sift it again. Sifting it first lightens the flour, so you wind up with less flour by weight per cup. For the same reason, don’t shake the measuring cup to remove excess flour, but rather use a knife to slide it off. As for the eggs, the recipe calls for more whites than yokes. If I’m motivated, I’ll use the remaining yolks to make mayonnaise or to enrich a cornstarch pudding. If not, the cats get a treat. Finally, this cake requires a tube pan with a removable bottom.

Lemon chiffon cake

2  1/4 cups sifted flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
1  3/4 cups sugar (divided)
3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon lemon zest (removed
     with a zester and finely minced)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
8 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

For the glaze:

1  1/2 cups powdered sugar
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 350F. Have ready an ungreased tube pan with a removable bottom. (Note that that’s ungreased. The cake has to stick to the sides of the pan when you invert it.)

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, then set aside. In a separate bowl, combine the egg yolks, 1  1/2 cups of the sugar, the lemon juice, oil, zest, and vanilla; set aside. Next, beat the egg whites and the cream of tartar with an electric mixer on high until they form soft peaks. Add the remaining 1/4 cup sugar about a tablespoon at a time and continue beating until the egg whites form very stiff peaks. (I used to do this by hand before I got my KitchenAide this year. The whites were never as stiff, but the cakes always came out just fine.)

Add the flour to the egg/juice/oil mixture and combine quickly but thoroughly. Add a large spoonful of the egg whites to the batter (using not more than a quarter of the meringue), and fold it in to lighten the batter. Pour in the rest of the meringue and gently but thoroughly fold the whites into the batter. Pour the batter into the tube pan and bake for 60 to 70 minutes, until the top is nicely golden. Don’t worry if the top gets too dark—it’s actually the bottom, so you can slice it off with a serrated knife if necessary before turning the cake onto a plate.

On removing the cake from the oven, immediately (and gently) invert the pan onto a wine bottle and let it hang for about two hours, until completely cool. Turn it back upright and use a knife to loosen the sides and middle of the cake, then push the bottom of the pan up out of the mold and turn the cake out onto a plate. Top with the lemon glaze before serving. Note that a serrated knife works best for slicing this cake.

For the glaze: combine the powdered sugar and lemon juice and stir to blend. Let sit for a few minutes to thoroughly dissolve the sugar before using.